Microsoft's cloud experiment looking stormy

Cloud computing outage has no silver lining for MS.

Users of Microsoft's Cloud Computing experiment suffered an overnight outage during which time none of them could get at their applications.

The Azure project is supposed to show the reliability of cloud computing. Currently only a test release of Azure is available, and some early adopters are running applications on it.

However, for nearly 24 hours the network was down, fortunately no one really noticed until they came into work on Monday. Microsoft fixed the problem within an a hour after realising that it had one.
While users did not expect an early test release of a product to run smoothly, the Azure program is supposed to show how shoving your software on the cloud can make life easy for you.

With Google and Microsoft also having outages on their Gmail and Hotmail services last week, many corporates will be wondering if Web-based services are ready to be used in anger yet.
The shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer plans to make the infrastructure generally available by November 2009.

He said that Redmond will give developers more information about how to build applications on Azure and use other features of the network at its annual MIX conference, which is scheduled to start today in Las Vegas. The company will also unveil new features of Azure at the event.

He probably would have preferred that Azure had not had a blue screen of death two days before he takes to the podium and probably will be having a quiet word with those responsible.