Above The Cloud

Firstly this is pure speculation. Either that or it is known fact and I am behind the game (I’ve been out of action for a couple months, you may have noticed my absence in blogging). If I am the first person you have heard this from, then there is every chance that it is false, so once again, this is just speculation.

Recently there have been a spate of questionnaires going out to Azure consumers/clients. Being a good CTP user and evangelist of the platform, I filled out every single one that came my way. Some took hours, some took minutes. But while it would seem that Microsoft were collecting information from me, it also alluded/hinted at some features that might be released by Microsoft sometime in the future. This post is simply identifying those features that have already been discussed in those surveys.

Get on with it already

The feature name currently is ‘Managed VM Role’ and would essentially be an instance that you could remote to like any other server. This would fall into direct competition with GoGrid/EC2 type hosting where you provision server instances and get full terminal services access to the instance. In this case it would be custom Server 2008 instances that could still be managed by the Fabric Controller. Microsoft summarises the concept like so:

‘A mechanism to snapshot an entire application environment and create a Windows VM to be deployed and managed by Windows Azure together with the relevant data, registry settings, and the ability to choose and control OS versioning. In this case, the customer is responsible for installing security patches, OS updates, and upgrades by creating a new image snapshot updating the running VM roles using the Windows Azure upgrade facility’.

This would work in harmony with a ‘Managed Application Role’ which basically sounds like what they are already doing with Windows Azure, however it also hints at using a packaging facility like MSI for the deployment process. Also some elevated privileges might be possible in the final release (currently you can run in full trust but under a restricted user account).

Anything Else?

There’s a few other smaller bits and pieces hinted at, summarised below:

• Cloud Storage Explorer (although there are already good candidates)
• Better deployment story from Visual Studio (I’d like to see MSBuild tasks)
• Better deployment feedback (provisioning process for example)
• Design surface for your service oriented application (this would be way cool)

Remember as I said before, its all speculation at this point.