Ray Ozzie announces Windows Azure

>> And so I'd like to announce a new service in the cloud - Windows Azure. applause Windows Azure is a new Window's offering at the web tier of computing. This represents a significant extension to our family of Windows computing platforms, from Windows Vista and Windows Mobile at the experience tier, Windows server at the enterprise tier, and now Windows Azure being our web tier offering which you might think of as Windows in the cloud. Windows Azure is our lowest level foundation for building and deploying a high scale service, providing core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage in the form of blobs, tables, and streams. And perhaps most importantly, an automated service management system - a fabric controller that handles provisioning, geodistribution, in the entire lifecycle of a cloud based service. You can think of Windows Azure as a new service based operating environment specifically targeted for this new cloud design point, striking the best possible balance between 2 seemingly opposing goals. First we felt it was critical for Windows developers to be able to utilize existing skills and existing code, for the most part writing code and developing software that leverages things, but you might already know. Most of you of course would expect to be able to use your existing tools and runtimes like Visual Studio and Dot Net framework. And of course, you can. But in developing for something that we would brand Windows, you'd also expect a fundamentally open environment for your innovation. You'd expect a world of tools, language, frame works, and run times; some from us, some from you, some from commercial developers, and some from a vibrant community on the web. And so being Windows, that's the type of familiar and developer friendly environment that we intend to foster and grow. But at the same time even with that familiarity, even in trying to create a familiar environment for developers, we need to help developers recognize that this cloud design point is something fundamentally new and that there are ways that Windows Azure needs to be different than the kind of server environment that you might be used to. Whether Windows, UNIX, Linux, or the Mac; most of today's systems and most of today's apps are deeply, deeply rooted in a scale up past. But the systems that we're building right now for cloud based computing, are setting the stage for the next 50 years of systems both outside and inside the enterprise. And so we really need to begin laying the groundwork with new patterns and practices, new types of storage, model based deployment, new ways of binding an app to the system, app models and app patterns designed fundamentally from the outset for a world of parallel computing, and for a world of horizontal scale.