Microsoft

As Microsoft spells out the first service terms and pricing for its Azure development and hosting platform, ZDNet UK spoke to Mark Taylor, the company's director of developer and platform evangelism.

We quizzed Taylor about issues ranging from risk and resilience to private clouds and interoperability.

Microsoft's Mark Taylor

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

Q: When Azure becomes available in November, what will Microsoft be doing to convince people it is worth taking up?
Taylor: Since last November, we have been running our CTP [Community Technology Preview] program, which provides the ability to use Azure without paying for it. That will remain free until November when we go into commercial mode. Organizations can put applications up there and see how it goes. Many thousands worldwide are trying before they buy.

From November, the beauty of the pay-as-you-go model is that organizations can put up applications without having to make a substantial upfront commitment. As they get a better sense of their predicted volumes, they can move to a more formal arrangement.

Once the full Microsoft marketing muscle gets behind Azure to push uptake, what sort of provisions will you have in place to cope with surges in demand, if a service suddenly proves unexpectedly popular?
Taylor: The architecture we've built out so far has a vast amount of redundancy in it, and we're confident we can deliver against our service levels for the predicted volumes that we have come up with. We've got an aggressive program to continue to expand in terms of data centers and the capability within data centers.

A big chunk of the data center we have in Dublin looks like a loading dock from a supermarket. We have the ability to reverse containers in -- the power and the taps are there -- and they just become part of the data center. The ability to scale very rapidly without having to build new facilities has been a real core part of the data center strategy. The cost and agility we can take from that approach will serve us very well.

In your Azure service-level agreements (SLAs), you're offering credits against failure to meet certain uptime thresholds -- effectively credits to compensate for a customer's potential loss of business. How do think those guarantees match up to the risks that businesses are taking in moving to the cloud?
Taylor: If you have a failure, it depends where the failure is. We provide the platform, the storage, the connectivity. A failure within an application, for instance, would have a similar consequence if it was running in a traditional infrastructure.

The cloud industry is a new one. As we evolve, as we learn, as we understand -- and this is an industry-wide issue -- what the right kind of commercial arrangements are, then I'm quite sure our SLAs along with all the others will evolve to accommodate that.

This is a new industry and a new approach to IT, and we are all learning. I'd be amazed if we don't see an evolution in terms of resilience and geographic location of data.

In the same way, I imagine we'll continue to evolve the contractual offerings, service levels and pricing models that we're coming out with initially. Competition will always drive that, as will pragmatic experience.

What can you do to reassure people, especially when the link between the customer and Azure may not be in your hands?
Taylor: That's a very good point. The network between the cloud and the end user becomes a point of failure like everything else. What will happen -- we're seeing it now with organizations such as Akamai and Limelight with streaming -- with the increased dependency on public networks, we'll see the network operators step up as well. People will be building in a high degree of redundancy into their network provision, and that will become as important as everything else.

If you're entrusting your line of business to the cloud, you need to make sure not only the back end is as resilient and as scalable as you need, but equally that network resilience needs to be there as well. There will be an increase in the strength of service-level provisions of network operators as well.

What else can businesses do to ensure against cloud failures?
Taylor: One thing is to understand where the points of weakness or the points of concentration are and obviously, when you are architecting an application, to design as something that is going to be delivered by the cloud.

One of the aspects of our approach is that customers can use a programming model that is familiar to them in .Net, and the extensions that you can provide to make it Azure-aware are the thing to focus on.

Are private Azure clouds going to be feasible?
Taylor: One of the benefits of the cloud approach is that multi-tenancy provides the kinds of economies that you can deliver back to customers. If you go from that to a dedicated cloud, you get some technology advantages when it comes to scalability and provisioning, but you're not taking advantage of multi-tenancy.

"Private cloud" is one of those terms that is used a lot, but there isn't a standard definition for it. Virtualization from the server level upwards gives you a high degree of abstraction and privacy, and that's where the real economies come in.

But it depends on the level of abstraction you want to achieve. You can get right to the point where you've got your own data center running your own cloud. What you get there is the elasticity within the capacity you've got, but you do lose a lot of the economies because you still have to own all the infrastructure.

There's no doubt there will be a market for that kind of service, but it's really a question of where you want that abstraction point that creates your private cloud -- and you can have it in multiple places.

