Red Dog
Ray Ozzie arrived at Microsoft in 2005 and stated that survival of the company hinged on a shift to cloud computing. He wrote a manifesto called The Internet Services Disruption in which he stated that there are three tenets that dramatically shift the whole landscape around computing. From his point of view, it was essential to embrace those tenets in Microsoft's products and services. These tenets are as follows:
Advertisement-supported economic models
New delivery and adoption model
Demand for user experience that "just works"
The essence of this manifesto is that he emphasized that the world was changing, the demands of customers were changing, and technology was changing. It was the beginning of a process that finally resulted in the Windows Azure platform.
Note
Cloud computing enabled a move from packaged solutions with fixed license-based models to resilient services with flexible payment options.
After the release of Vista and the new Office suite, a project group was formed with top engineers, and Ray Ozzie asked Amitabh Srivastava to lead the project. Also, David Cutler (writer of VMS and leader of the Windows NT team) was involved with this revolutionary initiative. The codename of Windows Azure used to be Red Dog. Virtual machines on Windows Azure are still named with the prefix Red Dog (RD).
Windows Azure announcement
On October 27, 2008, at the Professional Developers Conference, Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure and highlighted its capability in delivering services. The first commercially available release in 2010 of the platform contained:
The Cloud OS (confusingly also called Windows Azure) that offers service management and provisioning, storage, computing power, and networking capabilities
SQL Azure, offering a Database-as-a-Service (currently known as SQL Database)
Microsoft .NET Services, containing features such as workflow and access control (currently known as Windows Azure Service Bus, formerly known as AppFabric)
It was the start of a new era that brought us all into the world of services, agility, faster time to market, new ways of monetizing IT assets, operational expenses versus capital expenses and more. Ever since, Windows Azure has evolved into the mature, enterprise-ready platform it is right now, offering more services, with time.
