Development

Today, Microsoft jumped on the “cloud computing” bandwagon with its announcement of Windwos Azure – “a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.”

Aside from buzz words and tech speak, what does this actually mean? Basically it gives Microsoft application developers a solution to host and manage their websites in a “cloud” environment – meaning a scalable, managed environment that makes development and deployment easier. For us web developers (yes, we build our products with ASP.Net), it is supposed to help us to quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute our applications and services. At 48Web, we are in the process of ramping up our first product launch and will likely be using Windows Azure for our infrastructure.

This is BIG news following the recent announcement by Amazon to support Windows hosting in it’s cloud product – Amazon EC2.

From the announcement:

The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and
services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services
Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that
span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud
operating system and a set of developer services. Fully interoperable
through the support of industry standards and web protocols such as
REST and SOAP, you can use the Azure services individually or together,
either to build new applications or to extend existing ones.

Update: Although they have a big “Try It Now” button on the front of the Azure informational pages – there is no way to register and all the download links are dead. Fail…

Update: Also I wanted to note that I don’t see actual prices, but they claim it is based on consumption and is “attractive with the market”.

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