Microsoft Azure is The New Outlook

by Jorge Escobar on November 17, 2009

I just received an email invitation to try out a new application. I get a lot of those these days, but this one was different.

It was from Microsoft.

microsoft-wpi

It piqued my interest. A Web Platform Installer? Microsoft doing PHP?

I went to the URL provided and I was blown away with the concept behind this application.

Basically Windows could potentially introduce point-and-click cloud computing for the masses in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications, once their Azure cloud service is launched.

According to my friend Roberto Bonini, Azure is just the beginning of a frontal attack for the Cloud Computing crown:

rbonini-cloud

The way I see this evolving is that basically you could launch a cloud-enabled version of the Web Platform Installer add an application from the gallery and launch it on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and that’s it. The application basically handles the database, frontend, and serving in a matter of minutes. Of course developers would need to modify their payloads to be cloud-aware, but this is not something crazy.

There is already an application gallery that you can see. Matt Mullenweg was quoted today that WordPress is one of these applications, so bloggers can start their self-hosted blog in minutes, and there are many more already listed, like SugarCRM and mojoPortal. Microsoft is inviting developers to submit their applications to potentially be run by millions of users.

Windows Azure won’t launch until January 1st, but Microsoft is working hard to position itself as the defacto provider of cloud computing for the masses. This is going to be the Microsoft of the future. You can tell they know this is their new business model: cloud applications.

Microsoft has found their new Outlook.

Author’s note: I have edited the article to express my ideas better in terms of where I am extrapolating and where this is an existing application. For the record, I am big fan of Open Source stack, and as a matter of fact this blog runs on EC2, and I have million hits applications currently running for commercial enterprises on the AWS environment.

Tagged as: azure, microsoft

8 Comments 100 Tweets 70 Comments

{ 4 trackbacks }

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November 18, 2009 at 6:42 am
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November 20, 2009 at 6:04 pm

{ 178 comments… read them below or add one }

Andre P. Siregar November 17, 2009 at 7:58 pm

When you compare Azure to Outlook, I thought you were going to trash it in the post :-D

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Jorge Escobar November 17, 2009 at 11:40 pm

Haha, no Andre, I actually meant it as this is the future of Microsoft. Thanks for visiting!

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Jorge Escobar November 17, 2009 at 11:09 pm

"This is going to be the Microsoft of the future. You can tell they know this is their new business model: cloud applications.Microsoft has found their new Outlook."

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Vezquex: God of FF November 17, 2009 at 11:25 pm

I seriously am having a hard time comprehending what exactly this product is. The article suggests that Microsoft has finally seen the light, figuring out what to really build that works with the web. I’m skeptical.

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Vezquex: God of FF November 17, 2009 at 11:25 pm

Damn, Microsoft. You scary!

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Vezquex: God of FF November 17, 2009 at 11:30 pm

Nice launch date right at the turn of the decade, though.

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Vezquex: God of FF November 17, 2009 at 11:30 pm

Nice launch date right at the turn of the decade.

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Vezquex: God of FF November 17, 2009 at 11:33 pm

Wait, is it like Google AppEngine?

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Jorge Escobar November 17, 2009 at 11:41 pm

No Vezquex, it’s more like the iPhone apps, but for web apps

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kevin November 17, 2009 at 11:52 pm

sorry to be a snob, but it’s “piqued,” not “picked” your interest.

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Jorge Escobar November 18, 2009 at 11:02 am

Thanks Kevin!

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bayareaguy November 18, 2009 at 12:00 am

This sounds perfect for custom MediaWikis.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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smhinsey November 18, 2009 at 12:10 am

I’ve been following WPI for awhile, but I’m missing the actual connection to Azure here. From my perspective as someone who has been working in the Windows cloud ecosystem, Azure is more of a platform as a service than an infrastructure as a service play — I’d love to hear how arbitrary apps a la WPI fit into that.

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bhousel November 18, 2009 at 12:18 am

I dunno about killer app – but the Web Platform installer is pretty sweet. Glad to see it’s finally coming out of beta.Scott Hanselman blogged about web platform / web application installers about a year ago: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstall…

I haven’t looked it at lately, it will be interesting to see how many of those apps they can integrate with Azure..

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eam November 18, 2009 at 12:25 am

Sounds promising. I’ll be sure to give it a try once I get the chance.

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JKS November 18, 2009 at 12:30 am

Totally incomprehensible.

Microsoft, if anything, has lazily veiled their contempt toward what’s made the web successful. Even their app gallery is branded “Windows ®”. And “app-tastic”!?

I’m sorry, but they’ve been laughing the whole last decade, and now they want us to take their web platform seriously. What a joke. I’m all for improving the web as a platform, but to have Microsoft heralding the “next big thing” is offensive.

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Michael Wales November 18, 2009 at 12:41 am

I’ve been playing with this for 6 months now and to be honest, I’m not that excited about it.

1) I hate downloading an installer to download an installer to install the application I am wanting. Microsoft seems to be headed in this direction with this product as well as the Express line of products.

2) Microsoft doesn’t add the granular control mechanisms required to run a profitable, scalable web application on their Azure platform.

3) You are still running your application on a Windows platform, which is inherently crippled. IIS didn’t even support mod_rewrite until version 7 which has just recently been released.

