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Microsoft Announces Windows Azure, Cloud-Based OS
snydeq writes "Microsoft today introduced Windows Azure, its operating system for the cloud. The OS serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform to help developers build apps that span from the cloud to the datacenter, to PCs, the Web, and phones. Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services, which are hosted on servers within Microsoft's global data center network."
Was anyone waiting for this? Or interested in this?
Anyone?
Bueller?
How we know is more important than what we know.
From what they've said so far, Windows Azure is just Microsoft hosting your applications on their distributed network.
They were touting all these "great" things, but really that's all it really is.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Replacing the BSOD with the ASOD.
Except with ASOD, you wont know whos SOD it is...
I get it now. If you disagree with the majority on
Considering the source of this software, one can be pretty sure of this lifecycle:
Phase one: deployment by thousands of small businesses, the poor schmucks.
Phase two: serious security and compatibility problems go exploited and unreported. Those in the know start to advise against use of the software.
Phase three: Patching attempts by Microsoft. Cracking attempts by crackers. Either: Massive advertising campaign by Microsoft OR Microsoft puts out Version 2 with bug fixes and advertises that.
Phase four: more patching by Microsoft. More cracking by crackers. Microsoft comes out a with Service Pack. New Ubuntu does everything this product does, but faster and more securely.
Phase five: fewer and fewer companies use this product, but it enjoys a long half-life as companies fail to stop using it.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
According to Wikipedia, "Azure is a blue color, halfway between blue and cyan. Commonly it refers to a bright blue, resembling the sky on a bright, clear day."
So, now we can look forward to seeing a soothing Azure Screen of Death.
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
- It's slow(duh, connecting to the internet and such)
- You have no privacy (MS knows all)
- You have no control (MS controls all)
- You have no guarantee (MS decides when you are allowed to use it)
I'm sold
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I've been writing Windows apps since 3.1. Microsoft couldn't write a decent API if their lives depended on it. They manage to take simple concept, and bury under layer upon layer of useless complexity. Too often their documentation doesn't give examples, and the only way to find out what something does is it sit around and experiment with it. Take the absurd DirectX: you *have* to use it, but even today it takes pages to get a window on the screen and the documentation is useless. Remember Microsoft OLE? Such a simple thing made so hard. I want to code in as few a lines as possible. I don't want to write pages of COM declarations. Worse of all is their DirectShow - put a video on the screen. It's a mess of pins and connectors. Ugh!
Although I'm a Windows programmer by training, I've been spreading my wings and it's nice to use APIs that are simpler and more elegant. I can write code to do what I want to do, instead of wasting days with my nose buried in absurdly thick reference books trying to understand what they were trying to do. It's like the people at Microsoft who spend their time writing APIs never have to actually use one.
So Microsoft Cloud? No, thanks. Cloud may turn out to be another flash-in-the-pan fad, but even so I'd rather use a cleaner API by someone else. Microsoft have a lousy track record. Thanks, but no thanks.
What's the security boundary between customers based on? Virtual machines?
...I'm sick of the "cloud". I like the idea of syncing data over the net, but I hate the idea of having to be online to do work. Worse yet, I hate the idea of using web-based interface. They all work differently, they all look different and frankly they suck. It's hard for them to be open source, they're hard to extend and hard to deploy.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
BizTalk plus .NET, add a little FrontPage, a dash of Silverlight and mix it all up on a hosted server. For some reason I just had flashbacks to the Bass-o-Matic on SNL.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...it's not an OS in my book. It may be an excellent (hmph!) network API, but it is not an operating system of any kind.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
It is a new interface to a hosted platform for your .net apps, sharepoint, dynamics CRM and SQL server which will surely be running on clusters of good old server 2003 and 2008.
1. Can turn off access to any application, at will.
2. Can force upgrade$, even when perfectly happy with an older version of an application.
3. Can nickle-and-dime you for every piece of the OS, similar to purchasing your car one bolt at-a-time.
4. Over tax our still not-ready-for-prime-time broadband.
Gosh, how the hell does this benefit me in anyway? I am not an automatic MS-basher like some people here but I'm quickly learning.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
it's also ugly, bloated, and losing market share.
Vuzta.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's really hard to argue with such an extensive and reasoned argument.
Does this explain all the bullshit slashdot articles about cloud this and grid that? I hope this turns into microsoft bob 2.0.
If you run a business, you have to know DAMN well that your data is:
1) private and secure
3) available to your apps
4) backed up
How can you do that if your data is "in the cloud"? The SLA isn't worth the paper that it is written on if your business goes down for a week because something went wrong with "the cloud".
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
There is something seriously wrong with that boy. Some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder that makes him focus every waking moment of every living day into posting articles about the evils of MS (er... M$) while fellating Stallman (or, RMS as he likes to call him).
One day his trolling will stop, and there will be a blurb of an obituary that nobody bothers to read. "Man takes own life, blames Microsoft for releasing a product he actually likes."
True. I used to use Azureus. Then it got bloated, turned into Vuze.. Now I use ktorrent and recommend my Windows friends use uTorrent.
Windows, not walls.
You can look, but you can't touch.
That's not really your data you're downloading from the cloud, it's a copy provided to you by the grace of the service provider.
Windows 7 is losing core applications and replacing them with an installer to download them because doing so appeases the federal regulators who will come down -hard- on Microsoft implementing any program that could be considered, even if twenty years from now, unfair competition.
Microsoft doesn't want the headache and says, fine, we'll take our toys and replace it with an installer that is on the users' desktop or start menu or whatever, and they can choose to use it or not. OEMs can choose to leave it in or not, etc.
I'm OK with that, I don't use the Windows Live apps anyway.
