Microsoft Azure is Cloud Storage

Microsoft today announced their Cloud Computing initiative, the Azure Services Platform. While many of the commentators have been comparing it with Amazon's EC2 offerings, and with VMWare based hosting, Azure is as much about cloud storage as it is about computing.

Quoting from Microsoft's Port 25 Blog:

Both Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service, and both do it in the same way: using a RESTful approach. The underlying data store is not Microsoft SQL Server, however. In fact, Windows Azure storage isn't a relational system, and its query language isn't SQL. Because it's primarily designed to support applications built on Windows Azure, it provides simpler, more scalable kinds of storage. Accordingly, it allows storing binary large objects (blobs), provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure applications, and even offers a form of tables with a straightforward query language, Chappell says.

This is worth emphasizing. Azure provides global cloud-based object storage. And it takes it one step further, by providing active objects such as queues and tables. The presence of queues, message busses and other persistent data structures are a real game-changer, as they form the location-independent "glue" by which to hold together large-scale loosely-coupled applications that are best suited for cloud-based hosting. This directly competes with Amazon's S3, and by creating a platform that runs .Net and other interpreted languages directly without the weight of a full OS running in a VM, it should be able to scale much more elegantly.

For storage object access, the API Microsoft has adopted is very similar to the HTTP API used by Bycast for the StorageGRID platform, so this continues the trend of standardization around HTTP for object storage and access.

Their API documentation can be found at the below link:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=131258

Also of interest from the announcement are Microsoft's .Net Services for Ruby, which provide first class access to the Azure services for ruby applications.

Now all we need is a XAM VIM that talks to Azure. Their containers map closely to XSets, blobs to XStreams, and stype data can be placed in tables and thus be queried. They've even provided methods to handle cache coherency for multiple simultaneous writers. Very interesting...