Few days ago, I started looking to Clouds! Though, they were there for a while now, but I have been very busy looking down to duties I have. Before, I read about about Cloud Computing, Software as a Service, SaaS, Platform as a Service, PaaS, and Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, but when I saw Window Azure, I felt this is different than what I imagined.
I started collecting more data about Window Azure and I found a nice series on Channel 9, called Cloud Cover Show, which covers news, features, and tips about Windows Azure. I decided to dedicate more time to try different aspects of Azure, so I have installed Windows Azure SDK 1.2.
Today, I found Heroku, (pronounced her-OH-koo) is a cloud application platform for Ruby, as wrote on their site. I can find a similarity between anatomy of their structure & anatomy of Windows Azure in a way it adds to the whole picture in mind. Also, considering Google's AppEngine, I think this will give us a colorful sky with variety of clouds to host different kinds of applications :)
But, I think this is only conceptually, since that for all applications based on .Net Framework & Microsoft technologies the only option is Windows Azure, which's a great option but still the only one too.
The only sad news for me was that I couldn't open an Introductory Account because because of geographical obstacles. Currently, I live in Saudi Arabia and I couldn't find it on the list of Countries to choose. Also, Egypt, my home country, isn't available on the list too. I hope to find a solution soon.
In the mean time, I will study the subject locally on development fabric.
Puzzling Questions:
- Will future be heavily heading towards Cloud-based development?
- Will on-premise hosting come to end in future?
- Will few Giant companies, like Microsoft & Google, dominate Cloud-based hosting? Is not this involves considerable risks?
- How will competition take place in future on the light of cloud-based applications/hosting?
Well, that was all in my mind till now, a newbie point of view :)
More elaboration on Windows Azure is expected as soon as I start a bet project.
