Posts Tagged ‘microsoft cloud’

On SD Times,

LOS ANGELES – It’s Windows Azure, front and center at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, which began today in Los Angeles.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, took the keynote stage to announce the pending availability of Windows Azure. He also announced two Azure services: a data catalog called “Dallas,” and a business application marketplace called “Pinpoint.”

Windows Azure will go into production on Jan. 1, 2010, Ozzie said. Meanwhile, Microsoft will continue to add new features, and select partners will begin hosting commercial applications on Azure immediately.

WordPress developer Automattic’s founder Matt Mullenweg joined Ozzie on stage to announce that WordPress has migrated to Windows Azure at an infrastructure-as-a-service level. Popular blogs, including “I Can Has Cheezburger?” and “FAIL Blog,” are now running on Windows Azure.

Dallas is an information service that Ozzie called a “game-changing subsystem.” Dallas, which is built on Windows Azure and SQL Azure, allows developers to access commercial and private data sets across platforms.

Pinpoint is a catalog of business applications and services that target developers and are integrated into the Azure development portal.

Dallas is seeded with trial data sets from media companies, the U.S. government and others. Data can be bound to applications via ATOM feeds and REST, said Microsoft technical fellow David Campbell.

Microsoft’s Server and Tools business president Bob Muglia described how the company was going to help developers structure applications for Azure, and to make applications portable to migrate from Windows data center to the cloud. “Developers have to evolve applications to take advantage of the cloud,” he said.

Building hybrid cloud applications is another focus of the cloud application model. To that end, Microsoft is working on “Sydney,” a project to connect private data centers with Windows Azure. No further details were provided.

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By Eric Lai,

Microsoft said today that its upcoming Windows Azure cloud computing platform will come with marketplaces for both online apps built to run on Azure as well as datasets that companies can use to build their own apps.

PinPoint.com will host business-oriented apps developed by Microsoft partners, chief software architect Ray Ozzie said during a keynote speech at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) in Los Angeles.

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PinPoint will compete with Salesforce.com’s four-year-old AppExchange online marketplace and other more recently emerging app stores.

Azure will also host “an open catalog and marketplace for public and commercial data” code-named Dallas, Ozzie said. Developers can use the data to build their own services and mashups. Dallas is now in Commercial Technical Preview.

Microsoft is also bolstering Azure with management tools for developers running .Net apps on-premises and with Azure that are less sexy, but arguably more essential.

Windows Azure , meanwhile, will officially go into production on January 1, but customers won’t be billed until February 1, Ozzie said. Azure will be hosted at three pairs of data centers: Chicago and San Antonio for North America, Dublin and Amsterdam for Europe, and Singapore and Hong Kong for Asia.

Azure will compete with Salesforce, Amazon.com, and many other cloud platform providers. The key difference is that Azure, rather than dumping the desktop entirely for the Web, keeps the Windows operating system in the equation.

This vision of “three screens and the cloud” will allow developers to build apps that can be reused and delivered via the cloud (Windows Azure), on-premises server (Windows Server), or desktop (Windows 7), depending on what is most convenient or offers the best performance, Ozzie said.

To demonstrate how far Windows Azure has come, Microsoft enlisted the aid of some traditional antagonists: Silicon Valley startups and the federal government. San Francisco-based Automattic is using Azure to host parts of its popular WordPress blogging platform, said founder Matt Mullenweg. Another San Franciso startup, Seesmic, is building a Twitter app running on Windows using Microsoft’s Silverlight rich media player, said CEO Loic LeMeur.

NASA is releasing 3D imagery from the Mars rover vehicle for free to the general public via the Dallas data feed. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra said the government plans to accelerate the release of more data to the public. He likened the potential “explosion” of apps to the one that followed after the U.S. government liberalized the availability of GPS data.

To demonstrate that Azure can scale to needs, Microsoft’s president of its Server & Tools Division, Bob Muglia, cited its Bing search app, which runs on more than 100,000 servers. Muglia also announced Project Sydney, which will allow companies to connect their own servers to Azure-based services. Sydney will go into beta next year.

Finally, Muglia announced a beta of an application server for Windows Server called AppFabric. AppFabric will help developers manage both on-premises servers and Azure cloud-based services. It includes features from the Dublin app server and the Velocity caching technology. AppFabric will go into beta next year.