James Thigpen

I’m watching the PDC 08 keynote on Windows Azure, and it’s pretty cool. The speakers are kind of horrible, and the product demos were pretty crappy, but I get the idea. This is big.

Windows Azure, for all the bad presentation, is going to be really cool. I’m sure everyone and their dog is going to talk about specs and technologies, so I won’t bother with that.

An interesting thing caught my eye, they mention how it will be accessible to hobbyists all the way to enterprise customers. An interesting thing about the cloud platforms, Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, and now Windows Azure, is that it causes smalltime developers and bigtime developers to collide.

Hobbyists don’t typically have access to enterprise class resource, SANS, Racks upon Racks of Blade Servers, etc. etc. Now we have a unified platform for deploying my recipe catalog as well as an enterprise accounting system. The value for the small fish is that they don’t have to deal with managing their own servers. For the big fish, the value is the near infinite scalability the platform provides through a commoditization of a lot of technology and knowledge in horizontally system scalability.

The small fish can get away with a hosting company, but for startups, knowing that the systems they build can scale through their (hopeful) successes…  That’s pretty big.