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 20, 2009 at 6:04 pm

{ 178 comments… read them below or add one }

Tichy November 18, 2009 at 8:08 am

One problem with joeuser.wordpress.com is the price, though. At least if you want your own domains, most services seem to cost at least 10$/month (for example also GitHub, Issue Tracker, email?, storage > 2GB, …). Using an individual provider for each service one might need quickly gets expensive. Atm it would be cheaper to deploy a single vServer with all the required apps.No idea how much Azure & Co will cost, though.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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erikstarck November 18, 2009 at 8:10 am

The App Store model extends to just about everything and everywhere. Is this what web 3.0 will be all about? An internet of many walled gardens? If so, is it really that bad?

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Luke November 18, 2009 at 8:12 am

Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve misattributed a quote addressed to @photomatt as one written by him.

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Jorge Escobar November 18, 2009 at 9:01 am

I didn’t attribute the comment to @photomatt. I just quoted @technosailor who was watching him on the #pdc09 event, where @photomatt presented the WordPress app.

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bad_user November 18, 2009 at 8:17 am

My impression is that WebPI is for developers … it installs on your computer the stuff you need for developing / running your application, with the bonus that you can also quickly install a prepackaged web app like Drupal.I’m sure it wouldn’t make any sense to make it available for Linux / Mac OS X since it’s a Windows complement.

The problem here is that the TFA is wrong … Microsoft hasn’t released an "iTunes Store for Web Apps". It’s just a convenient way to get your Windows Server up and running, or am I missing something?

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j_b_f November 18, 2009 at 8:33 am

I think he might mean "SimpleDB" where he says S3 and "SQL Azure" where he says SDS.

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stcredzero November 18, 2009 at 8:34 am

Interoperability will suffer! Interoperability and open standards are two of the lynchpins of the Internet.Ultimately, if a large group of users keeps to the interoperable philosophy, the large walled gardens will fall. (Witness AOL.)

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steveklabnik November 18, 2009 at 9:43 am

That’s kinda what I thought. The "OMG MSFT THIS IS CRAZY!!!1" was a bit much.It’s good to see people compete with Heroku and Engine Yard (and for more things than Ruby, as much as I love it.)

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bumblebird November 18, 2009 at 9:51 am

Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer. So I think I’ll give Azure/whatever a miss.

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irrelative November 18, 2009 at 9:55 am

"Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications."Wow, buzzword overload!

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gvb November 18, 2009 at 10:02 am

Yes, I originally had a parenthetical comment comment about it being locked-in because of PHBs, but deleted it because the comment was snide and detracted from the point.

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bayareaguy November 18, 2009 at 10:08 am

This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?I’m a heavy user of the DynamicPageList, SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, TeX Editor and Lua extensions and had never heard of Flooha before so I took a quick look. While it looks promising, I didn’t see any of those extensions available :-(

Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?

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bayareaguy November 18, 2009 at 10:08 am

This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?I’m a heavy user of the DynamicPageList, SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, TeX Editor and Lua extensions and had never heard of Flooha before so I took a quick look. While it looks promising, I didn’t see any of those extensions available :-(

Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?

CORRECTION: based on http://flooha.com/build/addon_details/3559 it does appear you support DynamicPageList. I must have overlooked that earlier.

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jungleg November 18, 2009 at 10:29 am

I want to clarify (and I have edited the post some) that this is all a forward-looking article. I am not saying that the WebPI is already working with Azure; but that knowing how Microsoft is a technology-leveler of sorts (specially for the enterprise) I could see the WebPI evolving into a point-and-click app installer once Azure is deployed, allowing developers to write packages that are cloud-aware to be listed on the apps gallery.

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jungleg November 18, 2009 at 10:32 am

Outlook is the most used enterprise application used written by Microsoft. Azure could potentially be the next Outlook, in terms of adoption and usage (and could be the next cash cow for MS).

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jungleg November 18, 2009 at 10:36 am

As I said above, I’m not saying there is a connection now, but if MS plays it right, there could be a connection.

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sunchild November 18, 2009 at 10:47 am

When Engine Yard and Heroku offer this kind of service, all you hear about from corporate IT is vulnerabilities in the VM layer and lack of security in the "cloud". But when Microsoft offers it, it’s the next big thing. So sad.

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steveklabnik November 18, 2009 at 10:53 am

Yeah.This is slightly off-topic, but I find it moderatly disconcerting that I’m a Rackspace customer and I didn’t even think to mention the Rakspace Cloud Sites. They’re also totally technology agnostic…

And they have good marketing! I wonder why my brain doesn’t think of them first.

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mattmaroon November 18, 2009 at 10:58 am

Correction: Outlook is to most people on Hacker News the most irritating … To most people who don’t read this site, its a tool that reliably does everything they need it to do.

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flooha November 18, 2009 at 10:59 am

This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server.

I didn’t see any of those extensions available :-(

You can upload any extension you want! The process is very simple. Here are instructions from our wiki: http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addo…

Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?

No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com

If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It’s easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.