What is Microsoft doing to address the issue of interoperability between Azure and other cloud services and on-premise applications?
Taylor: What we've tried to do when it comes to the Azure service is that you architect applications in the same way as you would if you were just doing an in-house client/server application, for instance. When it comes to, say, SQL Azure, the database types and so on, the way you deal with the database is just the same as you would if it were in-house.

There is no doubt there will be a need to interoperate between different cloud services, and that is something we're fully committed to cooperating with. In the future, there will be the need to have the ability to, say, imbed a web service that is hosted on another cloud system.

The key question is whether there are new standards to be defined or whether the standards we have now are good enough, because what you're getting in the cloud is something that's very similar to what you would get with a standard approach. But either way, that's something that we're fully committed to participating in.

Do you have any suggestions for people who may be taking their first steps into the cloud and into Azure in particular?
Taylor: I would definitely suggest taking a fairly simple existing application that's targeting the .Net framework and just to put it up there. The work involved to move it to a cloud structure is fairly trivial for a competent programmer.

That experience is very useful for organizations, not just because of the experience of how it operates when it's in the cloud, but the whole way you get it there -- the various staging and testing.

One of our design goals with Azure is that you don't need to relearn too much, so you can use the languages, frameworks and databases that you're familiar with. The great thing right now is that it's free, and so the opportunity is there now for people to dabble with it and just get comfortable with it.

Toby Wolpe of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Microsoft's Bob Muglia announces Microsoft's Windows Azure plans at last year's professional developer conference. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced how it will charge for the service and what level of guarantees it will provide.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Microsoft on Tuesday announced how much it will charge companies that want to use its Windows Azure cloud computing service when it is released in final form this fall.

The software maker announced a variety of plans, including one that charges purely on consumption and another that offers discounted rates for those that agree to a six-month commitment.

With the launch of Azure, Microsoft finds itself in a new type of business, where it competes with the likes of Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com's Force.com.

The cloud operating system isn't launching in final form until Microsoft's November Professional Developer Conference, but a top executive had told CNET News that the pricing announcement would be made at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference, which is taking place in New Orleans. Microsoft first announced its Azure plans at last year's PDC and the product has been available as a free technology preview form since then.

On a pure consumption basis, Microsoft said it will charge 12 cents per hour for computing, 15 cents per gigabyte for storage and 10 cents per 10,000 storage transactions. For network bandwidth, the software maker is charging between 10 cents and 15 cents per gigabyte.

The discount plan, dubbed the "development accelerator" comes in two forms and offers a 15 percent to 30 percent discount off the consumption charges. It requires a six-month commitment, with overage charges billed at the regular rates. After six months, the pricing reverts to the standard Azure rates.

Microsoft also announced pricing for its SQL Azure database, charging $9.99 for the basic Web edition, including up to a 1GB relational database and $99.99 for the Business Edition, which includes up to a 10GB database.

The software maker said it would promise 99.95 percent reliability for its compute and connectivity and 99.9 percent for role instance and storage. Ultimately, though, Ray Ozzie has said that trust will play a big role in which company businesses are willing to choose to host their applications.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated the incorrect time for the Professional Developer Conference. It will take place November 17 to 19 in Los Angeles.

Microsoft appears poised to officially unveil a Web-based service that will let users store, share, and back up data from their mobile phones.

Provided, that is, that the phones run Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 phone operating system. And the service will be available as only a limited beta to start with.

Details of Microsoft's impending My Phone service slipped out inadvertently when the Web site went live ahead of its scheduled debut. The site appears to have been spotted first by Engadget Mobile, which also referred to the service as SkyBox.

Microsoft's My Phone service is intended to provide backup and other services for Windows Mobile 6 users.

According to the Microsoft My Phone site, the service will let users back up and restore the phone's data, access contact and scheduling information, and share photos. Users will get 200MB of free storage, but beware--a synchronization attempt that exceeds the limit will cut off any files beyond the 200MB mark.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that it has released an update to the developer kit for its Windows Azure cloud-based operating system.

The company said the updated tools fix bugs and speed performance, as well as add better integration with Visual Studio and other tweaks.

Microsoft unveiled Azure and offered up the first community technology preview version of its tools at the Professional Developers Conference in October.

"Microsoft will continue to release updates to the Windows Azure SDK based on feedback from developers," the company said in a statement.

In a December interview, server and tools unit President Bob Muglia said that developers are mostly kicking the tires on Azure right now, but said that some services would go into production later this year.

