Did you realise that Microsoft are releasing a new operating system in just four weeks that is currently being called Windows Cloud? No, me neither. Steve Ballmer made the announcement at a conference in London on Wednesday. Luckily ‘Cloud’ is just the project name as it gets a snazzier name at release.

It seems that if you are building on .NET then they want to make it real easy to just push a button and have that application deployed into the ‘cloud’ so that it just works. Taking away the headache of finding a hosting provider, installing and configuring software such as SQL Server would certainly appeal to many. I suspect that the operating system is really just some extensions on top of Windows Server 2008. Just like Small Business Server is not really a different operating system but just Windows with some packaging for businesses placed on top.

Amazon are also extending some love to .NET developers by adding support for Windows Server and SQL Server within their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. Currently in private beta testing this addition will help Windows developers that need to scale their web service without needing to handle all the scaling issues themselves. You pay only for the compute time used.

If we look into the future a little way we can image what Microsoft would like to achieve. They want .NET developers working on web applications to be able to sign up for a ‘cloud’ account and then just press a button within Visual Studio to have it deployed as a live system. With Microsoft, Amazon, Network Solutions and so on being providers of the actual hardware and providing a scalable system for you. Then you pay only for the amount of CPU/Disk used and need never worry about where the server is located. Add in Hyper-V and it becomes much easy for a provider to give every account their own isolated operating system that can then be moved around to different servers as needed.

Another new technology from Microsoft called Live Mesh is going to be presented at the PDC later this month and may well integrate into this story. It seems that the mothership has well and truely embraced ‘cloud computing’. But whatever you do don’t use that term with Larry Ellison from Oracle. When someone asked Larry what ‘cloud computing’ meant he said…

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That’s my view.”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 7:14 pm and is filed under .NET. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.