Today at PDC, Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure (previously known as Red Dog), Microsoft's big bet (HUGE bet) on cloud services.
“Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community,” Ozzie said. “We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web. Most important, it gives our customers the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based Internet services or through on-premises servers, or to combine them in any way that makes the most sense for the needs of their business.”
Further down in the PR announcement and the picture of the slide from the keynote look at the components, which I think is most interesting.
Key components of the Azure Services Platform include the following:
- Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking
- Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting
- Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control
- Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and Web sites
- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud
This picture is worth a thousand words (Thanks Long Zheng), and now we can speculate on what Microsoft SharePoint Service is, at least until they give us more info.
My thoughts...
Great move Microsoft. A number of people expected SharePoint to evolve this way, and now you can see clearly how SharePoint does integrate. Notice the new name. So it's great to see something that SharePoint can work with in an open way to REALLY Scale.
What is this exactly... Looks like it is plumbing and interoperability for services. What's interesting is that they are calling it an OS. I think we'll see more about why they call it an OS, later. Great PR move, but also you can see the road map evolving here to support all of the dynamics business applications, collab, portals, search.. oh yeah!
Looking at the site, I saw no webcasts or interesting blogs linked from that site, but there are many bloggers sitting at PDC...
10:12am: “We ourselves are betting on our own platform with our own apps. You are the first ones that are going to have access to our Azure SDK. You can register at noon today at
Azure.com, and will be activated over the next two weeks. We will be intentionally conservative about how we roll out. Because the service may change as a direct result of your feedback, potentially incompatibly so, we will not charge for the service. When it is released in 2009, the pricing model will be very straightforward, and competitive with the marketplace.”
9:54am: “In the future,
*all* of our Enterprise
software will be delivered as an option through Microsoft Online Services.”
Great stuff... EXCITING!