Windows Azure Framework

Following on Microsoft’s push this year into Software + Services comes a framework announced at the PDC that allows companies to make the transition even easier.  The Windows Azure Framework is all about moving your .NET applications, services, and storage to the cloud. 
 
I’ve downloaded the SDK and Visual Studio tools this week to get a good feel of how this new opportunity could play out from a developer and customer perspective and the implications are rather huge. 
 
The SDK and VS tools allow you to develop an applicaiton or service locally that can be deployed to the cloud.  It introduces the development fabric and development storage that mimic what would exist in the cloud from a interface perspective.

Sogeti is very adept at migrating clients from VB6 or other legacy applications to .NET.  One obvious thought I had was that our VB6 migrations will now need some additional value added activities to go along with the migration.  Value added in terms of assessing whether or not it makes sense to move the application to the cloud.  Think running on 64 bit Windows Server 2008 with unlimited scalability, load balancing, and instances hosted in their own hypervisor VM with support and a pay for only what you use model.

Moving a client’s capital expenditures for supporting those applications to operational costs in serving them from the cloud is something that is sure to be on everyone’s radar in this time of frugality.  Even more so in our market since Microsoft is building a data center right here in West Des Moines.