Microsoft recently announced that it was killing the Windows Live brand, and it is apperently also remove Zune . Microsoft is also dropping the “Azure” brand from a wide lineup of cloud services, too. This was revealed in an email message to Azure customers. “In the coming weeks, we will update the Windows Azure Service names,” These are only name changes: Your prices for Windows Azure are not impacted.”
Each Azure service is being rebranded with a simpler, more obvious name. and the whole oeefirn is now PaaS ie Platform as a service.
Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), is now joined by Amazon, who have announced support for SQL Server alongside MySQL and Oracle in its AWS-based Relational Database Service (RDS). Amazon is also providing .NET support via their Elastic Beanstalk, and Visual Studio integration, so the two products are starting to look very similar. RDS is not new; it has been running for two and a half years now, but SQL Server support is newRDS is much more like Azure, because the underlying EC2 infrastructure auto-magically expands and contracts to meet the demands of the database workload. RDS also takes care of deploying, patching, and backing up of the database.
To add to the competition Tier 3 launched a CloudFoundry-based PaaS called Web Fabric that supports .NET framework, and their data Fabric supports SQL Server. This service is more akin with Amazon’s EC2-based AMIs, but based on VMWare.
For any business contemplating moving their windows-based IT services to the cloud they are not forced to turn to Microsoft both as their service provider and as their software provider. It takes away one of the stumbling points that has hindered take-up of Cloud services.
