Windows Azure to Go Live in January
The Azure platform will have its first paying customers in February 2010.
Microsoft plans to transition its Windows Azure cloud computing platform from preview to full production capacity on 1st January next year. The service, currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), will remain no-cost throughout January; from February 1st it will start accumulating charges.
The CTP has thus far included three components: the Windows Azure platform itself, a scalable, manageable Windows environment allowing both .NET and native development, including support for CGI, PHP, and other Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies; SQL Azure, a replicated, fault-tolerate, high-performance version of SQL Server; and AppFabric (formerly known as .NET Services), a collection of web services providing reliable asynchronous communications, message queueing, and other glue infrastructure useful for interoperating with the cloud.
Further to these, Microsoft announced a new Azure service now included in the CTP. Codenamed "Dallas", the new service gives developers the ability to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure. The technology was showcased by PDC by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra demonstrated a career-finding application based on Department of Labor teaching data stored and catalogued by Dallas that allowed, for example, teachers to find which areas of the country needed more teachers.
The application was able to drill down within the dataset, for example to find out exactly what kind of special education teachers were required in a particular area. Behind the scenes, Dallas itself is built atop Windows Azure and SQL Azure.
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