Mix‘09 was held in Las Vegas last week and as usual there were all sorts of announcements relating to both our platform and our developer tools.
A couple of them were Azure related and worth a mention here.
The first was a step that we’re taking toward providing more flexibility for customers concerned with where their cloud based applications and data are stored.
My colleague James Brown (the eGovernment one, not the other one) talked about the relevance of this issue on his blog. “Cloud Computing and Data Sovereignty”;
One announcement that is great to see is that Azure is going to let developers choose which data centers they want their code and data stored in. At the moment Azure is running on two data centers in the US, but more locations outside of the US are planned. This is going to make the Data Sovereignty issue slightly easier in some cases. The legal ramifications of storing UK Citizen data in the US is very different to storing it in another EU country, for example. Also from a technical point of view, being able to locate your code in the same geographical area as your users makes a lot of sense from a performance standpoint.
The second related to choice for developers working on the Azure platform, Computerworld carried the story “Microsoft opens Azure to PHP developers”;
Specific improvements made this week include expanding beyond managed code to native code support; allowing ‘full trust,’ which is how most applications or services are written; and offering FastCGI support to allow PHP development.
“Basically, the Windows Server team has done a ton of work with FastCGI that allows Windows Server to now support programming languages beyond just .Net and Visual Studio,” Ketkar said. Through the FastCGI interface, developers can take existing PHP skills and PHP applications and services and run them on Azure.
Developers might also be able to run other languages via FastCGI, said Ketkar. Microsoft, though, has done stress-testing for PHP but not for other languages. “There is no reason that Ruby won’t work through that same FastCGI interface,” he said.
So, when Azure moves from CTP to release you’ll not only be able to choose from a range of development languages, you will also be able to decide for yourself where you would like your application and data stored.