This comment was originally posted on Hacker News

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jlees November 18, 2009 at 11:13 am

People announce stuff relating to technologies I don’t use at conventions I don’t go to all the time. A quick google suggests that it was more the concept of Azure that was announced, not its point-and-click accessibility (the WebPI). Even if I’m wrong on that, once again HN has confused me saying "I didn’t…" with "Nobody did…". Sigh.

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Hoff November 18, 2009 at 11:30 am

Which usually means the shark fins are starting to circle, regardless of whether the folks in the boat have noticed the mindshare leak.

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halo November 18, 2009 at 11:32 am

>Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer.You’re forgetting that it was competing with Lotus Notes.

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billybob November 18, 2009 at 11:35 am

Yeah, until they need to find an email from 2 months ago. Then they wish they had Gmail at work.

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wastedbrains November 18, 2009 at 12:13 pm

Amazon AWS really should have a ‘app store’ of pre configured EC2s with wordpress, drupal, etc.Online interface boots the EC2, makes sure it loaded, and links you to the admin interface, links to backedup s3 dumps, etc

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bumblebird November 18, 2009 at 12:15 pm

Apart from searching. Or anything else useful.

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coderdude November 18, 2009 at 12:47 pm

Are you guys kidding? Compared to what alternative is Outlook an "irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish?"That alternative definitely isn’t open source (like Evolution, which blows hard). It’s definitely not a Web app somewhere (ala Google). Outlook isn’t rubbish, by far, and y’all don’t know what you’re talking about. :)

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mattmaroon November 18, 2009 at 1:23 pm

I use it daily and love it. I switched from Gmail to Thunderbird to Outlook 2007 with Exchange and have never been happier.It has reasonable search, which I don’t need much anyway since it has hierarchical folders and great filtering. It has a preview pane, the lack of which makes Gmail unusable to me. Unlike Gmail the layout is intuitive and it doesn’t take me forever to remember where the spam folder is. Between Barracuda and Outlook’s spam filtering I get very little in my Inbox. And if I look in my Junk folder guess where 99% of the emails came from? They were sent to my Gmail account which auto-forwards to Exchange. Gmail’s spam filtering might be good in comparison to Hotmail but Barracuda (and probably many other third party boxes) blows it out of the water.

It works with Exchange 2007 so that my emails, contacts, tasks, and calendar events are constantly and instantly synced across the 3 PCs I use frequently and my phone. I can enter an address in a calendar event on Outlook, then seconds later on my phone tap it and have the location pop up in Google Maps. I can save a phone number from an email on my desktop and call it almost immediately after from my mobile. Any smart phone user can do these things.

I’d probably have a much different outlook on Outlook if I had to run the Exchange server, but I just pay some company $6/mo per mailbox to do that for me. There are dozens of such companies for small businesses. (We use Sherweb, and they rock.)

Oh and Outlook doesn’t make me disable Firebug :)

If you know people who email a lot, they’ll pretty much all tell you that you really can’t beat the Microsoft email stack. I’m small potatoes compared to the volume some of my friends do in a day, and they’ve all tried every email option available since its what they spend most of their time doing.

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Larissa November 18, 2009 at 2:02 pm

Child please.

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wmf November 18, 2009 at 2:29 pm

http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization” rel=”nofollow”>http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.js…http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization

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Locke1689 November 18, 2009 at 3:09 pm

Agreed — I didn’t think it was an "app store" it that sense, but it totally makes sense to make it cross platform. Django will run fine on ISS and I’m not sure a simple web interface and sftp is too much to ask for (so I could do updates from my macbook).Btw, as a VMM developer I would be very interested to know if Azure is built off the type-1 Microsoft Hyper-V.

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timtadh November 18, 2009 at 3:52 pm

You are probably right. We reviewed this paper about a month ago so i probably mixed up the names.

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JasonM80 November 18, 2009 at 3:52 pm

Thanks a lot for chiming in and clarifying this.Azure not being MSFT-stack specific is an interesting move. It certainly will open the platform up to many more applications than otherwise.

As for getting tokens, I found that it actually takes a lot longer than “a very, very short time.” For me, it was about just over a week and some other people have mentioned waiting much longer. Is there a way to speed up the process or at least get a realistic time estimate for a particular case?Thanks!

(I am contracted by M80, working with them and Microsoft to promote Windows Azure)

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timtadh November 18, 2009 at 3:53 pm

I definitely mean S3 when I say S3, take a look at the paper that I link to.

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Omri November 18, 2009 at 4:15 pm

There is already a company that provides Turn-key appliances for almost every popular framework, just run and it works fully configured to messing around with the small details kind.
I found out that testing web applications using their software is amazingly easy, and free since it’s all based on linux.
Django, drupal etc. just works , a refreshing change compared to installing it myself. i really don’t see the point of using something else (not to mention Microsoft tools ) or building anything myself. turnkeylinux.org

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leej November 18, 2009 at 4:37 pm

it is not just .net tech anymore. now with php, ruby and most weird JAVA! but i have two reserves how is library support for dynamic languages and how does overall performance compare to the ec2+s3.

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