What does Windows Azure mean for IT Pros?

APC Magazine
There has been a lot of talk about Windows Azure since the announcement back at PDC.  What does it actually mean for you as a IT Pro in your organisation?  James Bannan aka Windows Warrior from APC Pro interviewed our Microsoft CTO Greg Stone around what Windows Azure really means for IT Pros.

”For IT Pros and CIOs, Azure presents some very different opportunities. In the past, implementing a new application or business service required you to think about all the supporting infrastructure you’d need to make it work. Then, once that application was up and running but needed a future change, you’d have to consider all the changes needed to that supporting infrastructure, and this can be particularly complex and onerous. With Azure, Microsoft are providing not only the bare metal, the operating system and the virtualized environment, but also all the tools needed for management and data persistence in a fully-distributed environment. This means that IT Pros are making more decisions in terms of trade-offs, SLAs, load balancing, resourcing, scalability and so on, rather than the current day-to-day practises which involve a lot of time spent in repetitive tasks like management and fine-tuning. For IT Pros, the net benefit of Windows Azure is that they will be able to push these maintenance and management tasks out into the global datacenters, and then focus on high-level issues. In concrete terms, we’ve done things like making the backend far more componentised and far more explicitly described. For IT Pros this means that rather than having to build infrastructure around the requirements of an application, they can now model infrastructural and application requirements and bring the two together in a business-specific SLA. Behind the scenes, this will be handled by the Azure platform.”

Check out the full article here