Announced at the PDC this morning is Windows Azure. It is going to be the next version of the Windows Operating System except, you’re not going to run it on your home pc or on your corporate servers, Azure will run in Microsoft Data Centers also known as ‘The Cloud’.
So what is this thing which we now refer to as Windows Azure? Basically it’s everything you expect from an Operating System running ‘a data center’. This all sounds really vague and unclear, so to explain it a bit. Imagine that you’re a small startup company. For example you have the idea of a service which will enable your customers to share and collaborate messages. Now how would you go about to realize this? Until now you had to think about how to build the application, what hardware to run it on, and how and when to scale your business needs. Now with Windows Azure, you can focus on the application or services you’re building.
The Windows Azure platform will allow you to not only scale up like many of the systems we (as developers) are building today, but also to very quickly and easily scale out. You will also only pay as you grow. You pay for only the capacity and capabilities you use, and you can easily add more capacity as your business grows. You can even deal with unpredictable spikes in demand easily, by adding capacity. You now can rely on Microsoft’s data centers to host, scale, and manage your applications.
Besides all that Azure will also be programmable by both managed and native platform code. So all the skills you already have as a .NET developer or as a Win32 developer will still be of use. With the new Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, it’ll be very easy to build, debug, test and deploy Web applications and services for the new cloud platform.
In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python. If you want to start develop Windows Azure solutions today, you can download the Software Development Kit October 2008 CTP today.