Manuvir Das: Introducing Windows Azure

Your video is in some way better than the PDC keynote. Manuvir explains Azure better (less marketing blabla).

This is similar to Amazon's EC2. And it looks very intresting. I'm looking forward to find out how small organisation can use this.

I know that WCF and WF are based on .NET 2.0. Is Azure (the cloud Kernel) written in managed code?

If not just how much or what sections of it are not managed?

azure is pretty heavy stuff man
ive got a question though, its been posted elsewhere but i havent gotten a clear awnser.

i know that all the services and stuff in the ctp is hosted by microsoft. that is cool and all but my managers wont feel save putting allthe company data in the hands of someone else, they want to have it running on our server (or server cluster)

will i, at some point in azures future, be able to install it on my cluster? to have my own little cloud on a bunch on machines that i control? (putting aside the agument wether this is "the point" or not, for my company and many others, esp. oss  buffs, thats a deal breaker)

The downloads don't seem to work.  The Save button goes to save and just vanishes.  The Install, appears to do the download, but the installer never starts.  {edit}  Was my IE7.  Closed all and restarted.

In my opinion the standout statement in that video went something like this, forgive me ill be paraphrasing  a bit... "... Azure will do for the cloud what windows did for the desktop ..."

So true.. well done to everyone that was involved in this project!

I really like how microsoft is setting up this Azure enviroment, where every application is compleatly scallable, and protected from any kind of hardware errors.  What I would like to see though is an extention of the "developer" version of azure (the one used by visual studio), so that we can take azure applications, and run them on our machines using our bandwith.  It would be a more "advanced" version as it requires a bit more provisioning, but it would all compleatly scallability from one single computer (like the developer version of azure that already exists), to an intranet behind a company firewall, and then out on the web hosted by someone like microsoft. 

There are several reasons for this "corporate" version of azure.  I know that you guys pay tons of money for your hardware and bandwith, and that cost will have to be passed on to us companies creating these services, while I can get much cheaper hardware and bandwith if i dont care as much about 24/7 service (not to mention all the support staff that you guys must have for this).  The second reason is that not all data can be stored out on the cloud.  Especialy very sensative data (credit card #'s, social security #'s, medical records, etc), where it just cant (for reasons of regulations or buiesness reasons) be hosted by someone else.

I dont care if azure takes over all the machines (ie no other OS running), and I would expect to pay a per machine (or cpu/core) cost (as well as a per machine cost for each of the machines that can use the extra services like sql services).  But having a uniform way of provisioning a group of 10-100 servers, along with automatic duplication and failover on my own servers would be really nice.

There is a official forum on msdn and a thread called "Who else could host Windows Azure".

And the microsoft employee say: "With the CTP release, services deployed to Windows Azure run on Microsoft datacenters only."

And as far as I know non of the competitors (amazon, google, ibm, ...) sell there software. But then, it's a CTP

There's no way if i want a x4 or x8 scale up (or even 4 or 8 cores) they're running 4 or 8 full virtual machines with a windows install on it.... Im guessing this is where the whole WinMin OS thing comes into play.

yeah i get that thats the case for the ctp im just wondering if will always be like that or if i'll be able to install a azure os of a bunch of computers and make my own cloud some time in the future

alot of buisnesses already have big datacenters and arent to keen on just abandoning those also, not everyone is willing to share computin power with others
maybe i have a bunch of super fast rigs and i want my cloud to only consist of those

i really hope microsoft will release azure as something you can install on your own machines imo they'd be foolish not to
(again, im talking about this ctp but the general future of azure)

also, off topic but still,
the c9 reply button doesnt work for me, it just sends me back to the first page of the thread :/

Great video. I think I have seen very few introductions to brand new technology done so well. I have embedded this video in my PDC Day 1 post on my blog at http://developershelf.blogspot.com/2008/10/pdc-2008-day-1.html

Good to see you think of simplicity from a devleoper's perspective.

Too bad you need Vista and Win 2008 Srv just to get going with the SDK.

Can't understand why a "platform independent" solution has this barrier...on the dev side at that?

sigh...

So, would it be possible to build a .NET/XNA-based MMORPG designed for deployment on Azure or are there limitations that would make this impractical?

Thank you very much Manuvir. You explained the architecture of this technology in detail and very clearly.

I am very much excited on this technology. I had registered in www.azure.com and I have installed azure SDK to work on some sample (ASP.NET Hello world sample) but whenever I try to create host service none of the services are availble there. I noticed the below message.

Register for Services*
*Due to pre-release CTP status, you may be temporarilyplaced on a waiting list for certain services.

Also I noticed that, under the "Account" section in the site, I need to put Resource Token ID and need to claim the token. But I haven't recieved any email with that information.

Any body know how I can get host services to work on some samples ?

You should be able to run the samples and build new applications entirely on your PDC/laptop with the SDK. Please use the forum at: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazure/threads/ if you get stuck or have questions. Thanks!

Pity the video doesn't play on either IE or Firefox ... and even when I tried to download the MP4 version I get "Error -2048: Couldn't open the file ManuvirDasCloudServices_ch9.mp4 because it is not a file that QuickTime understands" -- also doesn't play with VLC.

Guess there's a problem with this one ...

There is a nice blog you can follow info on Azure platform

http://www.azurejournal.com/">http://www.azurejournal.com

I finally got the video to work ... but don't pause it and walk away -- because you can't then restart the video. I had to refresh the page to start the video from scratch again ... *sigh*

I've just written an article on building applications from scratch for Windows Azure. Hope you will find it useful to get started: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Building-applications-for-Windows-Azure.aspx

Check out the following video for additional details on Windows Azure storage (Blob, Table, Queue) from PDC:
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES04/

And for detailed information about Windows Azure compute, check out the following video from PDC:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES02/

As a former Microsoftee it's terrific to see MSFT come up with a technology that will help developers in a huge (central) way.  Manuvir's explanation has reeled me in!

Paul Smietan