Platform contiuum.
- On premise servers. Capital intensive.
- Hosted servers. Need to carry idle capacity.
- Cloud Platform. Shared, multi-tenant. Virtualised, dynamic, scalable. Pay as you go.
Azure Services
- SQL Services
- .NET Services (communications and identity)
- Live Services (consumer focussed applications)
- SharePoint (planned for future)
- Dynamic CRM (planned for future)
Core Services
- Compute: Hyper V scalable virtualised instances.
- Storage: Flexible storage with blobs, tables and queues.
- Management: Model driven service lifecycle management i.e. load balancing, instance monitoring, deployment.
Project Templates in VS 2008 that support roles within Azure. Project contains all the config data and can generate a zip file package to deploy to Azure. Vs 2008 has a developer fabric that allows local deployment for testing and debugging.
Very nice web UI for deployment and management of production and staging instances of an application. The potential to get locked in is enormous.
Full Trust Frameworks, FastCGI, multiple data centers (North America only for now).
SQL Services:
- Core SQL Services (Relational Capability)
- Data Sync (synchronise data from on-premise to cloud or cloud to cloud
- Built for high availability and scale
- Interoperable with PHP, Ruby and Java
- Consistent programming model with existing .NET APIs.
- Existing apps only need change the data connection string to use Azure cloud services
.NET Services:
- Integration of on-premise application with cloud
- Connect through firewalls
- Control permissions to apps and services
- Reuse existing user accounts
- .NET Service Bus (ESB anyone?)
- Service composition and workflow. Allows you to run on-premise or in cloud.
- Access Control, define requirements for connection to services via a claims based identity model.
- Event management
Live Services – Building blocks for consumer applications, users devices, applications and Data Sync.
- Identity
- Directory
- Storage
- Comms and presence
- Search and GeoSpatial
Roadmap:
- Fall 2008. CTP Beta. Customer technology preview.
- Sprint 2009. Update CTPs with PHP support. Extended access. New data centre. Open CTP, no invitation code required.
- Summer 2009. Pricing and SLA.
- Fall 2009. Commercial availability.
Copacetic 