Convergence of "Server AppFabric" and "Azure AppFabric"

It's good to see the prediction that I made in December 2010 coming true :). In November 2010, I wrote a post to show the differences between "Azure AppFabric" and "Server AppFabric". Intent was to help people who were confused because of the similarity in name of these two very different products.
   Refer: http://piyushprakash.blogspot.com/2010/11/de-mystifying-windows-azure-app-fabric.html

  I had concluded the post by saying that there is great potential if the capabilities from the "Server AppFabric" were merged with Azure. It's good to see that Microsoft is starting to offer some of the capabilities from the server version of AppFabric in the form of cloud based services.

 For now, I will just provide the difference in the visual representation, and look forward to diving into nitty gritty in subsequent blogs.

   Earlier:

  Now:

          
       
As you can see,  addition of services such as Caching, Composite Apps, etc within Azure AppFabric indicates a move towards evolving it from being "a basic service bus with access control", to being a full-fledged scalable and secure middleware with support for multiple integration patterns.

I hope to dive deeper into some of these features into future posts.