PDC 2008: Monday Keynote
Ray Ozzie and friends presented computing in the cloud or Windows Azure as it is now renamed/rebranded to. It'll be interesting to see some of the Azure sessions and what it actually will do.
Windows Azure is an "Operating System for the Cloud" which is suppose to ease the development and more to ease the deployment and maintenance of services running in one or more data centers with load balancing in place and multiple servers cooperating. The intension seems to be that Microsoft will remove the plumbing part of service development or rather to make it work in the production environment - so that I as a developer cam focus on developing the business logic. In the same way as we develop rich clients today, we don't have to bother about the storage and other stuff that apparently service developer have to deal with.
They also talked about Microsoft Online Services where programs as SharePoint and Exchange is presented as a service "in the cloud" or perhaps it just some kind of hosting service. Well, Exchange is not a part of my daily development life, but since I've been on quite a large SharePoint project the last year I'll be investigating this further this week and I'll if I can find out the differences.