Azure revealed at PDC08 in Los Angeles

PDC08 kicked off today in Los Angeles with the expected keynote from Ray Ozzie, who unveiled Microsoft Azure, a new web services platform living in data centers scattered around the world.

The pitch is seductively simple. Put your application in “the cloud” and let Microsoft worry about the ugly machinery underneath. Servers, infrastructure, scaling, the sort of things that normally require actual people, late nights and industrial quantities of coffee. Apparently, you just deploy the application and everything works. Under the Azure blue sky, the grass is always green, the servers never crash and nobody gets paged at three in the morning. Or something like that.

I like abstraction. Abstraction is useful. It keeps us from having to think about every miserable little detail lurking beneath the surface. But I’ve always been suspicious of terminology like the cloud. Give something an airy, friendly name and suddenly nobody wants to talk about what is actually inside it: computers, networks, dependencies, failure points and all the usual technical caveats waiting patiently to ruin your weekend. The cloud, after all, is still somebody else’s computers.

Blue sky in Red canyon, Utah.

That said, Azure looks genuinely interesting. Strip away the blue skies and marketing vapor and there’s a potentially very useful platform underneath. Microsoft clearly has serious ambitions here, and I suspect Azure will have a substantial impact on how applications are built and deployed.

The CTP is already available for developers willing to venture into the machinery while the paint is still wet. And while you’re feeling adventurous, there’s also Visual Studio 2010 (rebuilt using WPF because apparently somebody decided developers weren’t suffering enough already) and .NET 4.0 to play with.

Welcome to the cloud, but mind your head.