At the 2008 Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft unveiled its cloud operating system, Windows Azure. Azure is the operating system that acts as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. This platform aids developers in publishing services and applications on the internet. Microsoft has released the latest CTP for Azure.
This latest Community Technology Preview updates the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio. The CTP brings several improvements:
- The Windows Azure SDK offers improved support for the integration of development storage with Visual Studio, including enhanced performance.
- For each Windows Azure SDK sample that accesses the development storage Table Storage service, a database name is now defined within the associated Visual Studio project. When the sample service is started from Visual Studio, the named database is created and the development storage Table Storage service is configured to use this database for the running service.
- The StorageClient sample includes the following improvements.
- The ASP.Net Providers sample now supports a search syntax similar to the ASP.Net SQL-based providers.
You can grab the latest CTP from Microsoft’s download centre: Windows Azure Software Development Kit and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.
Im glad this is finally out, Im looking forward to read the documentation.
Is it the replacement for Windows 2003 Server Web edition or does it bring something that we can’t find on Server 2008?
The idea is a distributed service hosting platform with object persistence built in. Azure is the framework for it, azure server is the infrastructure bits.
Has the crack team of cryptologists managed to decode the biz-talk yet? I’m still lost as to what Azure is physically.
think thin client. imagine your windows desktop with all its storage going to windows SkyDrive. Azure runs within windows and then (as an extension to the web for storage or apps, or as a full blown OS, not yet complete)can be (when finished)… eh i was going ot go into a lengthy description but go to http://www.eyeos.org its basicly that same concept + this concept http://www.ncomputing.com/Default.aspx
here is MS info “The Azure Services Platform is designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web services and applications on the Internet. Windows Azure is an operating system for the cloud that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft data centers.
Windows Azure is elastic, flexible, and interoperable. With Windows Azure developers can achieve high levels of service availability and application interoperability while maintaining freedom of choice.”
here is a link to some stuff from the SDK I have been messing with: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/f/0af4d3d0-f181-41f2-859…
Edited 2009-01-15 22:29 UTC
Hmm… very “flexible” and lots of “freedom of choice”, as long as you “choose” to use a Microsoft data centre.
To paraphrase Henry Ford – “You can have any data center that you want, as long as it’s an MS data center”.
Azure server is how you host your own.
As far as I can tell, you probably will not be able to run your own instance of the server-side backend. I think it’s designed to be run at high scale within Microsoft data centers.
Hmm. Take this into mind and add the fact Microsoft just patented the concept of a PC you rent (pay a subscription for). Sounds like they’re planning on renting PC’s and on top of that holding your data hostage on their servers making you trapped.
Sounds like something Microsoft would do.
Don’t get me wrong, I think MS makes good software. It’s just their business practices I question.
currently its just a web app and services platform for storage and distributed aplications, but in my paranoid little world this is what i think this could be for MS;
MS makes a desktop product and server product and services, thats their bread and butter. then this new notion of Cloud OS’s start comming out “run it from your browser, any broswer (some restrictions aply), no need for a dedicated (and specific) operating syste.”
well MS doesn’t like that. initialy they didnt think the notion would make much head way, unfortunatly it did. MS late late in the game played teh “Me too” card and thew something into the ring, a name to a product that is being scrambled ot be put together. originaly, upon first mention, it was nothing but marketing nonsence that people still dont know what it is.
My Theory: MS doesn’t want to do a web OS, why make a competing product to their own product? why divide the resources like that in an economy that is already demanding “trimming the fat.” So why not make a cloud OS, make it poorly, give away the SDK, not market it much or talk much about it, let the tech community review it with disapointment, this then bleeds its way over to management of IT departments who decide that it isnt worth it and to stick with Windows locally. wow look at that no MS can go back to what they were doing and completely offset the potential market shift.
This is a busniess practice done very offten, but rarely spoken about. As an IT Admin (among other things) my bosses often have an idea and want proposals. I give them the one i want (and make it look good) and then 2 or 3 others that i let them play with that are obviously much worse, so that in the end i control teh direction of things. now that seems rather deceptive until you take into account that any IT admin will agree with me, 90% of the time or greater the people they have to answer to have no idea what they want, and worse, when they buy software without consulting you and then say “make it work” its a mess.
/end_rant
Edited 2009-01-15 22:47 UTC
You could very well be right. Microsoft has done this kind of thing before, announce vaporware to steer the market in their direction. But there are way too many people in the game for it to die now. If Microsoft doesn’t get on board now, they will be the ones losing ground to the web apps that run on anything, like free OS’s. Why pay the Microsoft tax when you can run your Windows apps in the clouds? Lord knows it probably won’t be running on a Windows server.
I wouldn’t put it past MS to do that (and I agree that I like their software but question their practices at times), but I believe that the patent was denied, or so I read. So this rental PC idea actually won’t be coming to fruition– unless they did some sort of appeal or whatever; I don’t know all about how the patent office works.
Edited 2009-01-16 04:02 UTC
The idea is a distributed service hosting platform with object persistence built in. Azure is the framework for it, azure server is the infrastructure bits. Looks like its well put together, the real selling point though is the whole third party hosting thing.
Azure is basically a distributed platform to use to publish applications and services. It’s a new platform based on Windows OS, .NET framework and with specific new services (like a counterpart to SQL Server but specifically developed for Azure). The key thing is you will have Microsoft hosting applications and services on their platform and other stuff like backups, managements, replications and so on.
Great for users / developers, a bit scary for partners.
Windows Azure is a platform for running web applications. It has nothing to do with the desktop, or with client applications. It’s basically ASP.NET on steroids. Instead of buying and maintaining a web server (and database server) yourself, you can deploy your web applications to Microsoft’s data warehouse. Another advantage is that it’s very scalable. If your web application needs more capacity, you can just start additional instances without having to buy additional hardware.
You can compare it with Amazon EC2, or Google App Engine.
In addition to the Azure “OS”, Microsoft also offers a bunch of services you can use, like Live Services (for interoperating with Windows Live), .NET Services (contains a ServiceBus and can host Windows Workflow Foundation applications), etc.
Thanks, finally an explanation that makes sense