PDC 2008: Ray Ozzie and company present the cloud
Monday morning in Los Angeles, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie took his time unveiling his company's gamble to dominate a field of computing where it has actually fared third-place, or worse.
For over two years, a team of senior Microsoft executives stayed mostly out of the public view, working on something that was sometimes strangely called the "Windows Core." Some rightly guessed it was the company's services platform for cloud computing, though it was still a matter of speculation how that would work, or what it would consist of.
Here's how Ray Ozzie described the project we now know as Windows Azure, in excerpts from his keynote speech on Monday morning:
Most of our enterprise computing architectures have been designed for the purpose of serving and delivering inwardly-facing solutions. That is, most of our systems and networks have been specifically built to target solutions for our employees, and in some cases, for our partners -- for hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of concurrent users, desktops, data centers, and the networks between them all scoped out, audited, controllable and controlled by an IT organization skilled in managing the enterprise as the scope skilled in managing the enterprise as the scope of deployment.
But more and more, the reach and scope that's required in our systems has been greatly expanded. Almost every business, every organization, every school, every government is experiencing the externalization of IT, the way IT needs to engage with individuals and customers coming in from all across the Web. These days, there's a minimum expectation that customers have of all of our Web sites delivering product information and customer support -- direct fulfillment from the Web. But the bar is being raised as far richer forms of customer interaction are evolving very, very rapidly.
At an industry level, we've come to believe that the externalization of IT is nothing less than a new tier in our industry's computing architecture. The first tier, of course, is our experience tier -- the PC on your desk or the phone in your pocket. The scale of this first tier of computing is 1 -- it's all about you. The second tier is the enterprise. Back-end systems, infrastructure, and our business solutions. And the scale of this tier is roughly the size of the enterprise, and the service tier is really the design center of today's server architectures, systems management architectures, and most major enterprise data centers.
The third tier is this Web tier, externally-facing systems serving your customers, your prospects, potentially everyone in the world. The scale of this third tier is the size of the Web, and this tier requires computation, storage, networking, and a broad set of high-level services designed explicitly for scale with what appears to be infinite capacity available on-demand anywhere across the globe.
So a few years ago, some of our best and brightest -- Dave Cutler, Amitabh Srivastava, and an amazing product team -- embarked upon a vision to utilize our systems expertise to create an offering in this new Web tier, a platform for cloud computing to be usede by Microsoft's own developers, by Web developers, and enterprise developers alike. [About the same time] we started to plan this new effort, Amazon launched their service called EC2, and I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon for their innovation, and for the fact that, across the industry, all of us are going to be standing on their shoulders as we establish the base-level architectural models and business models that we'll all learn from and grow.
In the context of Microsoft, with somewhat different and definitely broader objectives, Amitabh, Dave, and their team have been working for a few years now on our own platform for computing in the cloud. It's designed to be the foundation, the bedrock underneath all of Microsoft's service offerings for consumers and business alike. And it's designed to be ultimately the foundation for yours as well.
And so I'd like to announce a new service in the cloud: Windows Azure.
Windows Azure is a new Windows offering at the Web tier of computing. This represents a significant extension to our family of Windows computing platforms, from Windows Vista to Windows Mobile at the experience tier, Windows Server at the enterprise tier, and now Windows Azure being our Web tier offering, which you might think of as Windows in the cloud.
Windows Azure is our lowest-level foundation for building and deploying a high-scale service, providing more capabilities such as virtualized computation; scalable storage in the form of blogs, tables, and streams; and perhaps most importantly, automated service management system, a fabric controller that handles provisions, media distribution, and the entire lifecycle of cloud-based services.
Next: Microsoft's Srivastava brings the cloud more down to Earth...