Windows Azure futures: Turning the cloud into a supercomputer
February 1 is considered the “one year” anniversary of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform (even though February 2 is the actual date that billing was “turned on”).
Last year, Microsoft said it had 10,000 Azure customers; this week officials are saying they have 31,000, though they are refusing to say how many of these are paying customers, how many are divisions of Microsoft, etc.
As I noted last year, Microsoft has been slowly and steadily adding new features to Azure. But I haven’t written much about longer-term Azure futures. Until today. Bill Hilf, General Manager of the Technical Computing Group (TCG) at Microsoft, isn’t part of the Azure team. But he and his band are doing work on technologies that ultimately may have substantial bearing on the future of Microsoft’s cloud platform. The TCG has a server operating system team, a parallelization team and a team “with the idea of connecting a consumer to a cloud service,” according to Hilf.