From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tue 10/28/2008 2:38 p.m.
Subject: A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution

During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It's a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It's a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It's a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment.

Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. "Cloud computing" that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive data centers is one example. Social-networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another.

Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HDTV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few.

What's missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn't bounded by device or location. Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible. Why can't we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs? Why isn't all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application? Why can't we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?

This week at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, we shared news with software developers about a new set of platform technologies that will help transcend these limits. Because you are a subscriber to Executive Emails from Microsoft, I wanted to share my thoughts about the impact that these technologies will have as developers begin to use them to create a new generation of experiences that extend uninterrupted from the desktop to the mobile phone, media player, car, and beyond-to places where we never thought information and communications would be available to us.

A new platform for cloud computing
At PDC, we announced the availability of an early preview release of a new technology called Windows Azure. Windows Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone. For the first time, we shared pre-beta code for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows 7, which is the next version of the Windows desktop operating system, will take advantage of software and hardware advances to help eliminate the boundaries between information, people, and devices.

We also previewed Office Web applications, which are light-weight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are designed to be accessed through a browser. Office Web applications will be part of the next version of Office and will enable people to view, edit, and share information and collaborate on documents on the desktop, the phone, and in a Web browser in a way that is consistent and familiar.

Windows Azure is part of the Azure Services Platform, a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services that reside in Microsoft's network of data centers. Using the Azure Services Platform, developers will be able to build applications that run in the cloud and extend existing applications to take advantage of cloud-based capabilities. The Azure Services Platform provides the foundation for business and consumer applications that deliver a consistent way for people to store and share information easily and securely in the cloud, and access it on any device from any location.

Windows Azure is not software that companies will run on their own servers. It's something new: a service that runs in Microsoft's growing network of datacenters and provides the platform that helps companies respond to the realities of today's business environment, and tomorrow's. Windows Azure technologies are already finding their way into products such as Windows Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling organizations and Microsoft partners to create their own cloud infrastructure.

Windows Azure will enable organizations to respond to realities such as the need to use the Web to provide customers with comprehensive information and to interact with an audience that has the potential to expand exponentially overnight; to integrate operations with partners--and sometimes even competitors--to meet customer needs; to add new capabilities quickly to respond to new opportunities; and to enable employees to work efficiently and effectively no matter where they are. These realities apply not just to businesses, but to organizations of all kinds: schools, governments, community groups, and more.

Traditional approaches to building technology infrastructure and delivering computing capabilities make it difficult and expensive to adjust to these realities. You need systems with enough capacity to meet the highest possible demand-capacity that includes servers and buildings to house them, the power to run them, and the people to manage them. You have to spread that capacity across locations so there's a backup if one part fails. You have to solve issues like access for different types of users and compliance with tax regulations in all countries where your customers reside.

Designed specifically to meet the global scale that today's organizations require, the Azure Services Platform will provide fundamentally new ways to deploy services and capabilities. It gives businesses the option to take advantage of the capacity available in the cloud as it is needed, reducing the need to make large upfront investments in infrastructure simply to be ready when demand spikes. It will enable developers to create applications that run in the cloud and provide the features, information, and interactivity that employees, partners, and customers expect-no matter how many of them there are, where they are in the world, or what device they have at hand.

Software plus services and the power of choice
The Azure Services Platform reflects our belief that choice is critical for developers, companies, and consumers. It is also based on our belief that the key to delivering value today and in the future lies in combining the best aspects of software running on PCs, servers, and devices with the best aspects of services running on the Web--an approach we call "software plus services."

Our software plus services approach lets people take full advantage of the incredible power of today's devices. While there are undeniable benefits to being able to tap into the wealth of information and services that can be accessed over the Web through a browser, the interactive experiences that people expect on their PC, mobile phone, and media player depend on sophisticated software running on powerful processors.

The richness of these experiences will only increase as multicore processors expand the computing capabilities of our devices and new programming languages open the door to a new generation of applications that let us use more natural ways to interact with digital technology such as voice, touch, and gestures.

Software plus services also recognizes that for most companies, the ideal way to build IT infrastructure is to find the right balance of applications that are run and managed within the organization and applications that are run and managed in the cloud.

This balance varies by company. A financial services company may choose to maintain customer records within its own datacenter to provide the extra layers of protection that it feels are needed to safeguard the privacy of personal information. It may outsource IT systems that provide basic capabilities such as e-mail.

