First announced back in 2008, developers have been able to play around with Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for awhile now. Long before Google Chrome OS was even hinted, Windows Azure was a new type of operating system: a cloud-based computing platform. For the last two years, both Microsoft and developers have been tinkering around with Azure, but come January, Azure is finally going live… and in February, you’ll be able to start paying for it.
Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announced the development at the annual PDC conference yesterday. Currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview, Windows Azure will remain no-cost through January, but from February 1st on, it will start charging developers.
“Tens of thousands of developers have participated in the CTP and you’ve made a tremendous impact on the product,” Ozzie said. The idea is for developers to be able to continue to use Azure and test their products, allowing developers for the first time the chance to preview their usage and learn how much use of the platform will cost when billing starts.
New to Azure will be a service called Dalls, which gives developers the ability to discover, purchase and manage data subscriptions within Azure.
Ozzie concluded by emphasizing how much Microsoft believed in cloud computing as one of the futures of operating systems. That’s probably true, and they have proven remarkably forward thinking in starting the cloud operating system bandwagon, but personally, I have a lot more faith in Microsoft managing a cloud than other providers. It has even set a standard as the "OFFICIAL MAIL" or "MAIL FOR EXCHANGE" through their Microsoft Exchange Servers. I prefer Google the next to Cloud Providers.
There's a tremendous amount of capability being presented in the Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview), and there's more to come. It goes beyond simple Web hosting to a flexible architecture designed to automatically enlist additional resources in response to demand. There are capabilities here that I haven't seen in competing cloud offerings -- for example, workflows. The Azure team has picked and chosen existing Microsoft technologies -- virtual servers, the .Net Framework, Internet Information Server (IIS), worker processes, databases, queues, enterprise service bus, workflows, authentication and so on -- and adapted them to the cloud.
(See the Test Center's deep dive into Amazon Web Services, tour of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Google App Engine, AppNexis and GoGrid, as well as reviews of hosted Web application development environments Coghead and Caspio Bridge.)
One very promising note is how these services are tied together. The Microsoft of 10 years ago would have created proprietary interfaces to exclude its competitors from taking advantage of its technologies. The Azure team used open standards, such as REST, SOAP and Atom. This inclusive choice opens the Azure services to easy integration with almost any programming language and operating system.
Another promising note is how, while breaking new ground, the Azure team made the programming model familiar to developers who have worked with the .Net Framework. You don't have to learn a new programming language or integrated development environment (IDE) to work with Azure. If you know Visual Studio and C# or Visual Basic .Net, you're good to go now with relatively little effort. Using other .Net languages and tools is possible but not as well documented. Although using unmanaged code is not yet allowed, it will be in the future.
It took me a couple of weeks of dabbling with Azure an hour at a time to get it. Part of my problem was that I was overwhelmed by the amount of seemingly independent functionality available. Once I realized that what I was learning was a carefully designed, scalable service-oriented architecture (SOA) tied together with RESTful application programming interfaces (API), it began to gel for me. I would expect that any moderately experienced .Net developer with some SOA experience could be somewhat productive with Azure after a few days of concentrated work and fluent in a few weeks.
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