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Climbing on the Cloud

Posted on 8 Dec 2008 at 16:47

Jon Honeyball tries not to get too cynical about azure, finds the best of British in a high-end hi-fi kit, and breaks the iris scanner at Heathrow.

After such a let-down you'd think that Microsoft might be keen to answer the tricky questions we have today about Azure: small but important things such as "How much is it going to cost?", "What is the Service Level Agreement?", "How quickly will my app scale up if demand spikes?", "How quickly can I get it back up and running if it crashes?", "Will my sensitive data really be sprayed around the world, and put into datacenters in countries that I might prefer to steer clear of?" Microsoft's response was that it's too early to be talking about such things, and the story would be fleshed out over time, which is fine, but what about the 5,000 developers (probably representing an equal number of development houses from the largest global brands down to the smallest bedroom-hosted one-man-bands) who turned up and were told that now is the time to start architecting for this future Azure platform? Call me a cynic, but unless I can see the whole package now I'm not sure I'm prepared to start investing development dollars and time into a platform that hasn't yet been fully described.

Of course, Microsoft will argue that this is an evolving development platform, and so it really can't answer some of these questions yet. But hang on a minute - Microsoft didn't build those huge datacenters and stuff them full of computers just to see whether the air-conditioning works. Microsoft is using this platform today for real work, and while I'm sure the underlying plumbing and delivery platform may fall somewhat short of the final Azure specs, it couldn't even show us what these monsters are doing today.

And therein lies the problem: there's a no-risk solution available already called ASP.NET. I'll accept that it doesn't scale up well, and you have to know what you're doing to get datacenter standards of reliability, hardware, cooling and so forth - but it's possible. I can get a whole extra rack of space at Merula.net - my ISP - any time I want to, in addition to the boxes I have there now. Microsoft claims that the Azure platform will let me scale up in a bigger way, that it will require just a few mouse clicks, and I can have huge capability and capacity available just for the period I need it (and I'll pay accordingly). All of which is lovely, but this is going to be a slow burn for the development community.

Windows 7

The web has recently been flooded with information about Windows 7, so I'll keep my coverage of it short and sweet until there's a really interesting story to tell. The build that we were given at the PDC isn't the current one, and so many of those new user interface goodies aren't in it. First impressions are still interesting. It's better than Vista already, as it doesn't have that stuttering slothfulness that Vista is prone to. It's snappy, quick and easy to use, and that's when running it in a virtual machine - on good-quality base hardware it will rocket along.

The changes are huge under the bonnet: one feature I love is the ability to boot a machine from a VM image. Another under-the-hood change that I welcome is a much-improved implementation of support for high-resolution screens - changing the DPI is now seamless, and it will be fascinating to see just how many third-party software vendors will be caught with their trousers down over this feature. Oh yes, and changing User Account Control to be not merely on or off by adding a new "quiet power user" setting is an inescapable acknowledgment that the previous Vista incarnation was as nasty as we kept saying it was. Even the most hardened of Microsoft apologists now say that Vista was a bad delivery, and the whole message has moved forward to Windows 7. To complement this climbdown, it looks as though XP will stick around at least until the shipping date of Windows 7.

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