Windows Azure deserves a public roadmap

Last week, I had the chance to meet in person with Steve Marx and Doug Hauger, two key people part of the Windows Azure team at Microsoft.

First of all, I have been really pleased, those folks are brilliant. My own little company is betting a lot on Windows Azure. When I tell people (partners, investors, customers) about the amount of work involved to migrate Lokad toward the cloud, the most frequent feedback is that I am expecting way too much from Microsoft, that Lokad is taking way too much risk too rely on unproved Microsoft products, that Microsoft failed many times before, …

My own belief in that matter is that Microsoft is a large company, with loads of talented people and loads of not so talented people too. Yet it seems clear to me now that Microsoft has gathered a top notch team on Windows Azure, and this alone is a very healthy sign concerning the future of Windows Azure.

In particular, Doug Hauger spend a lot time to explain to me his vision about the future of Windows Azure. Again, it was brilliant. Unfortunately, due to NDA, I won’t be able to discuss here the most salient aspects of this roadmap. It’s a bit sad because I am pretty sure that most of the Azure community would be thrilled - like I am - if this vision was openly shared.

Among all projects going on at Microsoft, on team that I like a lot is the C# team. In my humble opinion, C# is about one of the finest product ever released by Microsoft; and one thing that I appreciate a lot about the C# team is that they openly discuss their roadmap. C# 4.0 is not even released, and that have already started to discuss features that lies further ahead. If C# is such a good product, I believe it’s precisely because every feature get openly discussed so much.

Back to Windows Azure, I think everybody would agree that cloud computing is, as a technology, about several order of magnitude more complex than any programming language (even C#). My own experience - reading questions asked on the Windows Azure Forums - is that many developers still fails to understand the cloud, and keep asking for the wrong features (ex: Remote Desktop). A roadmap would help people to avoid such pitfall, as it would make it much more obvious to see where Azure is heading.

Then, when we started migrating Lokad toward Azure about 6 months ago, we build our architecture upon a lot of guesses about the features that were most likely to be shipped with Windows Azure. So far, we have been really lucky, and Doug Hauger just confirmed me last week loads of things that we were only guesstimating so far. Yet, I would have been 10x more confident in the roadmap had been available from the start. You can’t expect people to be that lucky at doing forecasts as a line of business.

The world is vast, and no matter how dedicated is the Azure team, it does not seems reasonable to expect they will be able to spend hours with every partner to enlight them with their secret roadmap. Private roadmaps just don’t scale. Considering that Microsoft is a late entrant in the cloud computing market (Amazon EC2 has been in production for more than 2 years), a public disclosure of their roadmap seems unlikely to profit to any competitor (or rather the profit will be very marginal).

In the other hand, an Azure roadmap would heavily profit in very certain ways to all the partners already investing on Windows Azure; plus it would also help convincing other partners that Azure is here to stay, not just cover fire.

Reader Comments (2)

Wow! You hit, no smashed the nail right on the head. I’m a startup in a similar situation and would love to know what is coming down the pipe in order to architect my solution as best as possible to fit the platform. I have a concrete example. I needed signed URLs to download protected content. Of course it was going to come, but when? I decided to use Amazon S3 because it was highly important for me, and couldn’t risk not having the feature. Low and behold, that feature is released before commercial availability..arrgh! I’ve watched all PDC08 sessions, to make sure I get the most information possible. I envy you with your added knowledge. October 11, 2009 | Perry

I agree. The attractiveness of Azure to me is 100% based on whether it will support Office.Interop in the GAC. Currently, there is no roadmap, so I have no idea if this idea has been agreed on and scheduled or discussed and dismissed… July 2, 2010 | Derek Tomes