Ray Ozzie opened the Microsoft PDC ’08 this morning with a keynote speech, announcing Windows Azure, Microsoft’s “Windows in the cloud” (press release here). It is a new service based operating environment, which he described as a massive highly scalable service platform. What is being released today is just a fraction of what it will become. It will be Microsoft’s highest scalable system enabling people and companies to create services on the Web.
Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers operating within Microsoft’s global datacenter network. This provides developers with the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios.
Mary-Jo Foley offers a ‘guide for the perplexed‘.
Microsoft did not disclose pricing, licensing or timing details for Azure. The company is planning to release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of Azure to PDC attendees on October 27.
More details later.
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