This balance will change over time within an organization, as well. A company may run its own online transaction system most of the year, but outsource for added capacity to meet extra demand during the holiday season. With software plus services, an organization can move applications back and forth between its own servers and the cloud quickly and smoothly.

Today, companies around the world are implementing Microsoft technologies to take advantage of the best combination of on-premise software and cloud-based services. Using Microsoft Online Services, businesses including Coca-Cola Enterprises, Blockbuster, and Energizer access and manage Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, and Live Meeting over the Web through a single, secure infrastructure. In addition, 1 million people rely on Office Live Workspace for sharing and collaborating with friends, family, and colleagues.

Expanding the definition of personal computing
Ultimately, the reason to create a cloud services platform is to continue to enhance the value that computing delivers, whether it's by improving productivity, making it easier to communicate with colleagues, or simplifying the way we access information and respond to changing business conditions.

In the world of software plus services and cloud computing, this means extending the definition of personal computing beyond the PC to include the Web and an ever-growing array of devices. Our goal is to make the combination of PCs, mobile devices, and the Web something that is significantly than more the sum of its parts.

The starting point is to recognize the unique value of each part. The value of the PC lies in its computing power, its storage capacity, and its ability to help us be more productive and create and consume rich and complex documents and content.

For the Web, it's the ability to bring together people, information, and services so we can connect, communicate, share, and transact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

With the mobile phone and other devices, it's the ability to take action spontaneously-to make a call, take a picture, or send a text message in the flow of our activities.

Through Live Mesh-a service from Microsoft that we announced earlier this year and about which we shared new information week--we're beginning to bridge the PC, phone, and Web and create this next generation of connected experiences. Built on the Azure Services Platform, Live Mesh enables you to use programs and information stored on your work computer from your home PC, and vice versa. With Live Mesh, you can share folders and ensure that the information is automatically synchronized across your devices.

Live Mesh hints at how our lives will be transformed as the barriers between devices disappear and the option to connect instantly to people, devices, programs, and information becomes a reality.

We're not quite there yet. Today, the Azure Services Platform is available only as a limited technology preview release. But as developers begin to combine the capabilities of this new platform with the amazing ongoing hardware and software innovations that we are seeing from companies across the industry, it will bring us significantly closer to the time when information, communication, and computing flows along with us seamlessly as we move through our day-to-day activities.

You can learn more about these technologies and the progress we are making by visiting the Microsoft Software + Services Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/.

I look forward to sharing more information with you about these new technologies in the near future.

Steve Ballmer

LOS ANGELES--Analysts and enthusiasts offered largely positive reaction to Microsoft's announcement of Windows Azure on Monday, impressed at the scale of Microsoft's bet on the cloud.

"I think it is very ambitious, extremely ambitious," said Gartner analyst David Smith. He noted that Microsoft is trying to span a broad range of audiences, from enterprise to consumer, and a broad range of devices.

That very ambition also means that it will take a while before Azure is ready for prime time, Smith said. Still, he was impressed at Microsoft's overall approach. "I think it's a very visionary, pragmatic idea."

In announcing Windows Azure, Microsoft said it was releasing a community technology preview of the effort. Developers can build applications and host them on Microsoft's servers for free, though the company will start charging once it has nailed down the features and made sure everything is ready for business applications.

A common set of tools can be used for developing applications for traditional Windows as well as for Windows Azure, according to Microsoft.

The economic downturn could serve to drive adoption within companies looking to cut costs, said Robert McLaws, chief blogger at Windows-now.com.

"Why pay for your own data center and staff when you can move it to Microsoft? Let Microsoft do the investment for you," he said. "It provides an interesting opportunity for start ups who are looking to build apps efficiently and to test ideas."

For Microsoft, Windows Azure is nothing less than a make-or-break move, said Jonathan Yarmis, vice president for disruptive technologies at AMR Research.

"I think they've said we have no choice but to succeed at this. To leave it to Google or Amazon or others to define the pace and characteristics of the platform would be very bad for Microsoft's long-term and even near-term prospects," he said. Microsoft's thinking would have to be: "We have to do this or we cease to be interesting as a company."

Microsoft faces a well-established Amazon hosted services market and a popular development platforms for the iPhone and Google apps.

"The start-up guys love what Amazon's doing. They don't need millions of dollars to buy infrastructure. Now you click a button to provision some servers and bang, you've got a solution," Yarmis said. "Amazon has offered the developers a really easy way to quickly deploy potentially massive-scale applications."

