5 ms·

Microsoft's New Killer App

147 points by Raphael 17y ago

bayareaguy 17y ago
This sounds perfect for custom MediaWikis.
- flooha 17y ago
  <shamelessplug>...until you have to install a lot of extensions, which you normally have to do manually. This is the problem Flooha solves. </shamelessplug>
  - bayareaguy 17y ago
    This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds? I'm a heavy user of the DynamicPageList, SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, TeX Editor and Lua extensions and had never heard of Flooha before so I took a quick look. While it looks promising, I didn't see any of those extensions available :-( Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first? CORRECTION: based on http://flooha.com/build/addon_details/3559 http://flooha.com/build/addon_details/3559 it does appear you support DynamicPageList. I must have overlooked that earlier.
    - flooha 17y ago
      This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds? Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server. I didn't see any of those extensions available :-( You can upload any extension you want! The process is very simple. Here are instructions from our wiki: http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addon http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addo... Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first? No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It's easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.
smhinsey 17y ago
I've been following WPI for awhile, but I'm missing the actual connection to Azure here. From my perspective as someone who has been working in the Windows cloud ecosystem, Azure is more of a platform as a service than an infrastructure as a service play -- I'd love to hear how arbitrary apps a la WPI fit into that.
- mbreese 17y ago
  Agreed. I can't tell how Azure fits in here... It looks like this just installs the tools on your local machine (or I guess server). So, perhaps they are taking the next (perhaps logical) step and assuming that you can use this to install stuff on an Azure instance?
- jungleg 17y ago
  As I said above, I'm not saying there is a connection now, but if MS plays it right, there could be a connection.
bhousel 17y ago
I dunno about killer app - but the Web Platform installer is pretty sweet. Glad to see it's finally coming out of beta. Scott Hanselman blogged about web platform / web application installers about a year ago: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstallerOpenSourceWebAppsDeliveredAndInstalled.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstall... I haven't looked it at lately, it will be interesting to see how many of those apps they can integrate with Azure..
eam 17y ago
Sounds promising. I'll be sure to give it a try once I get the chance.
natch 17y ago
So, what's the catch, other than having to have annoying Microsoft naming conventions like ASP.NET show up in my field of vision?
mark_l_watson 17y ago
Interesting. Sort of like Heroku with "instant install", no admin. I don't touch .Net with a 10 foot pole (yeah, letting my M$crosoft biases show), but this does look cool.
- leej 17y ago
  it is not just .net tech anymore. now with php, ruby and most weird JAVA! but i have two reserves how is library support for dynamic languages and how does overall performance compare to the ec2+s3.
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  That's kinda what I thought. The "OMG MSFT THIS IS CRAZY!!!1" was a bit much. It's good to see people compete with Heroku and Engine Yard (and for more things than Ruby, as much as I love it.)
  - sunchild 17y ago
    When Engine Yard and Heroku offer this kind of service, all you hear about from corporate IT is vulnerabilities in the VM layer and lack of security in the "cloud". But when Microsoft offers it, it's the next big thing. So sad.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Yeah. This is slightly off-topic, but I find it moderatly disconcerting that I'm a Rackspace customer and I didn't even think to mention the Rakspace Cloud Sites. They're also totally technology agnostic... And they have good marketing! I wonder why my brain doesn't think of them first.
hvasishth 17y ago
I have tried Azure and I have to say it is super cool
timtadh 17y ago
So my graduate databases class recently took a look at several of these cloud computing environments, and Microsoft offering is clearly compelling both from an tool integration stand point and from the technical side. For instance Microsoft's incremental innovation in their S3 like utility, called Simple Data Storage (SDS), is that SDS provides guarantees for Durability and Consistency, while Amazon really only guarantees Durability. There has been some work on implementing idempotent logs on top of S3, and SQS to provide similar guarantees but this is third party academic work see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376645 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376645 for an introduction. While at first glance Microsofts innovation is an improvement however, there is the question of how SDS performs at scale. Providing consistency for such a system will incur some amount of overhead. Has anyone here used SDS to serve larges amount of data with frequent updates? I would be interested to know how it compares with S3.
- teej 17y ago
  I appreciate the call for a comparison, but I think Microsoft's solution and Amazon's solution fit way different needs. The biggest S3 usages I have seen in production environments have been for large asset hosting on websites, not data storage for backends. We use S3 because it's dev friendly, cheap enough, and doesn't require talking to a sales person at Akamai.
  - j_b_f 17y ago
    I think he might mean "SimpleDB" where he says S3 and "SQL Azure" where he says SDS.
    - timtadh 17y ago
      I definitely mean S3 when I say S3, take a look at the paper that I link to.
- sriramk 17y ago
