Microsoft's Windows Azure: What a difference a year makes

In some ways, Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating environment doesn’t seem to have changed much since the Softies first made it available to beta testers almost two years ago. But in other ways — feature-wise, organization-wise and marketing-wise — Azure has morphed considerably, especially in the last 12 months.

Microsoft started Windows Azure (when it was known as “Red Dog”) with a team of about 150 people. Today, the Azure team is about 1,200 strong, having recently added some new big-name members like Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich. Over the past six months, the Azure team and the Windows Server team have been figuring out how to combine their people and resources into a single integrated group. During that same time frame, the Azure team has launched commercially Microsoft’s cloud environment; added new features like content-delivery-network, geo-location and single sign-on; and announced plans for “Azure in a box” appliances for those interested in running Azure in their own private datacenters.

In the coming months, Azure is going to continue to evolve further. Microsoft is readying a new capability to enable customers to add add virtual roles to their Azure environments, as well as a feature (codenamed “Sydney”) that will allow users to more easily network their on-premises and cloud infrastructures. The biggest change may actually be on the marketing front, however, as Microsoft moves to position Azure as an offering not just for developers but for business customers of all sizes. (I’ll have more on that in Part 2 of this post on Thursday August 12.)

Senior Vice President of Microsoft’s combined Server and Cloud Division, Amitabh Srivastava, has headed the Windows Azure team from the start. Srivastava said Windows Azure is still fundamentally the same as when his team first built it. At its core, it consists of the same group of building blocks: Compute, Storage and a Fabric Controller (providing management and virtualization). MIcrosoft’s latest “wedding cake” architectural diagram detailing Azure looks almost identical — at least at the operating system level — to the team’s original plan for Red Dog:

Most of the work that Microsoft has been doing on Azure for the past year has been quiet and behind-the-scenes. The team regularly updates the Azure platform weekly and sometimes even daily. By design, there are no “big releases” of Azure. The Azure team designs around “scenarios,” not features. Some scenarios — like the forthcoming VM role — can take as long as a year or more to put together; something else, like a more minor user interface change, could take less and show up more quickly.

All these little changes do add up, however.