Azure Writeups

These writeups do a good job explaining the components of Azure, although they still leave many questions annoyingly unanswered. There seem to be four components:

• Windows Azure: runs applications in an EC2-like manner. There seem to be two types of apps allowed (both .NET for now): "workers" which do background processing and "web" apps which serve requests. This immediately seems kind of restrictive, but it also gives Microsoft good hints about how to automatically scale up and manage these types of apps. I'd really like to see the APIs and development environment to better understand what can and can't be done with these two roles. I imagine some of the APIs are pretty neat.
• .NET Services: hosts web services for use in your own apps and in other peoples' apps.
• SQL Services: Azure's storage service, for now just a simple pseudo-relational database similar to Amazon SimpleDB. It will be interesting to see what else they add (data warehousing? something with fuller SQL?)
• Live Services: Mostly seem to be a way to tap into Microsoft's Live web properties as well as its desktop mesh technology for connecting devices. This section of the paper was hard to extract useful information from since it was vague and somewhat full of marketing speak. The impression I got though is something like Facebook Connect or Facebook Apps, which lets apps interact with users' data within some structured environment. This is a pretty good idea even though it's not entirely clear right now how well Live will do.

In general, the advantages of Azure seem to be higher-level API (with a corresponding disadvantage of less developer freedom than EC2) and better integration with tools. I don't doubt that for certain key classes of apps, Microsoft's team has done serious user studies and planning to figure out how to let businesses use the cloud. The interesting question however will be whether Azure will have the same level of third-party developer energy going into it as the open-source-powered EC2. Projects like Hadoop for example are already supporting integration with EC2; it's very hard to imagine such projects running on Azure because they bring in dependencies on other open-source software (Java, Linux). Microsoft does have some great technology groups internally, but will those always be able to keep up with the experience and development effort of the open-source ecosystem?