Azure Tweaked, Promoted at Build

Microsoft has said it's "all in" with the cloud, and that means being all in with Azure. At the recent Build show, Microsoft spoke in a lot of generalities, but also laid out a fair share of specifics. On the general side, Server & Tools Business President Satya Nadella talked about the need for "a rich portfolio of storage across blobs, tables and full relational capabilities to handle the complexity of data [with] Windows Azure."

I've been reading the views of many cloud gurus and it seems that storage is perhaps the biggest impediment to cloud success. Let's hope the software and hardware together can build inexpensive, fast and reliable storage solutions for the cloud.

Microsoft also has a model for selling applications or places to store your data. The Windows Azure Marketplace already has hundreds of apps and services and will soon be available in 25 more countries.

Microsoft may want to dominate the cloud, but it also recognizes it must play nice if it is to have any chance at all. That means interfacing with services such as Yahoo, Facebook and (gasp!) even Google. Windows 8 will play a role because it's designed to access these services all with a single sign-on.

And Windows 8 developers can get started right away with the new Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. Yup, that's that actual name, with Windows repeated twice! There's also a more generalized kit: the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 with an enhanced certificate upload process.

Have you played with Azure? Share your thoughts and experiences at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/27/2011 at 12:47 PM