Windows on the Cloud released at the PDC 2008!
MS released Windows Azure at the PDC 2008, a code name used for the work done as a part of the Azure (MS Cloud) initiative. More details on these are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx
Quick definitions of Azure and Windows Azure,
Azure is, "Azure is a compos-able set of cloud-based building block services that integrate with your on-premise infrastructure and business applications."
Windows Azure is "an operating system for the cloud"
Windows Azure is the compute platform to be made available by MS over the cloud as services. It provide compute, storage and management capabilities. It extends Visual studios on-premise application development capability to the cloud. Developers can write code locally and execute it on the Azure cloud platform. For the enterprise this would mean lower hardware cost, lower operating over heads, low maintenance hassles.
Windows Azure can be compared with the likes of Google’s App engine.
What can you do on Windows Azure?
Well with the limited functionality made available with this current release, here is what is possible:
1. Build single-tiered web based applications on ASP.NET and even on Silverlight. But be informed that MS does not mention about Silverlight support in their documentations. But we did give it a shot with one of our applications and with a few minor tweaks it seemed to work flawlessly.
2. Build a client-server web based application that can use the storage capabilities provided as part of the Windows Azure platform. Note that this storage capability on the Windows Azure platform is different from Sql data services.This seems to be a redundancy from the MS teams but we can look at some consolidation happening on this area in the future
3. Build WCF based web services
4. Build windows service like components running in the background and processing tasks in say batch mode.
Keep looking for more updates as we explore new features on this technology
