Has Microsoft lost sight of its original Windows Azure PaaS vision?

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

During a recent cloud industry conference, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Corp.’s Server and Tools Business, referenced the perception that non-Microsoft technologies, while supported on Windows Azure, are considered "second-class citizens." This perception isn’t surprising when you consider how far Microsoft has strayed from its original vision for Windows Azure PaaS. Microsoft intended that Windows Azure’s two roles — Web and worker — would only be the beginning; there would be others.

The core of the Windows Azure PaaS includes the Web and worker compute roles. Though in a very general way, these are not dissimilar to the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Machine Images and instances, the difference lies in the level of abstraction…

In Windows Azure, the OS and other parts of the stack are abstracted out of the way. The Windows Azure compute roles just happen to contain Windows Server; the Web role happens to be based on Internet Information Server. And they all happen to come out of the box with .NET in place. None of these characteristics is fundamental. The big question is whether there is value in focusing on virtual machines and the details of their contents or whether software development has reached a level in which the minutiae of OSes and application stacks are no longer critical…

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