Microsoft’s cloud ambitions

By Chris Green in Reader

Posted in Cloud Computing, microsoft on October 28, 2008 at 4:26 pm

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The announcement of Windows Azure was not much of a secret going into PDC. However, what surprised many was the volume of support that Microsoft is giving this major new project.

From data centres around the world that are three times the size of a football pitch each, to thousands of development and technical staff in place to make Azure work and eventually make it a reliable, service level-based product platform, Azure is a massive undertaking for Microsoft compared to its tip-toe steps into Software as a Service (SaaS) so far such as Windows Live.

For now, Azure is little more than a beta, and it was made very clear that the Azure service will not have any service level guarantees in place. In fact, there is no guarantee that apps you develop to run within the Azure cloud now will work on the eventual 1.0 version.

Of course, at this stage Microsoft could hardly ask users to pay for using Azure given there are no guarantees it will work 24/7, which is why it will be free during this technology preview stage. This is important, as to really understand the potential of a cloud computing platform such as Azure, you need to go and play with it - mess around with some code and see what you can do with it. Only then can you really understand the capabilities and limitations of the platform.

During the Azure demo, what was lacking was any qualified data about what Azure can deliver to customers. Microsoft has not been ‘dogfooding’ the platform, or at least isn’t admitting to it yet, and it is so new that there were few third-party examples, though our look at Dot Net Solutions gave us some insight into the benefits of utility processing.

So, the jury is out on Azure for now, but the potential is definitely there. As developers, you need to go and play with it, stress test it and challenge the infrastructure with applications that Microsoft never even considered when it began work on the Azure project.

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