Microsoft is being purposely vague on the schedule for the services so as to attract and retain developer support, he said.

If Microsoft were to lose the developer community to a platform that's not in its control, that would mark a long slide into irrelevance, so they've got to win the developers,Yarmis said.

"Let's not underestimate what they're trying to do here...perhaps the most complex programming undertaking ever conceived. Given their track record, (do) we have to at least say is there a scenario where they crash and burn here? Yeah there is," he said. "But if they can deliver in reasonable time frames, can anyone touch them?"

Ina Fried of CNET News contributed to this report.

Ray Ozzie speaking to the PDC crowd at the beginning of his keynote address.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

At PDC 2008, Ray Ozzie and company on Monday morning talked up Windows Azure, Redmond's new cloud computing effort. Here's how the details unfolded in this live blog of his keynote address. Click here for a recap of the news from the event or here to see all our Professional Developers Conference coverage.

10:12 a.m. PDT: Microsoft didn't go into too many details on how it will charge for Azure, saying it will be free during the preview period. Final pricing, "will be competitive with the marketplace" Ozzie said. Keynote ending now.

Microsoft's Dave Thompson says all of the company's enterprise software will be offered as an online service over time.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

9:55 a.m. PDT: Microsoft's Dave Thompson is now talking about how Microsoft itself will offer business software that runs over the Internet. Microsoft currently offers its CRM and Exchange software as a hosted option, but that's just the beginning, Thompson said. Over time, "all our enterprise software will be delivered as an online service as an option," Thompson said.

But Thompson stressed that most companies will want a mix of software that runs both on-premise and in outside data centers. The key is to be able to offer both options with no difference to the end user, something that Microsoft has been betting on.

9:45 a.m. PDT: Muglia is demoing how a company will be able to monitor their Azure services using an add-on to Microsoft's System Center management tool, code-named "Atlanta."

Screenshot of the Bluehoo.com dashboard for monitoring service performance.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

9:43 a.m. PDT: Check out the Azure Web site. Press release is also live here.

9:35 a.m. PDT: Muglia talks about SQL Services--a version of Microsoft's SQL Server database that runs on top of Azure. (Microsoft talked about this at its spring Mix conference, referring to it then as SQL Server Data Services)

Server and Tools senior VP Bob Muglia talks about the benefits to businesses of Windows Azure.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

9:30 a.m. PDT: Now Server and Tools senior VP Bob Muglia is talking about how Azure applies to businesses. He's highlighting how the core requirements of businesses don't change just because applications are moving from a company's own data center into Microsoft's centers. Businesses still need things like interoperability, security, compliance and management, Muglia said.

9:20 a.m. PDT: A third-party developer is talking about one of the first Azure services, something called BlueHoo that uses Bluetooth to create a sort of social network of people that are in close physical proximity.

Screenshot of Bluehoo.com mobile social networking app built on Windows Azure.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Each person is represented by a cute little bug called a "hoo" that represents a person with an active Bluetooth connection. Until they are signed up for the service, their "hoo" is gray. Once they sign up, they can enter profile information and make their character come to life.

At that point your hoo turns pink or blue, depending on your gender," BlueHoo's creator Jonathan Greensted said. (Too bad there's not a purple option).

9:15 a.m. PDT: Don't think I've forgotten about you, dear readers. It's just that the talk has turned rather geeky, with a demo of how to build a cloud application.

Microsoft's Amitabh Srivastava goes over technical details of Azure.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

9:05 a.m. PDT: Now Amitabh Srivastava is talking more about the technical details of Azure.

Each processor in Microsoft's data center is running its own hypervisor, he said. At the heart of Windows Azure is a "fabric controller" which manages an Azure service throughout its life cycle.

"We have built a platform to allow you to build your killer apps," he said.

8:57 a.m. PDT: Ozzie said that Azure won't run on a company's own servers. "Rather it's a service running on a vast number of machines housed in Microsoft's own data centers."

Slide showing some of the services Microsoft plans to offer on top of Windows Azure.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Azure is being released now as a technology preview with a subset of what Microsoft eventually hopes it to be.

Ozzie promises that developing for Windows Azure will build on what developers know, but he also talks about a new storage model as well as a system designed for "scale out" rather than "scale up"

"There are ways that Windows Azure needs to be different," Ozzie said.

