This is the final overview picture of the windows azure platform which will directly compete with Google, Amazon and VMFORCE (Partnership of VMware and salesforce) in the PaaS space.
Now here are the list of updates from PDC10:
- WA VM Role
- WA Virtual Network
- Extra Small Instances (half the hardware, half the cost)
- New Portal
- Multiple users/roles for management
- Rolling out WS2008R2/IIS7.5
- Admin Mode
- Full IIS
- Remote Desktop
- WS AppFabric Caching as a service
- SSRS as a service
- Dallas
- New Composition Model and designer
- Microsoft will be hosting TFS in Azure
What is more impressive and you will be interested as a developer will be that that Windows Azure now has additional role called WA VM ROLE or ELEVATED PRIVILIGES ,earlier we had a Web Role which used to work as front end to interact with clients and Worker Role which was a background processing application. The VM role and elevated privileges functionality removes roadblocks that today prevent developers from having full control over their application environment.some of its features are:
- Full control of OS image (WS08R2)
- Full operations: reboot, reimage, remote desktop
- Customer must configure and maintain the OS
- SLA still requires 2 instances
- Fabric controller will not understand the health of the running applications, but does automate management
- No durability of instance state on failure/restart
- Still sit behind load balancer (one public IP)
- Priced by the hour
- The Windows license of the instance is included in pricing
Another interesting fact for developers is that we have now an additional compute instance called as EXTRA SMALL . New compute instance chart is as follows:
Another interesting fact is that now web role uses FULL IIS, its key features are :
- Web Role now uses full IIS by default
- Supports
- Multiple sites
- Multiple applications
- Virtual directories
- Everything else in IIS can be scripted with admin mode
- Can push iterative changes to running instances in minutes
PDC10 brings lot of cool stuff for the developers and Microsoft will also be launching new web portal of it.Microsoft is eyeing potential market share of SOA and will be directly competing with Google, Amazon, IBM, VMWare and SalesForce.