Microsoft Announces Windows Azure, Cloud-Based OS 419
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."
It is NOT A NEW OS (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Frankly... (Score:3, Informative)
Cloud computing as defined by IEEE is where your data is permanently stored on a server somewhere on the internet and then cache it locally as needed on a computer, smartphone, etc.. If you are a larger company that hosts your own data centers and have control over your own network, there maybe some merit to this.
But for most consumers I think they are looking for something similar to Mobile Me or similar type application where you cache the item online temporarily (whether that be hours, days, weeks, whatever) to be synced and then stored on the various devices. You still control the data. It is synced and stored on multiple devices providing a measure of redundancy for your files.
That is exactly how we operate. Most of our files are still done on laptops in MS Word and then we upload to Google Docs when we need to share or edit a document or spreadsheet. But once we delete the document online, is it really gone? It is not important to what we do, but to others it maybe.
Re:Naming? (Score:2, Informative)
True. I used to use Azureus. Then it got bloated, turned into Vuze.. Now I use ktorrent and recommend my Windows friends use uTorrent.
Re:Not going anywhere (Score:5, Informative)
It'll take baby-steps and corrections along the way, but so far this is the first real attempt at it.
Wrong. No Microsoft paycheck for you.
Google, Sun, Alexa, Amazon, GoGrid, Skytap, 3tera, Apache Hadoop, 3Par -- these companies/projects have all been doing cloud computing -- some for as long as the last 5 years. Microsoft is the johnny-come-lately here.
Re:Not going anywhere (Score:2, Informative)
The examples you give are merely load-balancing servers which have been dubbed with cloud. If you look at the specs you'll see they use Microsoft & Linux servers.
OS != server
Re:Does anyone use this? (Score:4, Informative)
If Microsoft owns the desktop, browser, server, and data center, what's going to motivate them to follow standards?
Erm, you might have a point on the desktop and the browser. Both are shrinking share. Server and data center never was wholly owned. Though they did get some good sports inserted in there, not enough of them will ascend to senior management to make a difference in the long run. They totally owned the laptops for a while but they're losing it on the laptops as netbooks are taking a good chunk. They're losing a bit even on desktops - I hear they just lost all of Russian schools. That's a bite right there. We had a good laugh with their attempts at HPC, but those folks do their own ROI math don'tcha know and they never had a chance there.
Folks in phones haven't given them much thought since they so publicly cannibalized their first partner there, and phones look like the high volume platform for the next decade. They could OEM systems, but that's a short trip to the grave as the top 20 OEMs deprecate their brand overnight for the sake of their own survival.
In short, a declining share of a declining market doesn't look good for continued growth. Long term outlook: negative.
Re:Does anyone use this? (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, happy to help. Grab a VNC client (there are lots of free ones for every platform) and set up your computer as a VNC server. If you've got a Mac it's one box you have to check.
It's kinda slow, but I'm pretty sure it'll be faster than an OS written in Javascript, running inside a web browser. Also, your data stays your own and you don't have to be beholden to Microsoft to use it.
Re:Frankly... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Does anyone use this? (Score:3, Informative)
Just wait for next week's headline: Microsoft Trademarks a Colour!
It's been done by Cadbury for their purple logo [wikipedia.org] and BP for their green logo [wikipedia.org]. Also many other companies have trademarked a colour for their logos and some have actually sued people because they used the same colour in their own but different logos see Cadbury sues Darrell Lea [findarticles.com]. Of course trademarking a colour can also be a double edged sword and big companies have been sued by smaller ones successfully.
Re:Ok (Score:2, Informative)
My memory may be bad, but I cannot remember seeing one action from Microsoft that I classified as morally or ethically just. Neutral maybe, and loads and loads of immoral stuff for sure, but good behaviour...
Gates Foundation. Magellan Learning Suite. Microsoft "School of the Future" in Philadelphia...I could go on.