Great simple explanation on Windows Azure

During the last GeneXus International Meeting held in Montevideo, I had the chance to talk for a few minutes with Steve Marx from the Windows Azure team. Milano and I were telling him what we expect to do with GeneXus and the Windows Azure platform.

The first scenario is having a one-click deployment to the cloud (Windows Azure platform) of the GeneXus generated applications. Since the SQL Azure is now a relational database (good old SQL Server) our reorganization programs can generate the tables in the cloud. Also, our applications are 100% compatible with the Azure environment so you could upload you application to the Azure platform today.

The other scenario is running GeneXus Server from the Azure platform. In this scenario we still have a “little” work to do. So we were asking Steve about the worker roles since we want to be able to specify and generate in the Azure platform and I have doubts about what could actually run in this “cloud”, so Steve explained it to me in a great simple way. He said, imagine I have a Windows Server 2008 installed out of the box with the .net framework 3.5 and all the latest service packs. Everything you could put on a portable USB drive and run from there will run on the Azure platform. He added, everything that needs a setup wizard, writing on the registry, and stuff won’t work.

As I said, great yet simple explanation of what you could run on the Azure platform.