Posted by Nick Mehta on Mon, Mar 09, 2009 @ 11:31 AM
Microsoft announced a high-level schedule for delivery of its Azure cloud computing offering today:
More details on Azure, including pricing, should be available in the "coming weeks and months," Steven Martin, senior director of product management for Microsoft's developer platform, said in an interview. It's unclear when exactly pricing details are coming, but Microsoft plans to unveil new features of Azure later this month at its MIX Web developer conference.
While the announcement was filled with ambiguous "plans to" and "coming weeks and months," and (my favorite) "expected to," the impact of what they're working on can't be underestimated.
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it simplifies the infrastructure management problem that has plagued everyone in IT for so many years. Yet cloud computing, until now, has largely been optimized for the open source (e.g., Linux) application stack. For example, Amazon's EC2 web service is great for Linux but is, in our opinion, still pretty raw for Windows.
Yet, speaking from experience, the infrastructure management problem that cloud computing purports to solve is perhaps the most severe in the Microsoft Windows environment. Anyone that has had to reboot servers every few days knows what I'm talking about.
Hence, we're excited to see Azure when it's "expected to" be released.