Windows Azure Cloud OS Is Here

One year after Microsoft first unveiled its Cloud operating system to the world, Windows Azure has been officially launched. The Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles acted as the stage for the Redmond company to release, what it referred to as critical pieces of its Cloud services strategy, namely the Windows Azure platform, composed by the Windows Azure operating system and the SQL Azure database. Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie explained, during his opening keynote address at PSD 2009, that Windows Azure was essentially Windows Server at the core.

“Windows Azure, which we introduced right here on this stage last year, is our cloud computing operating environment, designed from the outset to holistically manage extremely large pools of computation, storage and networking, all as a single, dynamic, seamless whole, as a service. It's a cloud OS designed for the future, but made familiar for today,” Ozzie stated.

Since its introduction at PDC 2008, Windows Azure has been available for testing, evolving through various Community Technology Preview releases. And in fact, Windows Azure will continue to be offered for testing as a CTP until the end of this year. This means that Microsoft will not charge companies anything for test driving Windows Azure by the end of 2009.

“We'll continue this Community Technology Preview program through the end of the year, so that you're going to have a chance to get your feet wet with some of the amazing new features,” Ozzie promised. And according to the man that replaced Bill Gates at the lead of Microsoft, Windows Azure will continue to be available to customers for free for a limited period even after the CTP program shuts down.

“On January 1st, for the first time, I'm pleased to announce that Windows Azure will switch to a production service for paying customers. For the first month, the month of January, we're going to be exercising our production provisioning systems and validating our billing systems for accuracy and completeness. So, during that first month, the month of January, you still won't accrue any actual charges. And then on February 1st, customer billing will begin,” Ozzie explained. (read about Windows Azure pricing here)

Microsoft already noted that Windows Azure would be reserved for hosted deployments, and that it would not be available to customers. Essentially, companies that will require to run Windows Azure on-premise will not be able to do so, and will have to leverage Windows Server in such scenarios.