Ray Ozzie Announces Windows Azure - "Windows in the Cloud"
Ray Ozzie opened the Microsoft PDC '08 this morning with a keynote speech. In it he announced Windows Azure, Microsoft's "Windows in the cloud". It is a new service based operating environment. He described it as a massive highly scalable service platform. What is being released today is just a fraction of what it will become. It will be Microsoft's highest scalable system enabling people and companies to create services on the Web.
On the new webpage for Windows Azure, it is described as follows:
Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.To build these applications and services, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments.
Use Windows Azure to:
* Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications.
* Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.
* Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises.
* Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
* Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
* Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.
In his keynote speech at PDC, Ray Ozzie gave some background to Azure. He started by noting that we're in the early days of the services revolution and then sung some lines from the now familiar Microsoft refrain of software + services. He mentioned the recent online stories that cloud computing may be over-rated (Larry Ellison and others). In response, he said that there is a trend of "the externalization of IT", and that rich forms of customer interaction are evolving - community interaction, wikis, blogs, etc. "The web has become a key demand generation mechanism". Further, Ozzie said that "a company's web presence has become critical to a company's overall business".
He talked about a company's web-facing challenges - power failures, cable cuts, earthquakes, and so on. He said that having more than one data center is required by companies, but this is difficult to do in-house. You may need to have data centers around the world, to ensure there are no latency issues etc. Excess capacity is required. And then you'd have political issues, tax issues, and other challenges. So going back to the issue of whether cloud computing is different than the old days of IT, Ozzie said that yes there is a "material difference".
Ozzie said that a few years ago Microsoft did an analysis of their web-facing systems - MSDN, MSN, and others. "Each one had grown organically on their own", but they also had common expertise - such as keeping software up to date, ensuring demand could be scaled in holiday seasons etc.
High scale internet infrastructure is a new tier of computing, said Ozzie. The first tier was the PC, the second the enterprise. The third tier is the web tier - externally facing systems (computation, storage, networking, "what appears to be infinite capacity"). So a few years ago Microsoft set out to create a platform for that third tier. A few months after they started their planning, Amazon released EC2. Ray Ozzie said that he "tips my hat" to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team for what they've achieved.
Azure is designed to be Microsoft's cloud OS solution - their new foundation for web-based services. As PDC progresses, more will be revealed about this new product.
UPDATE: Our analysis: Microsoft Azure Aims to Re-define the OS
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Is it Linux-based? Maybe some Mono to hook in with .NET? :D
Posted by: Daniel J. Pritchett
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October 27, 2008 9:54 AM
Ok I was joking but I *am* curious if this means a cloud of servers running Windows. Will a closed-source OS work out in this space? I guess if the communications are robust enough and the failure state is to crash/reboot a node then it might not matter...
Posted by: Daniel J. Pritchett
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October 27, 2008 10:07 AM
As we speak, Azure downloads are not working. Register is not working either. If it is early, why did they launch the site anyway?
"What is being released today is just a fraction of what it will become." So it's more vaporware, like Live Mesh?
Posted by: Pat Rice
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October 27, 2008 10:27 AM
Cool,
this is perfect for Blogtronix as we are a .NET platform and now we can offer a complete solution for our customers and even hit MOSS under the belt with their own solution.
Need to start testing this as well as the new Amazon could windows solution.
Folks, I work for the Windows Azure team. We're turning on all the switches as we speak. A lot of the pieces you mention will show up at noon PST.
@Sriram Krishnan
Why restrict it to Windows OS? Seems like that just guarantees it will fail.
What ever happened to Live Mesh? Port 25?
It all sounds terrific and interesting but I am struck by yet another PR from Microsoft announcing a new product as a "massive highly scalable service platform" && one that's "only a fraction of what it will become"!
Why not start with a KISS solution and build out and up? Otherwise it seems doomed for failure.
It all sounds terrific and interesting but I am struck by yet another PR from Microsoft announcing a new product as a "massive highly scalable service platform" && one that's "only a fraction of what it will become"!
Why not start with a KISS solution and build out and up? Otherwise it seems doomed for failure.
On the other hand, I'm still listening and will be reviewing for consideration.
I am really pumped up about Azure because it is the culmination of endless whispering, rumors and speculation. things that have gone on and on for close to 2 years now.
@Daniel:
Eclipse is supported. Eclipse will release support for Mac and Linux before the end of the year. but MonoDevelop 2.0 should be able to connect with this. and if not. you can be assured that Icaza will assure that it will with a .1 or .2 release before the end of the year or at the start of next year if needed. i would be extremely surprised he would not jump at the chance of doing so.
@Pat:
How can something that has been in CTP for months now is vaporware?. something that is getting into beta this very week by the way. more details tomorrow on that. Live Mesh is part of the Live Services of Windows Azure.
@Todd:
Any clear study or numbers to prove your claims? read general reports of reliability of win server from 2000 up to now and check how it has come a long long way from that time up to now.
head start for developers
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Building-applications-for-Windows-Azure.aspx
This is the RSS feed you need to subscribe to in order to get the latest news about Windows azure: http://feedproxy.google.com/WindowsAzure. It is using many sources including yahoo, google, MS live news search, blog search (using google), technorati, icerokcet and many more, including Twitter. Check it out!