Windows Azure
If you hear the term “Windows Azure” and wonder what it is, it is Microsoft’s new cloud computing platform. Microsoft is hosting the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles this week and is unveiling a number of things.
Windows Azure is intended for business but might some day have consumer services. Ars Technica reports:
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, announced “Windows Azure” during the PDC keynote Monday. Windows Azure is a hosted suite of services, including virtualized computing, scalable storage, and an automated service management system. Ozzie said that these tools were built to host Microsoft services like MSN, Xbox Live, and Office Online. In theory, if Azure is robust enough for these services, it will also work well for Microsoft partners and customers.
Windows Azure, previously code named “Red Dog,” is similar to Amazon’s Web Services platform, but Microsoft-centric. The storage offerings, in particular, match up almost one-to-one with Amazon’s. They provide the means to store blobs of data (like S3), “tables” (like SimpleDB), and queues (like SQS) in the cloud. The “computational resources” sound like a slightly more limited form of Amazon’s EC2. Pricing is not yet available, but it will be on a “consumption based” model, and should be pretty close to Amazon’s pricing.
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