A visualization of the Windows Azure platform, taken from the Microsoft website.
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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- IT software giant Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) announced on Tuesday it has officially launched its new cloud hosting plaform Windows Azure (www.microsoft.com/windowsazure), at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 (www.microsoftpdc.com) in Los Angeles.
Delivering an opening keynote address, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie explained how Windows Azure and SQL Azure are the core elements of the company's cloud services strategy.
Ozzie said that Microsoft will move its Windows Azure cloud platform from its current "community technical preview" to a production environment stage on January 1, 2010.
First introduced as a concept in October 2008, Microsoft explained the new cloud computing service in further detail last month.
The company also announced a set of new Windows Azure features, Windows Server capabilities, and marketplace offerings that will make it easier for developers to build profitable businesses from their Microsoft-based solutions.
"Customers want choice and flexibility in how they develop and deploy applications," Ozzie said. "We're moving into an era of solutions that are experienced by users across PCs, phones and the Web, and that are delivered from data centers we refer to as private clouds and public clouds. Built specifically for this era of cloud computing, Windows Azure and SQL Azure will give developers what they need to build great applications and profitable businesses."
In the keynote address, Ozzie referred to the company's "three screens and a cloud" vision and said that software experiences are seamlessly delivered across PCs, phones and TVs, all connected by cloud-based services.
In keeping with the IT industry's ongoing trend of hybrid cloud platforms, Ozzie explained how the new Windows Azure platform provides applications for both businesses and consumers, enabled by new Microsoft development tools and technologies.
He also unveiled the next evolution of Microsoft Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications, including the new information service, Microsoft Codename "Dallas," which is built completely on the Windows Azure platform.
The new service lets developers and users access premium commercial and reference datasets and content on any platform, including those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, ESRI, First American Corp., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, the United Nations, and Weather Central. Dallas is currently available as a limited community technology preview.
Meanwhile, Bob Muglia, president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, laid out the company's strategy and road map for extending the Windows developer platform to the cloud.
He described Microsoft's key investments to let developers move applications to the private, hosted and public clouds, enhance them with additional services, and transform them to make use of cloud computing capabilities.
As part of these key investment areas, Microsoft is delivering Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, a set of integrated application services that make it easier for developers to deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud.
The AppFabric technology combines hosting and caching technologies with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control, formerly referred to as .NET Services, to deliver a consistent set of application services to enhance both Windows Server and Windows Azure with a common, scalable foundation for running .NET applications.
Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 can be downloaded now, with the full release available in 2010.
Muglia also announced the company's plan to offer Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure, which will let customers support virtualized infrastructure across the "continuum of on-premises and cloud computing".
The company is also offering Windows Identity Foundation, which helps developers provide more secure, simplified user access to both cloud and on-premises applications with open, identity-based claims.
He also announced Microsoft has released ASP.NET MVC2 beta (www.asp.net/mvc), a free, fully supported framework that lets developers build standards-based Web applications through rich asynchronous JavaScript and XML integration and enhanced extensibility.
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This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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