PDC announcement – Windows Azure & Windows Azure Developer Services Platform

‘We are in the early days of transformation’ said Ray Ozzie at the opening keynote at PDC, introducing afterwards the new platform from Microsoft for the cloud, Windows Azure.

This is a platform that pushes a paradigmatic and important change about how we conceptualize and think of our applications, how we distribute them, how we host them, what we are going to have ‘in premise’ (in our datacenter) and what we are going to host ‘in the cloud’, how we are going to scale out and, in the end, how we are going to follow a S+S (Software + Services) strategy.

We can find a lot of information about this platform in the following site: www.azure.com.

I am going to share here a brief summary of what this platform means and which are the benefits that we are going to find as developers / architects:

What is Windows Azure?

It is a new operating system from Microsoft, thought for the cloud. It has been created to support the mega-datacenter that Microsoft has recently released in CTP so as we can host our applications and services there.

So, it isn’t an operating system that we can install in our PCs. J.

Which are the benefits of hosting our apps in Windows Azure?

In essence, according to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft has gained a lot of expertise in the field of datacenters and now it is making one step further by opening its platform to the community, by the means of the Azure platform.

In concrete, these are the benefits as developers for this new platform:

-          Scalability by design. If we choose Azure our applications and services will be ready to scale out and run in multiple servers and processors, totally transparent for us.

-          High availability. 24 x 7 or give your money back J. Total redundancy, we do not have to worry about this anymore.

-          Security. The platform is thought to be secured and manage different levels of authentication. Authorization is still not clear for me as well as other policies, but surely it will be securedJ.

-          Updating. Microsoft  is going to manage updates and keep their systems up to date. It is not our problem anymore.

-          Visual Studio Integration. This allows us to work with Visual Studio and have new Project templates, deploy solutions easily, manage configurations, debug (during development phase) etc.

What is Windows Azure Developer Services Platform?

In addition to the OS, Microsoft is providing a layer of services that are going to be ‘building blocks’ when building our applications for the cloud.

In concrete, the services are the following ones:

-          .Net Services.

o   Service Bus: it allows us to expose existing services to the cloud, exposing them to third parties or us. The services remain hosted ‘in premise’. Previously known this initiative from MS as Internet Service Bus.

o   Access control: it allows managing identity federation, making it transparent for the final user the cross between both worlds.  As far as I could see, we can use user & pass, cardspace or digital certificates.

o   Workflow services: it allows exposing workflows as services to the cloud easily.

-          SQL Data Services.

This is what we could say ‘Database as a service’. Through Http, have access to our data, abstracting the concept of database per ce.

Today it has some limitations; hence, it is worth to understand them before choosing this approach. However, it is interesting to see how through http verbs we can make queries and updates to our data.

I insist, forget about having a .MDF, the change is pretty dramatic here.

-          Live Services

It allows using the services of the live + mesh platform from our applications. I.e.: now I can have a client which consumes data / uploads files to mesh.

-          Sharepoint Services

This is what initially was born as ‘Sharepoint Online’. As far as I understood, it allows us to share sites and documents easily with our customers.

And all of these for free?

By now, at this preview stage, yes! Afterwards, in its final version the prices are going to be known and probably they will be aligned with the resources that we consume. According to Ray Ozzie the prices are going to be competitive with the market.

And what is available right now?

Today, the platform CTP is available; we can find it in two flavors:

-          A SDK that simulates Azure in our desktop. This allows us to develop a solution locally, debug it and see how it is going to behave in the final environment when deploying it.

This SDK is pretty cool.

Bear in mind that in the final environment we are not going to have debugging, so workaround: include a lot of traces!.

-          In azure.com we can create our solution, including the services mentioned above and for instance, expose a service through service bus.

I did it and ‘hello world’ worked as a charm!J. Nevertheless, you will need an account for Windows Azure and I guess it is only restricted to PDC attendees.

I hope that having shared these comments has been useful so as to clarify your thoughts about this platform. Despite there is lot of information nowadays, sometimes it turns a bit difficult to understand how these pieces work together.