PDC: Microsoft Unveils Cloud Services Platform

Microsoft kicked off its first Professional Developers Conference in three years in resounding fashion Monday morning by introducing Windows Azure, a new development platform for building cloud-based applications.

Speaking to a packed-to-the-gills audience at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, described Azure as an extension of Windows to the Web, and an initiative that represents the lowest level foundation for building high-scale services.

"Our customer-facing systems need to scale to the size of the Web," Ozzie said.

Now available in the U.S. as a Community Technology Preview (CTP), the Azure Services Platform is based on familiar developer tools like .NET and Visual Studio, but employs a new development model that taps into the vast computing power housed in Microsoft's growing array of data centers.

"Azure is not software that you run on your own server, it's a service running on a vast number of machines," said Ozzie. As such, Azure's development and operational processes have been designed for a "different type of server environment" than developers are accustomed to, which includes new types of storage and model based development, according to Ozzie.

The Azure Services Platform encompasses Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Dynamics CRM, and Ozzie said SQL Server will take on an especially important role in driving Microsoft's strategy. "We're planning to bring more of the power of SQL Server to the cloud," Ozzie said.

Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business, told attendees that while Azure bears certain similarities to Service Oriented Architecture and next generation infrastructure, these don't scale well and weren't designed with cloud computing in mind. Microsoft's focus with Azure, then, is to enable developers to build apps that scale "outward" by using distributed architectures, said Muglia.

"One of the goals of Azure is to let you build apps that take advantage of data center power, and reducing up front capital costs as well as management and operations cost," Muglia said.

Unlike traditional operating systems that manage single machines, Azure simplifies the task of managing the entire global data center infrastructure. According to Amitabh Srivastava, corporate vice president at Microsoft, Azure does this through automated services management that separates applications from the underlying OS, so that each is managed separately.

"Azure manages all this complexity for you, and in addition, provides a layer of abstraction to ease your programming burden," Srivastava told PDC attendees .

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