Windows Azure

Windows Azure to be online on January 1st 2010

Microsoft promises its new cloud computing platform to be operational for the new year and will remain free of use until February 1st. After that evaluation period, customers will start being charged for the use of Azure.

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing, Microsoft has of course prepared its own platform for cloud applications development. According to Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, the Redmond company is increasingly thinking of "three screens and a cloud" as the future of applications, screens referring to different devices such as PC's as well as smartphones and netbooks. One advantage of cloud computing is that everything from computing power to data storage is done in a centralized server and is accessible by any device connected to the Internet.

Windows Azure will allow the use of multiple programming languages such as usual Windows languages like .NET, C# and Visual Basic, but also PHP and other thrid-party languages. This is expected to pave the way to the development of varied, flexible applications that can be of use at home and in work environments.

But the power of cloud computing and the Azure platform is not limited to creating Web applications. People in the industry are confident that such a platform will help Website owners manage the spikes in traffic when their servers might have difficulty withstanding too large a demand at once. At the announcement of the platform, Martin Cron, developer of the Cheezburger Network (http://icanhascheezburger.com/), noted that he could use that feature if the network's new oddlyspecific.com generates a lot of traffic at once, for instance.

Azure's three components

The Azure platform is actually pretty broad. The main component is Windows Azure itself, which "is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft® datacenters." (Microsoft)

There is also a Relational Database, much like any other used in the industry, except for the fact that it is in the cloud. This component is simply named « SQL Azure ».

The last of Windows Azure's key elements is called « AppFabric? ». According to Microsoft, "Windows Azure platform AppFabric? provides Service Bus and Access Control for you and your business partners to bridge assets across cloud, on-premises, or hosted deployment locations, and to interoperate across languages, platforms, and standards."

More documentation is available on the Windows Azure page. Microsoft also provides a detailed 21-page PDF document on the platform.