New weapons for the cloud computing battle

Microsoft's Windows Azure

Microsoft's flagship cloud product isn't a product, it's a service targeted at its development community: Windows Azure Platform.

What's great about Windows Azure is also its biggest drawback: It is integrated so tightly into Microsoft's existing Windows ecosystem that for those schooled in Visual Basic and .Net, it should be an absolute breeze. But some would say that also means there's a catch.

Microsoft saw its ascension to the top of the industry in the '80s and early to mid-'90s when it made it simple and profitable for ISVs to build applications for its Windows platform. When moving up the chain to network- and Internet-based computing, Microsoft moved its model to the .Net platform and continued to grow. Now, with the advent of cloud computing, Microsoft brings us Windows Azure.

Built on the foundation of Visual Basic and .Net, Red Hat executives, among others, say Microsoft has built this with a Windows "lock-in" for developers. To a large degree, that criticism is correct. For something as simple as integrating the Windows Azure development into your environment, Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio requires .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (Standard or above), Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1 or Visual Studio 2010 (Standard or above) or Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition.

To simply access the tools and infrastructure, we needed to install everything on an instance of Windows Server 2008 (we used Standard Edition, 32-bit.)

To our way of thinking, that's a lock-in. But not everybody minds a lock-in. Some would say Apple's strategy surrounding iPhone and iPad is to build a lock-in, and that hasn't hurt Apple. And in previous computing eras, lock-in certainly hasn't hurt Microsoft in a noticeable way.

So you've met the requirements to install the Azure tools, you're familiar with Microsoft's Visual Basic-based programming environment and you want to build cloud-based applications.

Azure isn't free. Under an SLA, users can pay 12 cents an hour for compute cloud infrastructure, 15 cents per GB stored per month, 1 cent per 10,000 storage transactions, among other costs. (Microsoft isn't charging for inbound data transfers during off-peak times through June 30.)

While not free, the cost is competitive with other cloud computing or cloud storage services.

Microsoft's top executives have made it clear to channel partners that every, single, solitary part of its product lineup--from Windows to SQL Server--will be ported over to the cloud, which means that it's going to have to take its development community with it, or try. Azure is a robust platform for those sticking with Microsoft environments and will be a big part of the Microsoft ecosystem's future.