8:54 a.m. PDT: Ozzie announces "Windows Azure"--what had been called Windows Cloud.

"Windows Azure is a new Windows offering at the Web tier of computing... what you might think of as Windows in the cloud."

8:45 a.m. PDT: Companies have been doing this, building robust Web sites and trying to build all this capacity with their existing IT infrastructure.

"Doing this is extremely tough," Ozzie said.

While internal needs are roughly constant, Web demand fluctuates considerably, meaning companies need to build to peak demand, resulting in excess capacity. The need for redundancy means companies have to build not just one massive data center, but multiple ones.

8:40 a.m. PDT: Ozzie promises that between now and tomorrow, developers will hear the whole strategy from software to services--and developers will get their hands on all the new stuff as well.

Ozzie's shifting to the strategy, noting that how today most of a company's computing resources are devoted toward building things used by a company's own employees. That's shifting to where businesses are expected to have equally rich tools for customers and partners.

He dubbed this the "externalization of IT."

8:37 a.m. PDT: Ray Ozzie takes the stage, thanks the crowd, and tells them how good it is to finally be able to talk "end to end" about what the company has been working on the last couple of years.

"It's a transformation of our software and a transformation of our strategy," Ozzie said.

8:30 a.m. PDT: Keynote just getting ready to start.

LOS ANGELES--Microsoft on Monday announced a version of Windows that runs over the Internet from inside Microsoft's own data centers.

Dubbed Windows Azure, it's less a replacement for the operating system that runs on one's own PC than it is an alternative for developers, intended to let them write programs that live inside Microsoft's data centers as opposed to on the servers of a given business.

"It's a transformation of our software and a transformation of our strategy," said Ray Ozzie, a computing industry pioneer who now serves as Microsoft's chief software architect. (For a play-by-play account of Ozzie's speech, see "PDC 2008: Windows Azure live blog.")

Ray Ozzie delivers his keynote address at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Microsoft first outlined a shift to "Live Services" at an event in San Francisco in 2005. The company has released a few things piecemeal, such as Live Mesh, but Monday's announcement marked the first real discussion of how Microsoft's disparate Internet strategies fit together.

The announcements come at the start of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference here. On Tuesday, Microsoft plans to go into more detail on Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, due out by about January 2010.

With the launch of Azure, Microsoft will find itself in competition with other providers of Internet storage and computing services including Amazon, Salesforce.com, and Rackspace.

Ozzie said he was tipping his cap to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for innovating the hosted computing model. Amazon "established a base-level design pattern, architecture models, and business models that we'll all learn from," he said.

Microsoft is making Windows Azure in preview form to developers, with a limited subset of the features that it plans to have in the product before its final release.

There weren't many details on how Microsoft will charge for Azure, saying it will be free during the preview period. Final pricing, Ozzie said, "will be competitive with the marketplace."

The company itself plans to offer businesses the option of running over the Internet the kinds of software that have traditionally run on a company's own servers. Microsoft already sells its Exchange corporate e-mail software in this way, but that is just the beginning, said Microsoft vice president Dave Thompson.

"All our enterprise software will be delivered as an online service as an option," Thompson said.

CNET News' Elinor Mills contributed to this report.

Server and Tools senior VP Bob Muglia talks about the benefits to businesses of Windows Azure.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Microsoft's cloud computing team discusses how a common set of tools can be used for developing applications for traditional Windows as well as for Windows Azure.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Microsoft's Dave Thompson tells attendees at the Professional Developer Conference that all of the company's enterprise software will be offered as an online service over time.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

One of the biggest challenges in business software, whether it lives inside a company or is part of a hosted service, is making sure that only properly authorized employees have access to the data and applications. Microsoft discusses how its Federated Identity platform will work with the new hosted services.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi/CNET News)

Amazon said on Wednesday that it plans to offer its cloud computing customers the option of running Microsoft's Windows Server operating system as well as its SQL Server database.

Starting sometime this fall, Amazon said that customers of its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service will be able to run Windows, in addition to the Unix-based options currently available. Amazon is currently conducting a private beta test of the new Microsoft-based options.

"The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability," Amazon said in a blog posting. "Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform."

The company said that EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server will be useful for running ASP.NET Web sites, media transcoding and other Windows-based applications.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is expected to talk more about the ability to write applications directly to its Live Mesh service at its Professional Developers Conference, which takes place at the end of this month.