How can you do that if your data is "in the cloud"? The SLA isn't worth the paper that it is written on if your business goes down for a week because something went wrong with "the cloud".
Supporting small business I've seen some down right foolish and stupid decisions made on IT, placing cost over their data security.
Most cloud services offer business access to applications and services they could not afford if they put the software on site and I see it as no different to a SMB deciding to spend 5K on a new server and ignore the extra 5K for a backup system to support it.
Some business owners will understand the risks, and some will either not care or go for the bottom line with cost.
I cant wait to see how sucktacular it is. All the reliability and stability of Microsoft software delivered through Microsoft's legendary networking skill.
Friends, the LHC has nothing on this. We're about to see an example of negative energy, when modern physics had all but proved it completely impossible.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I may have missed the point of this, but it really looks to me like an attempt to give windows a package manager without ever having to admit that any other package managers were a good idea.
Microsoft couldn't write a decent API if their lives depended on it.
Microsoft's APIs are seamless, coherent and reliably engineered. They are flexible enough to enable seamless integration of all their apps into every aspect of the operating system in such a way that they seem to be part of it. They even build into the APIs current developers of their apps need to implement various features.
Although I'm a Windows programmer by training,
Oh. You mean the APIs they let you use. Never mind.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Are we still claiming that MS owns the browser? Let alone the server and data center market?
"what's going to motivate them to follow standards?"
Being left behind.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
The term to indicate a room is under some form of electronic surveillance, especially used by British intelligence services
Actually, I think they got that from "Edge of Darkness" mini-series.
>> They manage to take simple concept, and bury under
>> layer upon layer of useless complexity
This is a very astute observation. As a MSFT veteran, I can tell you why this happens. Microsoft as a company does not value simplicity. Simplicity in design is perceived as a lack of technical skill and therefore considered a weakness. It has to be uber-super-insane architecture starting right from V1, and it has to be so complex that it'll only be useful by V3, and even then only by people who already know a lot of the other equally grotesque Windows APIs. Otherwise people won't get promoted.
The most recent and most dramatic example of gross overengineering so far is Avalon, AKA WPF. I bet the same is true of Azure, knowing that it comes from Windows and there are a bunch of very senior people in the org. Which is why I predict that it will be an epic fail.
So... Basically MS has finally created an operating system so freakin' big that it won't fit onto a single computer?
"My religion is to live --and die-- without regret." -- Milarepa
Agreed. While OLE and the original Windows SDK sucked, that's ancient history. Focus on stuff from the last decade. The .NET API is excellent by and large.
That's because they started from Java.
Given enough time, they will wander into the land of incomprehensibility that users of traditional Microsoft API's are used to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Windows 7 is losing core applications and replacing them with an installer to download them...
Coming in Windows 8: repos.
Too bad no one in their right mind is going to leave tried and true LAMP and desktop OS that work. RMS, once again, was right, doubly so in this case, the user surrenders their software freedom and their data when they use Windows 7 in the M$ Vapor.
Of all the reasons to dislike Microsoft, this is not a good one.
It's not like there's going to be any market compulsion as on the desktop where they have to arrange to pay people to use MS Windows (the common argument here is that the fees paid by crapware installed on OEM preinstalls more than covers OS costs charged by Microsoft for the O/S).
Oh, and only an idiot writes stupid things like `M$'.
If you had half a clue, you would realize that the EVUL EVUL EVUL M$ had stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hreused Richard Stallman's only good idea as regards to an Emaacs style architecture but copied it so faithfully that they had reproduced all the same problems (see my historical posts here on Slashdot and journal entries for further documentation), or just fucking google for it.
How will you flame(stalk) me back, a man who refuses to ever do paid work on Microsoft Windows and whose primary workstation at work runs RHEL "Linux", not "GNU/Linux" or "Linux/GNU", and a man who has never owned a machine with a licensed copy of Microsoft anything (proudly Unix and later Linux at home since 1985).
Oh wait, I bought my wife a Microsoft Windows XP notebook in a fit of madness. She hated it because it crashed so much and I quickly had it replaced with a Macbook (which she loves and which sadly was not available at the time we got the Neo XP notebook).
You're an idiot twitter and if anything, I would suspect _you_ of being a Microsoft shill because to anyone with more than half a braincell (sadly as a blonde guy, that's the hand I was dealt), you just provoke the opposite reaction as to what you seem to be trying to promote.
I apologize to everyone except twitter. Mod this the flamebait that it is and move on.
Where'd you get one of those? Be careful with it; I hear they are very fragile (and if carefully protected from sunlight, it may eventually become one of us).
I wonder if the Azure site is hosted on Azure. If so, then the "internal server error" I just got is probably a sign of things to come...
Repos as in debian-like package management repositories? That would be well overdue. Somehow I think they'll never manage to do that well though.
This looks to me like more of a marketing announcement where they take a bunch of previously available product and put it under one particular brand. Yeah, there's a few more things in there but mostly that's glue.
-- Windows Azure, for service hosting and management and low-level scalable storage, computation, and networking. .Net Services, which are service-based implementations of .Net Framework concepts such as workflow. .Net Services previously was called BizTalk Services. "The services themselves, we found, were actually more identifiable to the .Net community than BizTalk," said Steve Martin, Microsoft senior product management director in the companyâ(TM)s Connected Systems Division.
-- Microsoft SQL Services, for database services and reporting.
-- Microsoft
-- Live Services, for sharing, storing, and synchronizing documents, photos, and files across PCs, phones, PC applications, and Web sites.
-- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud
So, they're taking BizTalk, Sharepoint, Live, a bunch of point features in SQL Server and a few other warmed over things and calling them "Azure". Whoopee. They've invented a brand. Wake me up when they have something new.