PDC: Microsoft Calls New Cloud Computing OS a 'Turning Point' for Company
- By Kathleen Richards
- 10/30/08
At its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week, Microsoft is unveiling the end-to-end vision for its Software plus Services platform.
On Monday, key executives and partners gave a two-and-a-half-hour keynote on what Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie termed the "back-end" infrastructure for the company's emerging cloud platform. The biggest news: Microsoft is running a kernel operating system (Project Red Dog) on its connected servers in its datacenters. The new service-based operating system is called Windows Azure.
"It's the transformation of our software, it's the transformation of our strategy and our offerings across the board to fundamentally embrace services," said Ozzie, who described the new Azure platform as a turning point for Microsoft.
Azure is Microsoft's operating system for the Web tier, he explained, joining Windows Server in the enterprise and Vista and Windows Mobile in what he called the "experience" tier.
"Windows Azure is our lowest-level foundation for building and deploying a high-scale service," Ozzie said, "providing core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage in the form of blobs, tables and streams and, perhaps most importantly, an automated service management system, a fabric controller that handles provisioning, geo-distribution and the entire lifecycle of a cloud-based service."
Services Platform
Microsoft also announced the Azure Services Platform for developers, which sits on top of Azure. It is comprised of several components including Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services (Reporting and Data Analysis in addition to SQL Data Services which has been renamed), SharePoint Online and Dynamic CRM Online. The .NET Services, for now, consist of a service bus for connecting on-premise apps to the cloud, access control that enables federation across existing identity providers into the cloud and workflow that will be extended to cloud services.
Developers will build applications based on service models and patterns using the functionality in the Azure Service Platform and familiar tooling such as ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2008, as well as the new "Oslo" modeling platform.
The Azure platform manages apps separately from the operating system. The platform offers a simulation of the cloud for debugging and testing on the local development desktop. Developers provide Microsoft with the code for the service and the architecture of the service model, and the company provided automated service management.