‘nuff said about my lack of blogging over the last, well, few years.
If the truth be told, I am so jealous of Mick Horne's blog that I have been ashamed to put fingers to keyboard, But, I have moaned at so many people to get them to blog, I really have to step up myself.
Luckily, I am at PDC in LA this week and this is a great opportunity to start again as I might actually have something mildly interesting to say?
I am here with a few Conchango bods; the great Simon Evans, the inimitable HvR and the masculine Matt Mould. As you can see from the picture below, we are not in competition with The Chippendales.
Enough of the sex…This picture was taken just before Ray Ozzie announced the new windows platform in the sky, sorry Cloud, Windows Azure. Previously known as Reddog, this is a significant initiative and a big bet that there is a mayor market for utility and scale computing is a world outside of the enterprise.
I will not repeat the blurb here as i am sure it will already be well blogged about, but the key objectives are;
Scalable Hosting. Federated data centers and on demand horizontal scale.
Automated Services. Automatic management of release and upgrade. Managed by a magical thing called the Fabric Controller.
High availability. DR, Global deployment, replicated storage, partitioning…all baked into the platform and from an application perspective, for free!
and as you would expect, all deliverable with the rich developer experience you have come to expect with Visual studio, VS tools, Local testing (read Cloud Cassini ) .
Oh did I mention federated security and a secure service bus in the sky allowing for firewall sympathetic connectivity to your enterprise LOB applications.
There is a lot to digest here and time will tell if this really is the 5th generation of computing, but be very clear; this is a significant investment and although not betting the farm on this, Microsoft are stepping up once again and taking a pretty big punt.
Next episode. Hanging with ScottG, well almost.