Making sense of Microsofts Azure [Video]

What app developers and enterprises need to know before signing up for Microsoft’s cloud platform

Credit: Me dia / Shutterstock

Last week, Microsoft announced its cloud-computing effort, called Azure. Fitting between Google’s and Amazon.com’s current offerings, it represents a very big step toward moving applications off the desktop and out of a corporation’s own datacenters. Whether or not it will have any traction with corporate IT developers remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, the Azure effort has brought more of a Wild West feel to the whole arena of cloud computing. If this were the late 1880s, Amazon.com would provide the land grants, as well as raw Linux and Windows acreage to build your applications upon. Google’s general goods store would stock and give away all the APIs that a programmer could ever use, and some of the scrappy prospectors that came to build the new towns would be from Microsoft. Steve Ballmer as Billy the Kid, anyone?

Enough of the metaphors. Mary Jo …