Case in point, Microsoft is trying to play catch-up because they see that Python, Ruby and PHP (as well as the rest of the open source world) is gaining a considerable share of the enterprise market. Microsoft doesn’t care about us, the average web developer, they only care about their enterprise profit margin. When the FOSS community finally started to gain ground they tackled the lowest barrier of entry, PHP, and created a downloader for an installer.

I’m not a Microsoft-hater, hell I’m the biggest Windows 7 fan-boy there is, but fact is fact. Microsoft is trying to recompete in a market that crept up on them and kicked them in the ass – and they are doing a poor job of it.

If you want a web-based application to perform well you either choose the FOSS stack (Apache, Python, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc) or you choose the enterprise stack (IIS, MS SQL, .NET). The two don’t intermingle very well and Microsoft’s first attempt at doing so is nothing more than a marketing ploy.

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natch November 18, 2009 at 12:41 am

So, what’s the catch, other than having to have annoying Microsoft naming conventions like ASP.NET show up in my field of vision?

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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mark_l_watson November 18, 2009 at 12:52 am

Interesting. Sort of like Heroku with "instant install", no admin. I don’t touch .Net with a 10 foot pole (yeah, letting my M$crosoft biases show), but this does look cool.

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hvasishth November 18, 2009 at 12:52 am

I have tried Azure and I have to say it is super cool

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timtadh November 18, 2009 at 1:05 am

So my graduate databases class recently took a look at several of these cloud computing environments, and Microsoft offering is clearly compelling both from an tool integration stand point and from the technical side.For instance Microsoft’s incremental innovation in their S3 like utility, called Simple Data Storage (SDS), is that SDS provides guarantees for Durability and Consistency, while Amazon really only guarantees Durability. There has been some work on implementing idempotent logs on top of S3, and SQS to provide similar guarantees but this is third party academic work see <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376645>; for an introduction.

While at first glance Microsofts innovation is an improvement however, there is the question of how SDS performs at scale. Providing consistency for such a system will incur some amount of overhead. Has anyone here used SDS to serve larges amount of data with frequent updates? I would be interested to know how it compares with S3.

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ordinaryman November 18, 2009 at 1:15 am

After seeing http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx, I feel sad that Google App Engine (GAE) still does not have a "click to install"Currently, there are two options for application developers in GAE

1. The code needs to handle segmentation of customer data based on login and decide on how to you bill customers for the resource usage.

2. Ask customers to create an application and make you a developer after which you have to manually deploy the application. Code need not have segmentation logic and resources can be purchased directly from Google.

Though my application http://crm.ifreetools.com supports both options, it could be better if there was a better marketplace allowing a "click to install", rather than the current marketplace which focusses on services..http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

and a GAE application gallery acting as just a directory…http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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ordinaryman November 18, 2009 at 1:15 am

After seeing http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx, I feel sad that Google App Engine (GAE) still does not have a "click to install"Currently, there are two options for application developers in GAE

1. The code needs to handle segmentation of customer data based on login and also arrive at billing strategy for the resource usage.

2. Ask customers to sign up for GAE, create an application and invite the developer; after which, the developer can manually deploy the application. Code need not have segmentation logic and resources can be purchased directly from Google.

Though my application http://crm.ifreetools.com supports both options, it could be better if there was a marketplace allowing a "click to install", rather than the current marketplace which focuses on services..http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

..and a GAE application gallery acting as just a directory…http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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ordinaryman November 18, 2009 at 1:15 am

After seeing http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx, I feel sad that Google App Engine (GAE) still does not have a "click to install"Currently, there are two options for application developers in GAE

1. The code needs to handle segmentation of customer data based on login and also arrive at billing strategy for the resource usage.

2. Ask customers to sign up for GAE, create an application and make you a developer; after which, the developer can manually deploy the application. Code need not have segmentation logic and resources can be purchased directly from Google.

Though my application http://crm.ifreetools.com supports both options, it could be better if there was a better marketplace allowing a "click to install", rather than the current marketplace which focusses on services..http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

..and a GAE application gallery acting as just a directory…http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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teej November 18, 2009 at 1:32 am

I appreciate the call for a comparison, but I think Microsoft’s solution and Amazon’s solution fit way different needs. The biggest S3 usages I have seen in production environments have been for large asset hosting on websites, not data storage for backends. We use S3 because it’s dev friendly, cheap enough, and doesn’t require talking to a sales person at Akamai.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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Alex Leverington November 18, 2009 at 1:39 am

The problem is, building web apps isn’t that easy. Nothing can automatically handle load balancing, scaling, etc. It only makes *initial* deployment for the user easy. The App store interface is a nice touch but it’s been done before (Channels anyone?) and MSFT will either sell out as usual or keep Azure behind the Windows-only curtain (as usual). Every aspect of this is Microsoft chasing other concepts. It paints a clear picture that Microsoft couldn’t do this alone and had to integrate PHP.

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sriramk November 18, 2009 at 1:45 am

I work for Windows Azure. I think the right equivalent to S3 is Windows Azure blob storage. I’m really not sure what you’re refering to by SDS. SDS used to refer to an older version of what is now called SQL Azure but the technology there has been changed dramatically.

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nearestneighbor November 18, 2009 at 2:15 am

MS has some interesting technologies, like F# & .NET, but I wonder if people trust MS to do the right thing on the server? (One braindead misfeature can screw up everything)

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