Microsoft Interoperability and Cloud Computing

October 28, 2008

This week at our semi-regular Professional Developer’s Conference, several announcements have been made regarding Microsoft’s newest foray into cloud computing, Microsoft Azure.

From the announcement:

The Azure Services Platform has been built from the ground up with interoperability in mind. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple Internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and “plain old XML” (POX). This interoperability opens up opportunities to build new or enhanced applications using existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework, or with other developments environments such as Java, or Ruby.

I’d also encourage you to take a quick glimpse at my colleague Stephen McGibbon’s post, where he links to some great resources for additional information.

The last few months have been a blur of announcements regarding our decisive moves on interoperability. As I’ve said before, we do this because it makes good business sense. The movement towards a ubiquity of devices will require versatile ways to deliver computing services, especially through the cloud. Microsoft is now entering a market that other players like Amazon and IBM have tentatively been exploring recently.

Some people have been critical of this new evolution of Microsoft’s OS strategy, repeating tired, hackneyed old phrases about lock-in, and accusing us of not getting it. These types of empty statements are easily put to rest by doing a little research. I’d refer you to Sam Ramji’s post where he outlines some proof points that paint the real picture.

The fact is that we’ve been completely focused, under Sam’s leadership, on making sure that Microsoft platforms treat open source developers as first-class citizens, able to choose from a wide range of open source development tools and technologies, and “be able to access Azure services using a variety of common Internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.” We’re also working to deliver several proofs of concept to show how OSS developers can create apps that run as services and have access to services in the cloud. Some examples include:

• A developer using the Eclipse IDE can write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure
• Gallery, the leading PHP photo application, can access Windows Azure cloud storage
• A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.”

Microsoft is repeatedly demonstrating its commitment to a brave new world. Continue to look for us to forego tired old talking points in favor of fresh new actions.

Posted in Uncategorized, Interoperability, Microsoft