  I work for Windows Azure. I think the right equivalent to S3 is Windows Azure blob storage. I'm really not sure what you're refering to by SDS. SDS used to refer to an older version of what is now called SQL Azure but the technology there has been changed dramatically.
ordinaryman 17y ago
After seeing http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx, I feel sad that Google App Engine (GAE) still does not have a "click to install" Currently, there are two options for application developers in GAE 1. The code needs to handle segmentation of customer data based on login and also arrive at billing strategy for the resource usage. 2. Ask customers to sign up for GAE, create an application and invite the developer; after which, the developer can manually deploy the application. Code need not have segmentation logic and resources can be purchased directly from Google. Though my application http://crm.ifreetools.com http://crm.ifreetools.com supports both options, it could be better if there was a marketplace allowing a "click to install", rather than the current marketplace which focuses on services.. http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ ..and a GAE application gallery acting as just a directory... http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm
- rbanffy 17y ago
  A GAE application marketplace would be a great idea. Is anyone from Google googling this?
- Tichy 17y ago
  Yeah, I was really expecting GAE to turn into this. But it would be a first of Google bringing a side project to it's full potential, I guess.
nearestneighbor 17y ago
MS has some interesting technologies, like F# & .NET, but I wonder if people trust MS to do the right thing on the server? (One braindead misfeature can screw up everything)
- sarvesh 17y ago
  They have had one too many braindead misfeatures already in .Net e.g., Linq-to-SQL. C# and F# have come long pretty good, kudos to them on that. Integrating Azure with their development stack is a really good move.
- dagw 17y ago
  Given that Microsoft has anywhere between 25-45% market share (depending on where you get your numbers) on servers obviously someone is trusting them. And it's not like the Unix world hasn't had its share of "braindead misfeatures" over the years.
jlees 17y ago
An idiotproof, point and click cloud solution is definitely what's needed for cloud to go mainstream (i.e. Joe User thinks nothing of putting his wordpress blog on the cloud). I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft, but kudos to them if they get it right. AWS, GAE etc are still all too hard just to push stuff out - I've tried explaining them to tech-savvy laypeople and had zero luck so far.
- patio11 17y ago
  Joe User can already get 100% of the benefits of "the cloud" (whatever that means) by getting joeuser.wordpress.com . I don't see there being much upside for anyone whose relationship with their computer is similar to their relationship with their toaster. What I do see happening is Microsoft doing what they usually do: figure out a way how to become the standard platform for smaller software companies writing niche software for businesses. There are an awful lot of businesses out there who have essentially infinite technology needs and very little capacity to absorb it. Previously, Microsoft said "Here's a windows computer. Run this installer which cost you $50 from some company using our products. Bam, you now have a need filled without learning how to program yourself." In the future, I expect it sounds like "Hey, you've already got a computer. Cool. Click once and pay our vendor $50, and BAM we'll give you a website with X business software installed on it. You don't have to learn anything about programming or system administration." Now personally, having done downloadable software and web apps, I would prefer to have users pay me directly for access to my web app rather than having them host a copy locally. However, that won't fly for all businesses, and if Microsoft totally took all the technology pain out of it for them and reduced barriers to purchase by getting payments totally right, well heck, I'd be happy to sell hosted apps. (Particularly hosted apps which you have to pay for every month or MS will turn off your access for me.)
  - Tichy 17y ago
    One problem with joeuser.wordpress.com is the price, though. At least if you want your own domains, most services seem to cost at least 10$/month (for example also GitHub, Issue Tracker, email?, storage > 2GB, ...). Using an individual provider for each service one might need quickly gets expensive. Atm it would be cheaper to deploy a single vServer with all the required apps. No idea how much Azure & Co will cost, though.
ivenkys 17y ago
I am sorry i don't get it , how can a new "Killer App" be Windows only ? The installer only works on Windows , what happens to the rest of us.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  According to Microsoft, there is no rest of us. At least, there won't be for long. I'll flag the article as it looks an awful lot like Microsoft astroturfing. I suggest you do the same.
- yxhuvud 17y ago
  Lets see, their previous killer apps also either required Windows, or WAS Windows. I don't really see how being platform specific affects ability to be a killer app. Obviously depending on how a "killer app" is defined.
  - ivenkys 17y ago
    Platform specific does effect the ability to be a "killer app". Ms Windows being a killer app was in a completely different time period. Any app that has to have game changing ability has to be cross-platform or perhaps run on the web. Anything else and its not a "killer app". It might get the bills paid and be profitable but "killer app" it ain't.
    - richardw 17y ago
      The definition of a killer app is one where somebody will buy the platform just to use your app. By its nature it makes you choose a platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application
ErrantX 17y ago
