PDC 2008: Microsoft Aims for the Clouds With ‘Windows Azure’
Microsoft threw its hat into the cloud computing ring with Monday’s announcement of its new Windows Azure computing platform. It’s accessible right now as a community technology preview. Microsoft developers can download the development kits at the Windows Azure website.
Azure is a web-based, scalable hosting environment for applications. Developers can build apps using one of Microsoft’s popular desktop coding tools, then deploy them to the Windows Azure platform, where they can be accessed by any computer or internet-connected mobile device. Microsoft supplies the storage, database server, identity management and processing power. As the demand for a particular app or service grows, the amount of resources dedicated to it can be increased or decreased on dynamically, stretching like a virtual elastic band.
The announcement was made by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie during his keynote at the Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. As Ozzie was quick to point out, “Azure is not something you install on a server. It’s a service, hosted and maintained by Microsoft on an array of distributed data centers.”
It’s the distributed app platform we’ve been expecting from Microsoft, as the company races to catch up to similar platforms from Amazon and Google. In fact, during his keynote, Ozzie praised Amazon’s EC2 platform, which was made generally available earlier this month, as a release which raises the bar significantly for cloud computing platforms. Amazon’s web services are used by small and medium businesses, including big name startups like Twitter.
Microsoft has definitely aimed high with Azure. We’ve seen hints of this strategy with previous releases like its Live Mesh storage service. But from what was shown in the demo during the keynote, Azure is an end-to-end platform suitable for hobbyists, enterprise developers and everyone in between. Microsoft smartly made sure Windows developers would be able to use their existing software tools and code to build apps for Azure. There’s full support for popular tools like VisualStudio, Visual Basic and the .NET suite, as well as support for third-party tools like Eclipse. Azure apps will also be able to use open web technologies like XML file formats and REST protocols.
Microsoft plans to push its own pre-existing cloud services onto Azure.
“Azure is designed to be the bedrock under all of Microsoft’s web services,” Ozzie says. Developers will be able to mix and match code and capabilities from Microsoft’s Live Services, .Net Services, SharePoint and its scalable database, SQL Services (formerly known as SSDS). Microsoft’s hypervisor virtualization technology is also baked in, so Azure developers can run virtual server appliances.
There were some quick demos during the keynote. The first, fittingly, was a “Hello World” app written in a few lines of code in VisualStudio, then deployed to the platform. You can view it at hellocloud.cloudapp.net.
Microsoft vice president Amitabh Srivastava, wearing a pair of vibrant bright orange sneakers, announced that .NET services are available right now as a preview, with the rest of the platform being rolled out over time.
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