Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
In other words, just as you can write applications with rich functionality for the desktop, or software that works with a database or SharePoint sites, so too you ought to be able to – and can – do these on the cloud also.
That is, the Azure platform provides five major underlying frameworks that software developers can use. These are Live Services, SQL Services, .NET Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services.
Each framework exposes useful functionality and diminishes any notion of a constrained or inferior environment to the desktop.
Visual Studio (and other familiar development environments) will still be used for constructing software; there is no new platform to learn. New project types are added so that just as you can elect to construct a Windows form app or a Web app you can now build a cloud app.
This cloud app is uploaded to your Azure workspace and is then available to all you designate.
Gianpaolo Carraro demonstrated this, showing off such nifty features as a staging and production environment to aid with testing while leaving your working apps unharmed until you are ready to swap it for new code.
Gianpaolo’s demonstration also attempted to show the sheer ease in which multiple instances of an application – to service more concurrent visitors – could be catered for. A simple configuration parameter in the application’s XML-based configuration file is tweaked – and that’s that. The underlying Azure engine will appropriately scale and provision the Cloud infrastructure to cater for the number of instances you have required. Suddenly, with nary any effort on your part, your app has increased its capacity to service the wanting public.
And this, in a nutshell, is Azure. Personally, I find it interesting, I find it intriguing. I think there are still a wide range of questions around limiting access, pricing intentions, integration with existing line-of-business applications and other matters but I am sure these will be resolved or come to light over the coming months.
Obviously one significant ramification of cloud computing is that network connections become critical. If your ISP lets you down, or the undersea cables linking your country to Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure fails, or Microsoft’s link fails, or any of a number of problems on intermediate nodes, you are sunk.
Steve Ballmer didn’t allow himself to be drawn into any political commentary on broadband policies of government and telecommunication carriers but he did pronounce the world is moving to high speed cloud based computing and whoever can make this happen ought to be getting on to it. This statement met with widespread applause from the audience.
Be warned, it’s still pre-beta code and it’s also only for developers at this point: until there are meaningful apps available there’s nothing for end users or businesses.
One last thing: here’s my ugly mug with Gianpaolo and with Tim. Alas, Steve didn’t mingle but I do have a crummy pic from my position in the audience as he met our craving to hear him refrain “Developers, developers, developers.”
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David Bass
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