In a much anticipated move, Microsoft announced the combination of the Windows Azure group with the Windows Server and Solutions group into a new organization, titled the Server and Cloud Division. The new division, headed by Senior Vice President Amitabh Srivastava, will be a part of the Servers and Tools Business, headed by Bob Muglia.
The new division will “deliver solutions that help our customers realize even greater benefits from Microsoft’s investments in on-premises and cloud technologies,” according to the Windows Server Division blog. The Windows Azure team blog adds that the combined team will “ensure that customers get the full benefit of Microsoft offerings that span Microsoft’s public cloud, on-premises solutions, private clouds, and clouds that our partners host.”
The move makes sense, as the company’s “software plus services” strategy requires consistency in the management and execution capabilities of both Windows Server and Windows Azure. Microsoft has been working on both Azure and private cloud capabilities for some time now, though its Web site currently pitches its Dynamic Data Center Toolkit as a “foundation” for both private and partner cloud services.
It should be noted that this move means that CTO Ray Ozzie is no longer heading the Azure team, a signal that Azure has graduated from a technical project to a full-fledged Microsoft business.
Also announced was the move of the Windows Azure Business and Marketing team, headed by Doug Hauger, to the Server and Tools Marketing group, under Corporate Vice President Robert Wahbe. bron
Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform is a cloud platform offering, set to go into production on January 1, 2010, that “provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the internet” (though the platform itself will not be made available for on-premises deployments). It is significant in that it is Microsoft’s first step into cloud computing following the launch of the Microsoft Online Services offering.
A Community Technology Preview was given to Professional Developers Conference 2008 attendees. This preview is set to expire at the end of January 2010. Microsoft will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010
Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. It provides a cloud operating system called Windows Azure that serves as a runtime for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of applications off-premises.[5] All Azure Services and applications built using them run on top of Windows Azure.
Windows Azure have three core components Compute, Storage, Fabric. As name suggested Compute provides computation environment with Web Role and Worker Role while Storage focuses on providing scalable storage (Blobs, Tables, Queue) for large scale needs.
The hosting environment of Windows Azure is called the Fabric Controller – which pools individual systems into a network that automatically manages resources, load balancing, geo-replication and application lifecycle without requiring the hosted apps to explicitly deal with those requirements. In addition, it also provides other services that most applications require — such as the Windows Azure Storage Service that provides applications with the capability to store unstructured data such as binary large objects, queues and non-relational tables. Applications can also use other services that are a part of the Azure Services Platform.
Azure Services Platform provides an API built on REST, HTTP and XML that allows a developer to interact with the services provided by Windows Azure. A client-side managed class library is also provided that encapsulates the functions of interacting with the services. It also integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio so that it can be used as the IDE to develop and publish Azure-hosted applications