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October 27, 2008
PDC, Day 1: Keynote
Just got out of the keynote here at PDC, Day 1. Ray Ozzie kicked it off and announced a new product called Windows Azure. The overall idea is to provide an entire end-to-end solution for deploying an application to "the cloud". They are making a CTP available today for PDC folks, and in a few weeks for the general public.
The overall vision for Azure contains a number of pieces, which are best described on this page. They want to offload the developer of any cloud-based service headaches, including high availability, failover, scalability, etc. It’s likely that this will appeal most to small- and medium-sized businesses. It’s also likely this will appeal most to people running enterprise or LOB applications, although consumer applications can also benefit.
From a .NET developer’s perspective, nothing really changes. You write your application locally and test it against your local development server, using the same tools and languages you’ve been using for client or ASP.NET apps. You then use configuration files and a web interface to actually deploy it to the Azure service cloud.
The speaker who presented the guts of what Azure is also alluded to the plans for interop with other technologies such as PHP, but he did not go into detail on what that would entail. However, he did say that since they are using standard stuff such as REST and XML, it would be possible to do this.
One demo in particular was that from BlueHoo. They are a location-based social networking type site that uses Bluetooth to find people near you that you can connect to. They demo’d using Azure as their cloud that allowed Windows Mobile devices to update profiles, and a Silverlight desktop app for viewing participants, management of the servers, etc. It’s a simple app but they were able to get it running quickly using VS, C#, .NET, and Azure.
The big question marks for me are: how far along is the technology today? What features are implemented? How long will it take for them to achieve their vision? And finally, how much will it cost to use?
Azure is something that is not really a surprise. It really is the culmination of where Microsoft has been headed with all their cloud-based services, including Live Services, Silverlight Streaming, etc. The fact that they have a seamless workflow and stories for developers is typical of Microsoft. Hopefully they will roll out more and more functionality under the Azure hood so that people can build something real with it!
Posted by eburke at October 27, 2008 2:28 PM
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