Expert to Expert: Amitabh Srivastava - Windows Azure and Cloud Computing

Posted By: Charles | Apr 14th @ 8:51 AM | 39,273 Views | 12 Comments
You first learned about Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform at PDC08. Remember that? Yeah. It's been a while since we first unveiled our cloud computing offering. Now that the hysteria has died down, we thought it wise to go learn the details behind and inside Azure. Who better for this next iteration of Expert of Expert than Windows Azure VP Amitabh Srivastava? Exactly.

Amitabh is a computer scientist turned VP. Lucky for us, he chose the Azure project (formerly known as Red Dog) to put his IQ to work. He built a great team including the venerable and mysterious genius David Cutler (what did David build for Azure, anyway? Tune in...). Much brain power followed the trail to Azure clad in red sneakers with distributed visions of cloud computing in their heads. What would they make? How will it evolve?  

What is Azure, exactly? Why are we (Microsoft) doing this? What does cloud computing really mean, anyway? Why "Red Dog" for the code name? Is this just hosting? How is Azure different than what, say, Amazon has already been doing for a few years? What's the score here? What's next?

Erik Meijer leads the questioning and Amitabh does a great job explaining things in a readily understandable way. Great stuff!

Enjoy
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#Apr 14th @ 12:39 PM
Justin Bailey
Justin Bailey
Charles - have you seen Code Canvas frmo Kael Rowan at MSR? It looks SOOO cool and the only info out there is an old video on his blog. Will you consider talking to him? I want to know more! Check out the video at http://blogs.msdn.com/kaelr/archive/2009/03/26/code-canvas.aspx.

Sorry to hijack here, but I'm not sure how else to get in touch with Charles.

Can't wait to watch this E2E - thanks again to you and Erik. When are we going to see Erik's lectures???
#Apr 14th @ 1:34 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Hi Justin,

I just sent a mail to Kael and Peli (who has been conducting some great interviews with RiSE team members).

You can always get in touch with me by sending an email to me from the mechanism provided in my profile (like you would for any other Niner).

Erik's lecture series on Functional Programming is on tap to begin later this spring/early summer. As you can imagine, Erik is a really busy guy and he and his team are working on an impressive suite of new technologies that we can't talk about yet Smiley

Stay tuned for a lot more Erik (and also Beckman is waiting in the wings for a great chat about what he's been building that is awfully cool....).

EDIT: In fact, emailing Niners from their profiles is not possible. In the future, use the Contact Us link to email anybody (well, everybody) on the C9 team.
C
#Apr 15th @ 2:11 PM
banshee
banshee
"Now that the hysteria has died down..."

I think I'd replace "hysteria" with "yawns."

At best, you guys are a very, very distant third in mindshare for cloud computing.  Amazon's EC2 and Google's App Engine have left you in the dust.  Time for some panic around here!

#Apr 16th @ 8:30 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Did you watch and listen to this converstion? I'm not certain you could draw your conclusion if you did. Certainly, at this point, we're new to the game, but the game plan is indeed very promising.

C
#Apr 16th @ 11:49 AM
Justin Bailey
Justin Bailey
Charles -

Thanks for following up! Looking forward to it ...
#Apr 16th @ 7:43 PM
staceyw
staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

I have checked out EC2 and was not what I needed.  Azure and EC2 are much different from each other in goal and function. Azure is more in-line with what developers want in a cloud environment imo.   With Azure you publish and run Services.  In EC2 you have a computer image and vm to manage, so its more like they provide you an os and you have to do everything else.  The point of Azure is they abstract a lot of that unneeded work for you and you just concentrate on the service logic, not all the other goo.

#Apr 16th @ 7:53 PM
staceyw
staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...
btw.  What is happening with Volta lately?
#Apr 16th @ 7:58 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Volta is no longer called Volta, but the technology lives on. Stay tuned.
C
#Apr 16th @ 8:04 PM
staceyw
staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...
That code canvas looks really cool.  Seems to make sense to layout your code files in a visual way like icons on the destop and be able to group them is various ways and have connectoids, etc.
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