Monday, at Microsoft’s Professional Developers
Conference in Los Angeles, the company introduces with much ado, Windows Azure, the Redmond IT
giant’s take on a cloud-based operating system. It’s a relative late comer to the
scene; can it outdo its seniors though?
Azure, previously known by its code name Project Red Dog, is a scalable hosting environment
used for deploying applications in Microsoft’s cloud, according to Amitabh Srivastava,
Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President.
Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie
was positively enthusiastic about the new solution "Windows Azure is a new
Windows offering at the Web tier of computing," he said. "This
represents a significant extension" of the Windows computing platform, Ozzie
added.
Windows Azure is the basis, the foundation of
the Azure Services Platform, which runs on Microsoft Windows Server, and is intended
to help developers build applications for such varied cloud environs as datacenters,
PCs, the Web, and Phones.
Hardware support for cloud-based solutions
aimed at developers is comprised of storage, computational and network
infrastructure services. All of these are hosted on servers within Microsoft’s
global data center network.
A limited version of the Azure Services
Platform, a Community Technology Preview, is being showcased at the PDC. Key
components of the platform being featured include:
- Windows Azure, for service hosting and
management and low-level scalable storage, computation, and networking.
- Microsoft SQL
Services, for database services and reporting.
- Microsoft .Net
Services, which are service-based implementations of .Net Framework concepts
such as workflow.
- Live Services,
for sharing, storing, and synchronizing documents, photos, and files across
PCs, phones, PC applications, and Web sites.
- Microsoft
SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content,
collaboration, and solution development in the cloud.
Developers engaged in the preview will be able
to build applications and host them for Free on Microsoft servers. This is only
temporary however, as once the company has well established the system’s features
and made sure it’s ready for business applications, it will start charging.
Analysts and enthusiasts who saw the
presentation generally reacted positively to the scale of the Microsoft project
and the company’s confidence in it.
"I think it is very ambitious,
extremely ambitious," commented David Smith, analyst with Gartner, going
on to note that Microsoft is trying to cover a broad range of clients, from
enterprise to consumer levels, as well as a broad range of devices.
But the lofty goals Microsoft has set also
mean it’ll be a while before Azure in its final form is ready to launch,
continued Smith. Nevertheless he was impressed by Microsoft’s approach, calling
it “a very visionary, pragmatic idea.”
The pragmatism Smith implies finds itself in the
fact that with the current economic troubles, companies looking to tighten
the belt may look to software-as-a-service.
"Why pay for your own data center and
staff when you can move it to Microsoft? Let Microsoft do the investment for
you," said Robert McLaws, chief blogger at Windows-now.com. "It
provides an interesting opportunity for start ups who are looking to build apps
efficiently and to test ideas."
