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.
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.