ReadWriteWeb

As the Windows Azure platform began branching out last year from support for purely Microsoft frameworks like .NET, going so far as to incorporate Java, one possibility that was overlooked at the time was to support JavaScript. The reason seemed obvious: JavaScript, as its creators would tell you, is a client language. Well, that's no longer true, now that Node.js makes it about as easy to write JavaScript for the V8 interpreter on the server as it is for V8 in Google Chrome on the client.

Last month, Azure demonstrated how much both its platform and its proprietor's attitude had matured by opening up support for Node.js. Today at a summit of Node.js developers in San Francisco, the maker of a SaaS-based IDE for developers, announced it has added the ability for developers to deploy Node.js apps to Azure.

In a move to stay competitive in a cloud landscape that looked to be blowing it away, Microsoft this morning is making important strategic shifts that could advance its position in a two-front war against both VMware and Amazon. Today the company is making available a release candidate for its System Center 2012 administrative suite, which will utilize a new fabric controller (FC) for private cloud architectures.

This new FC will be hypervisor-agnostic. Up until today, Microsoft's private cloud product was called "Hyper-V Cloud," and was centered around the Hyper-V hypervisor. Today, as the company's corporate vice president tells ReadWriteWeb, the new SC 2012 Datacenter edition will feature a completely renovated, simplified licensing model, now supporting unlimited virtual machines for the same, flat fee.

It's almost impossible to believe now, but when Microsoft premiered its Windows Azure service back in October 2008, there was genuine speculation over whether the company would try to muscle its way into the cloud the way it did with Internet Explorer during the war with Netscape. What was the hook? What Windows service or feature would be so irresistible that would require Azure, that no other competitor would be able to gain a footing?

Most conspiracy theories seem stupid three years or so later, after they've failed to come to fruition. Now that Amazon is the leader (albeit amid good competition) in cloud-based virtual machines, VMware is the leader in virtualization services for the enterprise (with Citrix keeping it on its toes), Salesforce (it's still amazing to say it) has become the leader in cloud-based applications, and Heroku (a Salesforce product) is believed to be within striking distance of leadership in cloud-based apps platforms, it becomes not only feasible but practical to consider Azure in terms of relevance.

When Windows Azure was launched in 2008, it was with the intention, Microsoft said, of running .NET Framework applications from the cloud. What ended up happening was that the PaaS market matured much faster than anyone in 2008 could have anticipated, so any cloud apps platform that needs to stay competitive must run with the languages the development world is using.

Hosted JavaScript certainly was in Microsoft's original plans, but JavaScript that runs as a host, was not. For a company that has historically been incapable of turning on a dime, though, it's executing a pretty impressive course change with Azure. Last June, the company helped the Joyent open source team to port its Node.js stand-alone JavaScript server to Windows. And yesterday, Microsoft announced it has completed its addition of Node.js support to Azure, meaning that any developer can launch a server-based JavaScript app from Microsoft's cloud in minutes.

Newsgator announced this week important enhancements to Social Sites, including a connector to its spin-off Sepia Labs' Glassboard.

Something I said over the weekend before Microsoft's Build 2011 conference in Anaheim kicked off: It's not about the experience; it's never about the experience. Computing is a process, and what's important about it is what gets done. This week, a big transition process was started, and a lot got done. And in a few cases, we heard what we've been needing to hear for some time: "Message received."

The next edition of Windows Server, still code-named "Windows Server 8," will have vastly expanded integration with Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform that started out as simply a .NET application provider. Not only will Azure become (as expected) a platform for providing data and services to Windows enterprise applications, but an identity manager for federating identity across multiple Web services, including client-side Metro apps.

Microsoft is positioning its cloud offering, Azure, to be the go-to resource for mobile application development. Yesterday, Microsoft released brand new software developer kits for Android, iOS and Windows Phone to integrate Azure as the primary cloud computing back end for creating apps. With Microsoft's Azure push, what does that mean for other backend services that are just getting off the ground?

Microsoft sites American Airlines as a company using Azure toolkits to push real-time flight status, gate change and baggage claim notifications. Push notifications and other functions are often difficult for developers to integrate and services are lining up to help developers provide those capabilities.

Today Microsoft Research announced the availability of a free technology preview of Project Daytona MapReduce Runtime for Windows Azure. Using a set of tools for working with big data based on Google's MapReduce paper, it provides an alternative to Apache Hadoop.

Daytona was created by the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research. It's designed to help scientists take advantage of Azure for working with large, unstructured data sets. Daytona is also being used to power a data-analytics-as-a-service offering the team calls Excel DataScope.

Last week Infinite Apple posted screenshots of what writer Paul Paliath believes are evidence that Apple iCloud is using Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services to store content. GigaOM ran an article after consulting three networking and cloud computing experts who concluded that the data Paliath posted wasn't sufficient to prove that iCloud was using AWS or Azure.

This week, Paliath posted a raw dump (with some redactions) of some tests conducted with beta versions of iOS5, and conclude that Apple is at least using Azure as a content-delivery network (CDN).