Ray Ozzie Has His Head In the Clouds
October 27, 2008 at 13:12 PM EDT
Microsoft wants in on cloud computing. At the company's Professional Developer's Conference today, Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure , its "internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers." Windows Azure will only be open as a technology preview to a very limited number of developers for now, and no pricing details have been revealed that I can find. But this is basically Microsoft's answer to Amazon's Web Services and cloud computing initiatives from other enterprise IT players, including everyone from IBM to RackSpace. Azure will run Windows servers and the .Net framework in the cloud as a hosted, pay-as-you go service. It will be part of what Microsoft is calling Live Services, and it will run Live apps, .Net apps, SQL server, Sharepoint servers, and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM. No wonder Amazon added support for Windows servers and SQL servers to EC2 just last week .