Windows Azure has just been announced at PDC 2008. And information is now available online from http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx.
Drilling into the features for developers there is a video interview with Steve Marx that outlines Azure from a developer perspective:
- His blog http://blog.smarx.com/default.aspx hosted on Windows Azure.
- Aim to use current skills and technology that they are used to. Built around .Net I.e.
- Use Visual Studio
- .Net 3.5
- IIS 7
- Windows Communication Foundation
- Only difference is that it runs on the cloud or Fabric of components.
- Client side local development experience to test before deployment
- Azure API's
- Debugging
- Ability to emulate Simulate scale via Visualised Compute.
- Synchronised state
- Azure storage available (Blobs, Tables)
- Deployment, VS.Net deploy package and configuration file to a web portal.
- Question about management:
- Framework will restart application is required
- Logging and metering
- Integration with Windows Live Alerts to send information about service
- Ability to deploy new versions seamlessly
- Ability to set metrics "e.g. Queue length, response time" to trigger scale out.
- Ability to scale out on demand if required (IIS and SQL Services).
- Currently in CTP.
- Programming Differences
- Horizontal Scale - Store state centralised so that it can be accessed by any machine in the virtual web farm
- e.g. Web Farm - Save shopping cart
- Using in blob or table helps eliminate bottlenecks of centralised SQL Server for persistence of state.
- Ability to create services that can be leveraged buy other users e.g. Email service gateway.
- Service Discovery, still determine plans about how create Market Place of services over the next Year e.g.
- Find Services
- What do they cost
- Ratings for services
- Ability to integrate services in the development environment
- Technology
- RESTful interface
- Manages & Unmanaged Code
- Can be used from Python, Ruby etc
- Does not have to be web form applications could just be a REST interface to a headless service.