For many years, technology experts forecast that the future of computing is in thin client computing; a large powerful central computer running operating systems and applications while out desktop PC are reduced to mere terminals that only send requests to the central computer for everything we needs, similar to the IBM AS400 model. Alas, reality cannot be more different as Amazon and Google demonstrated with the success of their Internet based software using the so called cloud computing.
Microsoft is playing catch up, but they seem determined to catch up fast, when at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie as announce their own cloud computing platform called Windows Azure. Azure platform will allows developers to create web applications using Microsoft development tools and deploy them across Microsoft’s data centers. Some of the highlights of Windows Azure features follows:
- Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications.
- Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.
- Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises.
- Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
- Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
- Reduce the effort and costs of IT management
- Option to run Azure on your own computer or Microsoft data centres.
Amazon was credited with the development of the cloud computing platform, with huge data centres processing millions of transactions from Amazon ecommerce sites around the world, Amazon basically sell off its spare capacity on it servers to a range of customers ranging from small application developers to huge organisations.
