Digital Collaboration Guide, a SharePoint Architect's view

Microsoft has finally announced their Windows Cloud strategy via the WinHEC PDC 2008 where Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie called it as Windows Azure. Ray noted that Windows Azure is going to be a scaled-out cloud operating system that runs on virtualizes servers in the new massive data centers of Microsoft’s.

Microsoft Azure is going to run Azure Services Platform where developers can develop applications scaling the cloud from beginning to run on Microsoft’s rented on-demand  infrastructure.

Starting January, Microsoft Azure will host a limited version of Office which would come to full scale in the future.

Windows Azure is going to be built from the ground up and it’s long term vision is going to be interoperable and open. In the early stages of the platform, Visual Studio and .NET is going to be the primary development framework and tool to be used; later on, it will add Ruby on Rails and Python and Eclipse development platform. Open source development tools will definitely be supported by Windows Azure such as HTTP, REST, WS-*, and the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub).

Azure Services Platform will also be home to SQL Services, Microsoft’s Live Services and .NET Services that will eventually create federated applications traversing firewalls and communicate across application and services. Both SharePoint Services and Dynamic CRM would be added as well.

Image source from Sys-con.