Microsoft has made a HUGE commitment to the cloud. They’ve spent billions of dollars building datacenters around the globe that provide on-demand, dynamically scalable compute, storage, caching and content delivery capabilities. This is Windows Azure.

Azure datacenters are populated with specially-built shipping containers filled with server blades and storage racks. These containers are ordered on demand, delivered to site, plugged into power, network and cooling and then self-integrate into the Azure fabric.

Rather than buying and hosting complex and costly cloud-scale infrastructure, most customers rent compute and storage resources as necessary.

Compute resources come in two flavors: Worker Roles and Web Roles.

Windows Azure worker roles are essentially Windows Server VM's running on racks in Microsoft’s datacenters. Azure Web Roles also run IIS. This means that pretty much any existing Windows Server app can be easily run in the Azure cloud.

Today, Microsoft leaked a new codename: Azure “Antares” (source: Mary Jo Foley @ ZNet):

Details are sketchy at present, but I believe that Antares is a natural evolution of Microsoft’s current web/cloud infrastructure towards a more comprehensive, complete and holistic web/cloud hosting platform, allowing one to build and host a web/cloud app and deploy it seamlessly and without change to in-house servers, servers operated by hosting partners and/or to servers hosted in Azure.

Its highly likely that this infrastructure will integrate current and new features such as FastCGI and IISNode in order to better support sites that use technologies created by open-source communities such as Java, node.js and PHP.

More details as they appear

Today’s facepalm, brought to you by Microsoft:

We all know that supporting future technologies can be costly in terms of time and resources. Why spend the money, time and energy modifying your application, site, etc. to support every new whizz-bang OS, app, platform or browser – I mean, it’s not as if THAT many people adopt this cutting-edge technology, right?

Imagine that you run one of the world’s largest computer software companies that creates and sells the world’s leading operating system, world’s leading browser and that you also offered some pretty cutting-edge services that you offer to customers to buy online using your own browser, amongst others.

Now imagine that your company was spending HUGE amounts of time, energy and money to built a next-generation browser that is likely to not only stem your browser's increasingly rapid decline in browser share, but actually reversed it AND set the pace that the rest of the browser vendors now have to follow. That’d be pretty good news, right?

Because this is such a big deal to your company, you’ve just launched Beta1 of said browser after a well-executed tech preview program. These efforts combined have generated ENORMOUS interest from almost everyone in the web development community. So much so in fact, that your browser has been downloaded 6 million times in two weeks – that’s more than the number of iPads that Apple sold in an it’s entire first quarter since launch, and your browsr isn’t even done yet!!

Someone in your company has earned his/her bonus this year

However, someone else shouldn’t be getting a bonus this year!

Who do you suppose is the primary customer for your whizzy new cloud services platform? Web developers, right? Yep. Absolutely. Those same web developers who are flocking to download the beta of your spanky new browser. So imagine what it looks like when those developers turn up to purchase a new account only to find that they cannot do so using your new browser because they see an error like this:

Embarrassed? YOU SHOULD BE!

And your embarrassment should be amplified 100-fold when you come to learn that said customers have to use a browser from one of your major competitors who are seeking to put you out of business in order to buy your cloud services.

What would you do to the (ir)responsible party who tarnished your company’s hard work and effort by being so unprofessional and ineffective? Suggest appropriate actions in feedback comments below!