PDC 2009 Day 1: Cloud: The Next Generation
In the second PDC keynote, Bob Muglia, President of Server Applications & Tools, spoke of the Cloud Application Model as the next widespread and accepted software model:
- Mainframe.
- Client-Server.
- Web.
- SOA.
- Cloud Computing.
According to Bob’s vision, cloud computing would be successful as it would enable some very complex scenarios such as scaling out, failure resiliency and many more which are hard to deal with today.
Several announcements were made during the session, and these are highlighted below. Without a doubt, the most exciting announcement on my part is Microoft’s AppFabric, which is also described below.
The Amazing Azure Demo
Don Box and Chris Anderson gave an amazing demo of developing a CGI script in C language and deploying it to Windows Azure. They also showed how easy it is to use TDS, T-SQL and transactions in SQL Azure, directly from the standard desktop applications. The amazing part is how the development environment stays just like all of you know it for “regular” application development (DB management, file system, programming languages etc.) and only the deployment is performed to the cloud. This is definitely a big step towards easily developing cloud applications.
Windows Azure Project “Sydney”
It was announced that next year Microsoft will go into Project “Sydney” which is a project aimed at allowing software developers to connect their own server applications together with the Windows Azure environment to allow developing applications which utilize both environments simultaneously in as easy as possible manner.
Microsoft’s AppFabric
An exciting announcement for my part is “Microsoft’s AppFabric” which is released as beta for Windows Server 2008 starting today and for Windows Azure during the next year. AppFabric is an application host which replaces IIS for easily hosting, deploying and managing WCF services, WF services and others which also handles scaling out scenarios, managing long-running WF applications and much more. I wonder how this relates to project “Dublin”… This is definitely a beta I would like to get my hands on as quickly as possible!
The Bottom Line
In continuance from Ray Ozzie’s keynote, Microsoft is strongly pushing towards a cloud computation model with Windows Azure and other supporting tools, and after the first two keynotes it sure seems impressive!
