Ray Ozzie Keynote at PDC 2008

Today's focus is on the back-end innovations. The client conversation/demos will be done at tomorrow's keynote. In other words, this is the 'cloud' talk.

The content of the first portion of his talk is about the convergence of IT Pro and IT Dev functions. Basically, he is making a case for the need for cloud computing. Things like redundancy, resilience, reliability, etc. Nothing exceptionally new here. But he then branches to the idea that, rather than having the infrastructure within a corporation, perhaps it would be better to have the infrastructure hosted by someone who specializes in offering web functionality that supports millions of developers. I think I can see where this is heading :)

The new service is called Windows Azure.

That explains the 'blue' theme seen throughout the Convention Center.

One of the goals is to be able to integrate the service with the existing toolset. "And you can", says Ray. But there will also be a new set of tools aimed at assisting developers with this 'cloud design point'. After all, it's not quite the same as traditional Windows applications. The focus for a typical Windows application is 'scale-up' and not 'scale-out'. And to work properly with the cloud, the 'scale-out' model is a requirement.

Keep in mind that one of the benefits of the cloud computing is the ability to increase capacity by turning a dial that increase the number of 'servers'. For your application to work successfully in that environment, the manner in which you develop applications might change significantly. But the details on that piece will have to wait for tomorrow.

Now it's time for the demos. More shortly.