Windows Azure


I've always been a scale nerd. A few months ago, as a result of a weird set of incidents, I find myself having a conversation with the 'Red Dog' team. Seeing the kind of technology they were building and the kind of people they had (Dave Cutler to start with), it seemed a perfect fit for me. Little did I realize how life on the team was going to be like. After a roller-coaster two months, I'm happy to be able to finally talk about what I work on.

I work on Windows Azure. It is a great feeling to be part of such a big launch (Techmeme has been on fire all day).

What is Windows Azure? Well, the authoritative answer for that can be found here or on this first post on the team blog which I just pushed out. Here's the Cliff's notes version as I see it.

Windows Azure is about three things

  1. A virtualized hosting environment. In essence, your code running on our hypervisor in our datacenters.
  2. A highly scalable, available storage service. We do blobs, queues and tables right now for the CTP
  3. Third and one of the most interesting pieces - a fabric controller which 'knows' all of the data center's resources. Instead of dealing with individual machines, you can declaratively model your service and hand it off to the fabric controller to manage. Want more hardware? Tell the fabric controller and it'll assign more hardware to you.