title: What exactly is the Windows AppFabric?
body: <p>Microsoft released a beta of Windows Server AppFabric  that "makes it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS".</p>
  
  <p>MS has also said that you can deploy AppFabric on your own servers, on a 3rd party host  and on Windows Azure.</p>
  
  <p>So far we haven't done any Azure development mostly because the API differs from ASP.NET and you can only deploy your app to the cloud (and not on your own servers).</p>
  
  <p>So if I use the AppFabric API, will that let me create apps that I can deploy in house, at a 3rd party hoster or on the cloud with the same API? Will it be a 'first class citizen' in all of these?</p>
  
  <p>Where does this leave the Azure API - is AppFabric a replacement? What about Azure SQL?</p>