Developers of
Microsoft Corp. software and services have been concentrating their efforts on the three screens and cloud as evidenced by numerous announcements at the Microsoft’s annual Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this week. The company heralded the expansion of its arsenal of developer tools with the availability of Windows Azure and SQL Azure, technologies that comprise Microsoft’s cloud services strategy.
“That vision recognizes the fact that most of the applications out there today are really rich, data-driven applications with that information residing either in corporate data centres or in hosted environments,” said Barnaby Jeans, audience marketing manager at Microsoft Canada, at a Toronto media briefing of the conference.
A major announcement was the commercial availability of Windows Azure, a platform that enables developers to build Web-based applications hosted on Microsoft data centres. The platform’s other component, called SQL Azure, is a service that provides relational data storage for the applications. “The key message behind both of these things is scalability, the redundancy, the high availability that’s available through those offerings,” Jeans said, adding that developers can try out the technology and roll out their applications on the Azure platform for free until February 1, 2010.
Sitemasher Corp., a cloud-based Web site development and management platform provider, has been working with Microsoft developers over the past year to deploy a version of Sitemasher on the Azure cloud that is set to launch in beta next week.
“Azure gives us a couple of pretty big things,” said Eric Dorgelo, vice-president of product development at the Vancouver-based company. “One, it gives us a hosting environment that is very elastic. It can scale up or down depending on the demands of our customers.… The other thing is reliability. It’s got a lot of built-in features for fault tolerance, so we get 99.9 per cent up time numbers that we can deliver to our customers.”
