Microsoft News: Microsoft enter the Cloud space with Azure Cloud Computing
Following Oracle’s assertion that Oracle intends to make the Cloud ‘fully enterprise grade’ at December’s Cloud Expo, Microsoft have made their own move into the Cloud space.
Monday 1st February marked the official entrance of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud technology into the cloud computing market.
Azure Cloud technology has been in beta testing for the past year following an initial development period of more than two years. Customers and developers alike can now utilise the SQL Azure hosted database, developing and deploying on Windows’ Azure operating system.
As yet, relatively few of Microsoft’s own properties have been migrated to the Azure Cloud: Windows Hotmail, Exchange Online and Xbox Live are a few of the major Microsoft facilities that are yet to be moved.
However, according to a number of sources, ‘tens of thousands’ of services and applications are already running on Azure, spanning from small pilot apps to larger commercial investments.
In conjunction with a number of partners, Microsoft has been working hard to deliver availability of open source tools for Azure. Uptake by developers is expected to be gradual over the next few years.
Whilst Azure is currently often used as an ‘overflow’ capacity to be used on top of existing technology, a number of independent testing projects have deemed the Azure Cloud platform reliable.
Greater functionality has been promised for 2010, including:
- A ‘Virtual Machine Roles’ feature to provide administrator control of a Windows Server virtual machine
- Availability of SQL Server features such as reporting and analytics
- Live Services components
With the Azure Cloud, Microsoft has tried to provide coders with familiarity in terms of operating environment, middleware and development infrastructure for ‘physical’ or Cloud-based applications alike. It may take some time, but general thoughts are that, with Azure Cloud, Microsoft is capable of competing for a significant chunk of the Cloud IT spend.
