Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, and Amitabh Srivastava participated in an informal blogger roundtable this afternoon at Microsoft’s Professional Developer conference. Although the morning keynote focused on Windows Azure’s infrastructure, Ozzie delved briefly into some of tomorrow’s announcements, implying that there might be surprises in the area of Office applications deployed on top of Azure. Srivastava confirmed that one of the demos featured a glimpse of an online version of Microsoft Word.
Muglia and Ozzie reminisced briefly of problems in Hailstorm that still aren’t solved with Azure. Muglia credited Identity architect Kim Cameron with important work in identity federation that is just now seeing the light of day in Azure’s automated identity provisioning. And Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said sometimes people can get really enamored, overengineering the platform for the platform’s sake. He suggested apps developed during Azure’s community preview release beta will be much more important in driving the cloud platform forward.
Ozzie is actually encouraged that Amazon is in the game, saying he doesn’t know what competitors will do. But as a competitor of Microsoft before his current job, he notes: “The moment that Exchange was launched, Notes took off. The moment we can reasonably port apps from one platform to another, this will take off. Is the web the place to do it? Is the PC the way to do it? Is the phone the way to do it? Ozzie says “Yes!”
Where is Steve Balmer in all of this.
Could there be internal tensions with this new direction?
Ballmer is the CEO. CEOs don’t usually, not always, get into explaining details of the technical roadmap of a company. That is why they are hired Ray and have Muglia, it is sort their job. :-)
You can find more info related to Azure on http://www.azurejournal.com
-Marcio
@Public*Relations - They sent Ray Ozzie to present it seeing as how he is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and the conference is for Developers.
Realistically Azure is much more of a competitor to Google App Engine then it is to Amazon EC2. Both Google App Engine and Azure provide Platform level services which is a much higher level then what Amazon provides with EC2. People continue to play up with Azure vs EC2 angle but realistically they have Windows on EC2 which helps Microsoft in the short term until they can figure out a way to go after that corner of the market. I talked about the whole Azure project here On my blog
TY, your blog make a better job explaining what Windows Azure is.
As for now, I still not sure that Azure will be a new operating system. I suspect that Azure may stand as a marketing term for virtualized-Windows-Server-OS-running-on-Datacenter with all Microsoft web technology available to developers.
Wait and see.
It does not look like developers will be able to easily port their Azure services to Google App Engine or Amazon EC2 unless developers avoid using any of the Azure infrastructure. No surprise. Microsoft is not obligated to make it easy to compete with them. And Microsoft will continue to use their tools and APIs for locking developers into the visual cloud development environment. You don’t have to use their tools but I can’t imagine Eclipse becoming a first class development environment for Azure.
Is it true that 3rd party services built on Azure will not be portable to Microsoft’s enterprise level infrastructure as there will be only one Azure and only infrastructure components will be shared? Developers that do not trust Microsoft are going to see the writing on the walls. The enterprise infrastructure will provide comprehensive support for consuming Azure services while 3rd party service providers won’t be able to effectively compete with Azure services provided by Microsoft.
I thought Ray did a poor job in side stepping the requests for information on useful applications that might take advantage of the abstractions provided by Azure and Live Mesh. I suspect no compelling explanation exists.
You mean it’s easy today to port between Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services?
I did not say this.
Per Jonathan, whats the cross platform support b/n Google & Amazon? Google only supports Python BTW, Azure will support PHP, Python and Ruby plus C# , eclipse. It’s so much more robust than anything Google is doing.
I prefer AWS to GAE.
Language support is not the issue regarding lock-in. It is the tools and APIs that are designed to make moving your code to another environment difficult. Microsoft will make it very easy to build apps on their terms.
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