Build 2013: Microsoft Updates Windows Azure Again

Microsoft used the second day of its Build 2013 conference to reveal a number of developer-centric updates to its Windows Azure cloud computing platform.

Windows Azure spans infrastructure and platform capabilities to provide them with a comprehensive set of services to easily and quickly build modern applications, using the tools and languages familiar to them.

Mobile Services

Delivering on its pledge to provide developers with a comprehensive cloud platform, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Azure Mobile Services. Speaking at the conference, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, said Azure Mobile Services enables developers building Windows, Windows Phone, iOS and Android apps to store data in the cloud, authenticate users and send push notifications.

Microsoft also announced the general availability of Windows Azure Web Sites, which allows developers to create Websites on a secure and scalable platform to reach new customers. With the investments Microsoft has made in ASP.NET and Web tools, Web developers can now create scalable experiences easier than ever, the company said.

Keynotes delivered by Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools Business, and Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president and chief evangelist in Microsoft’s Developer Platform Evangelism group, showcased how commonality across the Windows platform enables developers of all types to build compelling apps and experiences spanning devices and services.

“Developers are increasingly demanding a flexible, comprehensive platform that helps them build and manage apps in a cloud- and mobile-driven world,” Nadella said, in a statement. “To meet these demands, Microsoft has been doubling down on Windows Azure. Nearly 1,000 new businesses are betting on Windows Azure daily, and as momentum for Azure grows, so too does the developer opportunity to build applications that power modern businesses.”

Nadella also rattled off some impressive statistics about Windows Azure, including that more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 organisations use Azure, and there are 3.2 million organisations using Windows Azure and 68 million individual users. There also are 8.5 trillion storage objects stored on Azure, and the platform manages 900,000 transactions per second. Microsoft has also seen three times the growth in its Hyper-V share, and the compute and storage capacity of Windows Azure doubles every six months, Nadella said.

Enterprise Cloud

Meanwhile, Nadella noted that after just announcing the general availability of its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capability in April, already 20 percent of Windows Azure capacity is IaaS capacity.

For his part, Guthrie also highlighted Microsoft’s continued enterprise cloud momentum by demonstrating several platform advancements, including previews of improved auto-scaling, alerting and notifications, and tooling support for Windows Azure through Visual Studio. In addition, he previewed how Windows Azure Active Directory provides organisations and ISVs, such as Box, with a single-sign-on experience to access cloud-based applications.