Microsoft’s answer to Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s EC2: ++
At Microsoft’s PDC ’08 today, Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft Azure. In a nutshell, Azure can be described as “Windows in the Cloud”. More specifically, Azure is a cloud service operating system that serves as a development environment with on-demand compute and storage, service hosting, and a service management environment. Sound familiar? Azure is squarely aimed at Google’s App Engine with a healthy dose of Amazon EC2.
Azure Services Platform
As you can see from this Microsoft marketecture diagram, Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services, Sharepoint Services, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services are all layered on Azure. The platform supports HTTP, REST, SOAP, RSS, and AtomPub – a well rounded set of modern services protocols. Unlike Google’s and Amazon’s services, Azure is very focused on enterprise applications. An SDK is available today.
These are exciting times, exciting times!