Azure revealed at PDC08 in Los Angeles

PDC08 kicked off today in Los Angeles with the expected keynote by Ray Ozzie. He presented Azure, a web service platform hosted in data centers all over the world. It will host web applications in “the cloud”, supposedly the best thing since sliced bread if we are to believe Ozzie.

Just deploy your application in the cloud and everything will work. Under the azure blue sky, the grass is always green or something like that.

Blue sky in Red canyon, Utah.

Abstraction levels can be very useful but I’m generally a bit on the skeptic side regarding terminology such as clouds, as it has a tendency to conceal facts about technical caveats. But the platform will certainly be useful and it will most likely have a big impact on the market.

The CTP is available for early developers. While you’re at it, you might want to try Visual Studio 2010 (rebuilt in WPF, lord have mercy) and .NET 4.0.