In my previous post, I was thoughtstreaming Ray Ozzie’s keynote.

He’s just announced the name of the Web tier operating system – Windows Azure. It’s designed for cloud computing. It’s a new service based operating environment specifically designed for the Web Architecure for SAAS.

It’s critical that Windows developers can use existing skills and existing code and runtime to target the cloud environment. In developing for something that we brand as ‘Windows’, we’re aiming at a keeping the familiarity for developers.

It’s an OS that MS are hosting for you. It’s available today as a CTP.

The Azure Platform will contain Live Services’, .NET Services, SQL Services [note that things such as Reporting Services, Analysis services etc. are now part of this and just called SQL Services], Sharepoint Services and more.

Key points on Azure

• It’s a hosted OS for Cloud computing – it manages the entire global data center infrastructure.
• Scalable Hosting
• Automated Service Management – managing upgrades of applications without recycle or performance degradation for example – Azure handles this for you
• High Availability – Azure will strive for this in 2 ways – its built for fault tolerance and redundancy. Even double failures of disk and/or CPU will fail to bring it down. It’s also built for replication, cacheing, auto load balancing etc for high availability under varying loads with no user intervention.

[Got called out of the keynote for a demo issue – this is the end of today’s stream, I’ll do more tomorrow]

[More Soon]