What is Windows Azure

Cloud Computing is no doubt the future of applications that we work with and develop today.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for all the web applications we see on the Internet, Enterprise. Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications and services on the internet in Microsoft data centers. i.e. On-Demand, the capacity can be increased, or based on Threshold triggers, capacity can be increased to meet-up the expected traffic with optimal performance.

e.g. For Bloggers: You can host your WordPress blogging app-service on the Cloud and capacity is Tuned dynamically. For Developers: You can run Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP, .NET applications on the cloud. 

So if you own a blog or belong to an enterprise that wants to run Applications and scale the capacity sky high, Azure is for you. On day one: your blog may be getting low traffic, you can subscribe to a low-end cloud service. On demand, with rise in traffic, capacity can be increased (on the fly) to scale upto a traffic of Billion hits per day, like Twitter gets.

So what all can be done with Windows Azure?

Features (as per Microsoft)

When is it Available, What is the Deal?

Microsoft will launch Azure as a production service on January 1st, and customers can avail it for free for 1 month. The Technical Preview, now underway, will continue through the end of the year.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, took the keynote stage on PDC 09, today. He introduced the world to Azure Services Platform a year ago, during PDC 08. Today, he added when to why, what and where about what Microsoft now calls the Windows Azure Platform.

Ozzie said that a few companies would take Azure into production starting today (November 18th 09). With that as introduction, Ozzie announced that Automatic, creator of open-source WordPress blogging system, would be one of those companies. From a marketing perspective, it was a stunning announcement, since Automatic uses open-source tools like Apache and MySQL.

The message: Azure isn’t just about Microsoft products or development tools.

I must say it was simply shocking, Microsoft promoting Open source, I Love it!

What do you think?