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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.
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.
...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.
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.
You might not be interested in the cloud, but the cloud is interested in you.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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
Windows 7 is losing core applications and replacing them with an installer to download them...
Coming in Windows 8: repos.
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).
Well, then, it is a good thing you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
This offering from Microsoft isn't about a web based office suite or webmail, it is foundational web services that allow businesses and developers to build websites and services while offloading the heavy lifting (such as writing distributed systems or load balancing). The primitives Microsoft is offering are similar to those Amazon already has: storage, database, compute, queueing. In general, you don't access these through your browser.
This isn't some new AJAXy Web 2.0 website. "The Cloud" is about outsourcing the building blocks of software--database, storage, compute--to someone else and paying for exactly what you use. Instead of buying your own machines, managing the fleet, and building or buying scalable software, you pay for a service and someone else takes care of all of that for you.
It is like the transition to the electric grid. Instead of paying for a generator and diesel upfront, you just pay for what you use from the electric company, and benefit from their economies of scale. This is utility computing.
What's the security boundary between customers based on?
Leprechauns.