Azure Cloud on Ulitzer

Except for a few companies that are clearly teacher's pet, nobody will be going into production on Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud, until January 1.

Until then it remains a technology preview, with tens of thousands of developers already using it according to Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie.

And Microsoft won't start charging for it until February after it checks out its billing and payment widgetry. It's expected to take years for Microsoft to make Microsoft-style money off Azure.

Microsoft will have two container-based Azure data centers in the U.S., one in Chicago, the other in San Antonio, Texas; two in Europe, in Dublin and Amsterdam; and two in Asia, in Singapore and Hong Kong. Having two is supposed to mean backup in case something horrible happens.

Microsoft announced Azure's pending availability at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles Tuesday along with a bunch of Azure support technology such as an "evolved" application server called AppFabric.

Aside from its notion of three screens and a cloud where PCs, phones and TVs are connected by cloud-based services, its updated vision leans more toward the hybrid approach of online services combined with on-premises software and a more embracing developer model that includes Eclipse, Java, PHP, Python and MySQL as well as .NET and Visual Studio.

Of course last week Microsoft updated the Azure SDK with gussied up Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 and the 2010 beta.

Anyway, AppFabric, which is still in beta and is likely to remain so for some time into next year, combines the hosting and in-memory caching technologies formerly code-named Dublin and Velocity with Azure's AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control a k a .NET Services.

Understand that there are two things: Windows Server AppFabric due for final release next year and Azure AppFabric, which won't even make preview until later in 2010.

Microsoft says the mojo will make it easier to deploy and manage applications spanning both the server with its scale-up architecture and the scale-out cloud since it's a common, scalable foundation for running .NET apps.

Windows Server AppFabric, available for download now, involves a runtime environment for what Microsoft calls "composite applications" built for both the cloud and the earth on ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. It's supposed to deliver a set of capabilities for hosting services (RESTful or SOAP-based), workflows and application-level monitoring (based on Dublin).

Microsoft says it will provide developers with a set of pre-built infrastructure that improves the scalability and manageability of composite applications. As a result, much of the complexity related to infrastructure is supposed to be taken care of.

The Azure AppFabric basically provides the connectivity between loosely coupled services and applications so they can navigate firewalls or network boundaries.

And since composite applications might have to connect to heterogeneous systems to access data or business logic BizTalk Server is supposed to connect to non-Microsoft environments, whether back-end line-of-business (LOB) systems or legacy mainframe environments. Microsoft said the next major release of BizTalk will include platform support for Windows Workflow Foundation and take advantage of certain Windows Server AppFabric services.

Microsoft also said Azure will get Windows Server virtual machine support next year too to make it easier to support virtualized infrastructure across on-premise and cloud computing.

Meanwhile, Windows Identity Foundation for secure user access to both the cloud and on-premise application has been released to manufacturing. And there's a new beta out of ASP.NET MVC2 beta, a free framework for building standards-based web applications out of JavaScript and XML (AJAX).

Microsoft has set up an information exchange, built on top of SQL Azure and code-named Dallas that's available as a limited community technology preview (CTP) through its so-called Pinpoint online marketplace where developers and users will be able to access paid and free commercial and reference "datasets" and content on any platform.

Microsoft imagines developers using the data in developing applications.

The information will initially be coming from folks like the Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, ESRI, NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations and Weather Central Inc.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric and http://www.asp.net/mvc.