PDC Day 1 Azure announced

Hello everyone, I was a bit of a stranger in a strange land today.  I am attending PDC with my fellow IT Pro guru, Keith Combs.  You might be wondering, why are we here.  Well we decided to crash the party and we were able to get in the door and do some work with the IE 8 folks.

What is really cool is being able to attend the opening keynotes.  Today’s keynote displayed a great new cloud services called Azure.  Azure is windows in the cloud as well as other cloud based services like, SQL, Live, .NET, SPS, Dynamics and was announced this morning (see the official press release today:  Microsoft Unveils Windows Azure at Professional Developers Conference )  You can also watch the videos here: Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 Virtual Pressroom.

Overall I was pretty impressed by the new service offering and I think  will offer a great way for provisioning, geo distribution and service based operating systems.  This cloud service was built on some wonderfully scaled technologies that we have built on some best practices from our existing online services so it will be a fantastically scalable solution.  As they were announcing the services they were talking about the underlying architecture that was going to make this possible, they also briefly discussed the magic sauce that was going to connect these services to the platform, it was called the fabric controller.  In my mind I made this equation:

fabric controller = flux capacitor  :-)

Bottom line it is the magic sauce that is going to allow people like you and me to take even better advantage of the cloud and the power of the web!  Should be exciting!

I will be at PDC for the rest of the week and I will try to get you my thoughts on what I am seeing as things are happening.  The question I have for you, is there anything you want me to check out while I am here in LA?