I work for Windows Azure. I'm going to try hard to not make this into a marketing thing. I want to clarify a couple of things from the blog post
- The web platform installer is really quite distinct from Windows Azure. The WebPI is a nice installer which gets all the right SDK+ tools installed to get you up and running with MSFT's web dev stack Windows Azure can run any code that runs on Windows Server (with caveats) and it just so happens that the webpi is a nice way to get something running.
- Windows Azure isnt really MSFT-stack specific (.NET/IIS) though that works real well. There was a bunch of content at PDC this year on how to run MySQL/memcached/php/python/RoR/whatever. Matt Mullenweg did a keynote demo running Wordpress on Azure for example.
- The blog post 'Microsoft is taking applications but in reality, you can just go and sign up and get a token in a very, very short time. After January, the platform billing kicks in so anyone can sign up anytime.
Interesting -- assuming that it's a true cloud compute environment (mostly application and language agnostic), is there a reason why the "installer" is Windows only? Is there a way to install and configure a compute node without using Windows?
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?
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.
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.
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)
