I guess that you all already read in the press or elsewhere about the new bomb Ray Ozzie had thrown to the keynotes hall in the PDC, declaring Microsoft’s new "operating system" – Microsoft Azure.
Azure is actually called "operating system" just because this is what Microsoft is used to call its products :-). In fact, this is a completely new beast – the move of Microsoft from selling the platform to owning & leasing it. At least at the first stage, Microsoft will not sell the new OS, but rather lease storage, bandwidth etc. on its own servers – what will put it as a competitor to companies like Rackspace, Godaddy, and, well, Google. In corridor talks I had, this was the most controversial aspect of the new move – Microsoft became such a great company because it had developed open systems (well, not open source :-)) and developed and echo-system – in contrast to the close approach of Apple computers. In the new move, Microsoft want to take the OS & tools alongside with the actual hosting & maintaining of the data – just as Google is doing with Google Apps. It is interesting to see if it will continue that way, or eventually sell the Azure as OS and bring along partners.
So far for business thoughts… On the technical side, Azure is a really exciting platform for easily hosting services, that brings "hosting" to a new level – from just storage to a complete set of enterprise-grade services.
In an "Azure Overview" talk I attended right after the keynotes, Munuvir Das describes that Azure to services is like OS to applications – it frees the developer for thinking of the ugly details of deployment and hosting. Indeed, the demonstration of a few clicks deployment of distributed application looks quite impressing. However, it is clear that Azure also requires the developer to learn a whole new set of tools and paradigms, just like VB programmers could not just "evolve" to VB.NET programmers…
Among other things, Azure presents yet another queuing (if you are not already confused enough between MSMQ and Message Broker). Azure queuing looks like the main paradigm Azure programmers will use, in order to allow the system to perform heavy background tasks and be a little more than ASP.NET++. One first observation from the code I saw (mainly in Steve Marx "developing your first Azure application" presentation) is that Azure queuing had taken a "light transactional" approach – you can "GetMessage" – which give you the message exclusively – and when you are done, you should explicitly delete the message from the queue. If you fail to do so, the message will return to the queue after a timeout. There are not full transactions or distributed transactions. I kinda like this approach actually. I should devote some time to play with Azure queuing and come with some more solid conclusions…
This is all for now – I am almost late for 2nd day keynotes – see you soon!
Yoel's Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) space 