
Microsoft's New Killer App - Raphael
http://jungleg.com/2009/11/17/microsoft-azure-is-the-new-outlook/
======
sriramk
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.

~~~
Locke1689
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?

~~~
bad_user
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?

~~~
Locke1689
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.

------
timtadh
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.

~~~
sriramk
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.

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

------
ordinaryman
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>

~~~
rbanffy
A GAE application marketplace would be a great idea.

Is anyone from Google googling this?

------
flooha
I have an interesting perspective on this since my startup, flooha.com is
extremely similar, but actually better in some ways IMHO.

First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a
web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the
application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC,
but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you
don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The
blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure.

Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web
server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like
username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and
use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server).
There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico,
Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We
will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server
and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps.

It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in
the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the
other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email,
backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can
install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though
most website will never need it.

Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like
WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps,
especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository
are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in
addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores,
private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or
MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain.

I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as
their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the
service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web
platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my
comments.

If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing
budget.

~~~
jacquesm
Flooha is cool & useful stuf people, go check it out!

------
smhinsey
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.

~~~
mbreese
Agreed. I can't tell how Azure fits in here... It looks like this just
installs the tools on your local machine (or I guess server). So, perhaps they
are taking the next (perhaps logical) step and assuming that you can use this
to install stuff on an Azure instance?

------
bhousel
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...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstallerOpenSourceWebAppsDeliveredAndInstalled.aspx)

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

------
erikstarck
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?

~~~
stcredzero
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.)

------
ErrantX
We sell some ASP.NET (dont get me started) software and this was a god send
when it appeared a little while ago. Before our setup procedure (we usually
let clients do it themselves due to them being paranoid about letting people
on their networks) was just complicated enough to require a phone walkthrough.
This makes it a breeze. Click XYZ, then install. Install our app. Slight cfg
tweaks. Win.

------
brown9-2
What in the world does this have to do with Outlook?

~~~
gvb
Nothing.

It is just an analogy. According to the article, what Outlook is for
Microsoft's application suite, Microsoft's Azure (or web platform installer
per another comment) will be for cloud computing.

~~~
bumblebird
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.

~~~
mattmaroon
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.

~~~
bumblebird
Apart from searching. Or anything else useful.

~~~
mattmaroon
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.

------
wastedbrains
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

~~~
wmf
[http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.js...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=171)

<http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization>

------
nearestneighbor
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)

~~~
dagw
Given that Microsoft has anywhere between 25-45% market share (depending on
where you get your numbers) on servers obviously someone is trusting them. And
it's not like the Unix world hasn't had its share of "braindead misfeatures"
over the years.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
steveklabnik
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.)

~~~
sunchild
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.

~~~
steveklabnik
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.

------
jlees
An idiotproof, point and click cloud solution is definitely what's needed for
cloud to go mainstream (i.e. Joe User thinks nothing of putting his wordpress
blog on the cloud). I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft, but kudos
to them if they get it right. AWS, GAE etc are still all too hard just to push
stuff out - I've tried explaining them to tech-savvy laypeople and had zero
luck so far.

~~~
nomoresecrets
"I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft"

Not even when they first announced it at PDC2008 a year ago?

~~~
colinplamondon
They had about eight and a half layers of marketing bullshit during the
presentation and on the website- if you squinted real hard while hopping up
and down on one foot with a tin foil hat in correct alignment, it looked like
something resembling a good solution to a real problem.

Now more information is coming out in an accessible way about what Azure
actually is, no hat alignment necessary.

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

------
irrelative
"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!

------
bediger
This smells like an MSFT PR hit. I bet this goes the way of ".NET" or
"HailStorm" or some other all-encompassing, vague-enough-to-impress-corporate-
types acronym-laden "vision".

------
bayareaguy
This sounds perfect for custom MediaWikis.

~~~
flooha
<shamelessplug>...until you have to install a lot of extensions, which you
normally have to do manually. This is the problem Flooha solves.
</shamelessplug>

~~~
bayareaguy
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.

~~~
flooha
_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...](http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addon)

 _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.

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

------
ivenkys
I am sorry i don't get it , how can a new "Killer App" be Windows only ? The
installer only works on Windows , what happens to the rest of us.

~~~
yxhuvud
Lets see, their previous killer apps also either required Windows, or WAS
Windows. I don't really see how being platform specific affects ability to be
a killer app.

Obviously depending on how a "killer app" is defined.

~~~
ivenkys
Platform specific does effect the ability to be a "killer app".

Ms Windows being a killer app was in a completely different time period. Any
app that has to have game changing ability has to be cross-platform or perhaps
run on the web. Anything else and its not a "killer app". It might get the
bills paid and be profitable but "killer app" it ain't.

~~~
richardw
The definition of a killer app is one where somebody will buy the platform
just to use your app. By its nature it makes you choose a platform.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application>

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

