Microsoft introduces Windows Azure for cloud development

By David Worthington

October 27, 2008 —

Microsoft offered a glimpse of Azure today at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, releasing a Community Technology Preview of the hosted, Windows Server 2008-based kernel.

But while Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie described the essence of the company’s platform in his keynote address, his outlook on how developers would ascend to the cloud was somewhat hazy.

Developers will create applications that run on Windows Azure using Visual Studio and their existing .NET programming skills, Ozzie said. There will be pain points, he noted, such as transitioning to model-driven development and understanding new development patterns, parallelism and horizontal scale. While he did not address those challenges in his keynote, the company has been putting a process in place via its Oslo initiative.

Oslo is moving .NET developers toward model-driven development, and the company will release Visual Studio 2010 with facilities for creating and deploying model-driven applications. .NET 4.0 will tackle parallelism with specialized libraries, and Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Group will support developers as they adopt the technologies.

Microsoft tools are not required for Azure; developers will be able to choose from a range of open-source tools and technologies, including Eclipse, and will be able to access Azure services using common Internet standards, such as Atom, HTTP, representational state transfer and WS-*. Microsoft will sponsor open-source projects for cross-platform software development kits under the BSD licensing model in collaboration with Schakra and ThoughtWorks.

Azure is not tied exclusively to .NET languages; it will support native code. That capability is not yet in place, however. It will also be interoperable with other cloud services through Internet standards, and developers may choose to use services on an a la carte basis, said Microsoft corporate vice president Robert Wahbe.

SOA first
Having developers use their existing skill sets clears one hurdle to adoption, said Bola Rotibi, a principal analyst with Macehiter Ward-Dutton. But she noted that a service-oriented architecture might have to be in place first.

“Enterprises will have to have some clarity in their strategy internally in how they will position their services architecture to have a better understanding of what will be on premises and what will be best served in the cloud,” Rotibi said. “That is a large exercise for a number of organizations.

“A small number of people are thinking about services in the way that they need to,” she added. “The move toward a cloud-based environment is made easier if you are already structured in a services-based infrastructure.”

Ozzie did not comment on that transition, but a PowerPoint slide shown during his presentation showed that a SOA should be in place before enterprises move services onto Azure. Microsoft mapped out a timeframe that has developers putting SOAs in place starting next year.

“SOA is a precursor to what we are doing in the cloud,” said Wahbe. Microsoft will extend its patterns and practices guidance to incorporate the cloud, he added, calling cloud computing “a natural extension” of the Windows platform.

For developers who are ready to make the leap to the cloud, Azure will provide an infrastructure for automated service management, scalable storage and virtualized computation. The cloud itself will be powered by a worldwide network of federated data centers, said Microsoft corporate vice president Amitabh Srivastava.

Developers would upload source code and a service model for managing their applications in the cloud throughout the application life cycle, with the application state defined in XML files. Developers would write, test and debug their Azure applications within Visual Studio without deploying to the cloud for initial testing by setting breakpoints in their code, Srivastava said. He referred to that capability as the “cloud on the desktop.”

On top of Azure, Microsoft is providing a .NET service component that will offer workflow services, Dynamics CRM, a standalone identity service, SharePoint Services and SQL services.

The identity service, code-named Geneva, will provide a connector for Active Directory to a cloud-based service for federating identity, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business. “You use your own [identity] providers and federate them together,” he added.

An expanded version of SQL Server Data Services, which launched in March, will eventually perform more-advanced functions such as data synchronization, data mining, ETL (extract, transform, load) and reporting.

“The cloud environment needs a database, just [as] on-premises [environments do],” Muglia said.

Also announces was a systems management service called Atlanta. It is a portal that will provide information about systems and will use a message bus to traverse corporate firewalls to Azure, Muglia said. It will make reporting services available to systems administrators.

Microsoft will detail product offerings and pricing in 2009, according to Wahbe. “We want to start the conversation now,” he said, without specifying what service-level agreements or resources Microsoft would put behind Azure.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, .NET, SOA, Windows, Microsoft

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