Win Azure supports non-MS languages

BANGALORE, INDIA: In an interview with Pratima Harigunani from Cybermedia News, Amitabh Srivastava, senior VP, Windows Azure, Microsoft shared his views on Microsoft's Windows Azure.

Excerpts:

CIOL: Whats the status of Microsofts strategy in the cloud market?

Amitabh Srivastava: Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for Azure Services Platform.

Azure provides developers with on-demand computing and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. It is currently in Community Technology Preview, and commercial availability is likely at the end of 2009.

CIOL: But is the current limelight for cloud a right time to accentuate portfolio and strategy around it?

AS: Right now, hype has overtaken reality. Cloud, is a massive geographical distribution computing mechanism made available as a utility service. We are among the first ones to build an operating system for it with Azure.

It allows for better efficiency on hardware, drives costs down, takes the complexity away (unlike our competition). A good operating system is crucial to realize the real worth of clouds and manage it better. Automating various elementsinstead of letting it go the manual waybrings opex and capex down and reduces complexity. Thats what we are trying to offer.

CIOL: In terms of developments on Open Cloud Manifesto, what is Microsofts standpoint now?

AS: We are very interested in an open dialog and figuring out clearly how cloud works. But its important that all stakeholders, be it users or developers, are involved. It should be a publicly open forum. But it is very important to understand what customers want.

One cannot just standardize without it and then push it across. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. It supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

CIOL: Whats the progress in terms of enterprise-readiness of cloud products?

AS: A customer wants costs to come down, and wants agility along with no hassles on security, compliance, etc, when he/she opts for a cloud product. Then there are SLAs ranging from normal to critical, depending on various business requirements. We have a large enterprise business. And the readiness would be evolutionary.

Some workloads would move on clouds, some will stay. Issues and practical areas of concern will start emerging. It would be a stage-wise approach. As of now, with Azure, customers can add web service capabilities to existing packaged applications. They can build, modify, and distribute applications to the web with minimal on-premises resources.