Microsoft has a new announcement in the area of "hosted computing” called “azure”. Its a new service rivaling amazon’s webservices and Google’s half baked Appengine.
The problem with this announcement is, the signup page doesn’t take me anywhere nor can I find any “sample” sites that are running azure. It looks like a work in progress and will be sometime before it is released to the developers. I just wish they(Microsoft) make their websites simple and not generate so much of noise, with no significant information. Make an announcement if it is ready and I can take it for a spin.
The previously released Microsoft SSDS ( Sql server data services) is a part of this whole azure tech stack.
- Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking
- Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting
- Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control
- Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and Web sites
- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud
One of the most significant advantages of Azure is going to be support for “ALL” languages. I don’t know when this is going to happen, but is something they are promising. Support for PHP, Rails etc is fundamental for the success of azure , because of the body of open source code already existing for these tech stacks. It will be quite simple to port the existing PHP application on-to azure when it is available.
One of the biggest problem with Appengine is, there are no “open source” code base which can be leveraged to build apps. Simple functionality, which is normally pulled off the web and implemented with a copy paste, has to be laboriously hand-coded for Appengine.
Just hope azure serves as wake up call for Appengine team and they speed up their releases.
