Microsoft Embraces the Cloud

Earlier this week at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, a new initiative from Microsoft was announced. Referred to as Windows Azure, it is a platform for developers to easily and robustly create applications in the cloud.

From the Windows Azure site, the following bullet points detail what the product will do for the customers.

• Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications.


• Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.


• Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises.


• Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.


• Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.


• Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.

There is now evidence of the large movement towards bringing everyday computing from the offline world to the online world. Very big names in the industry like Amazon and Microsoft and Rackspace are now fully embracing cloud architectures for developing applications. Microsoft is even delivering one of their flagship products, Microsoft Office, to the cloud in its next iteration.

It's exciting to see all of the advances being made in the field of distributed applications. There seems to be a cyclical nature to having applications move from a centralized distribution point (mainframes, the cloud) to desktop only applications but the cards certainly seem to be aligning for an interesting time in centralized application usage and deployment.