We sell some ASP.NET (dont get me started) software and this was a god send when it appeared a little while ago. Before our setup procedure (we usually let clients do it themselves due to them being paranoid about letting people on their networks) was just complicated enough to require a phone walkthrough. This makes it a breeze. Click XYZ, then install. Install our app. Slight cfg tweaks. Win.
sriramk 17y ago
I work for Windows Azure. I'm going to try hard to not make this into a marketing thing. I want to clarify a couple of things from the blog post - The web platform installer is really quite distinct from Windows Azure. The WebPI is a nice installer which gets all the right SDK+ tools installed to get you up and running with MSFT's web dev stack Windows Azure can run any code that runs on Windows Server (with caveats) and it just so happens that the webpi is a nice way to get something running. - Windows Azure isnt really MSFT-stack specific (.NET/IIS) though that works real well. There was a bunch of content at PDC this year on how to run MySQL/memcached/php/python/RoR/whatever. Matt Mullenweg did a keynote demo running Wordpress on Azure for example. - The blog post 'Microsoft is taking applications but in reality, you can just go and sign up and get a token in a very, very short time. After January, the platform billing kicks in so anyone can sign up anytime.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  Interesting -- assuming that it's a true cloud compute environment (mostly application and language agnostic), is there a reason why the "installer" is Windows only? Is there a way to install and configure a compute node without using Windows?
  - bad_user 17y ago
    My impression is that WebPI is for developers ... it installs on your computer the stuff you need for developing / running your application, with the bonus that you can also quickly install a prepackaged web app like Drupal. I'm sure it wouldn't make any sense to make it available for Linux / Mac OS X since it's a Windows complement. The problem here is that the TFA is wrong ... Microsoft hasn't released an "iTunes Store for Web Apps". It's just a convenient way to get your Windows Server up and running, or am I missing something?
    - Locke1689 17y ago
      Agreed -- I didn't think it was an "app store" it that sense, but it totally makes sense to make it cross platform. Django will run fine on ISS and I'm not sure a simple web interface and sftp is too much to ask for (so I could do updates from my macbook). Btw, as a VMM developer I would be very interested to know if Azure is built off the type-1 Microsoft Hyper-V.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
flooha 17y ago
I have an interesting perspective on this since my startup, flooha.com is extremely similar, but actually better in some ways IMHO. First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC, but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure. Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server). There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps. It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though most website will never need it. Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps, especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores, private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain. I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my comments. If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing budget.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Flooha is cool & useful stuf people, go check it out!
brown9-2 17y ago
What in the world does this have to do with Outlook?
- gvb 17y ago
  Nothing. It is just an analogy. According to the article, what Outlook is for Microsoft's application suite, Microsoft's Azure (or web platform installer per another comment) will be for cloud computing.
  - bumblebird 17y ago
    Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer. So I think I'll give Azure/whatever a miss.
    - gvb 17y ago
      Yes, I originally had a parenthetical comment comment about it being locked-in because of PHBs, but deleted it because the comment was snide and detracted from the point.
    - mattmaroon 17y ago
      Correction: Outlook is to most people on Hacker News the most irritating ... To most people who don't read this site, its a tool that reliably does everything they need it to do.
      - Hoff 17y ago
        Which usually means the shark fins are starting to circle, regardless of whether the folks in the boat have noticed the mindshare leak.
      - billybob 17y ago
        Yeah, until they need to find an email from 2 months ago. Then they wish they had Gmail at work.
      - 17y ago
erikstarck 17y ago
The App Store model extends to just about everything and everywhere. Is this what web 3.0 will be all about? An internet of many walled gardens? If so, is it really that bad?
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Interoperability will suffer! Interoperability and open standards are two of the lynchpins of the Internet. Ultimately, if a large group of users keeps to the interoperable philosophy, the large walled gardens will fall. (Witness AOL.)
irrelative 17y ago
"Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications." Wow, buzzword overload!
wastedbrains 17y ago
Amazon AWS really should have a 'app store' of pre configured EC2s with wordpress, drupal, etc. Online interface boots the EC2, makes sure it loaded, and links you to the admin interface, links to backedup s3 dumps, etc
- wmf 17y ago
  http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=171 http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.js... http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization
bediger 17y ago
This smells like an MSFT PR hit. I bet this goes the way of ".NET" or "HailStorm" or some other all-encompassing, vague-enough-to-impress-corporate-types acronym-laden "vision".

147 points by Raphael 17y ago

bayareaguy 17y ago

This sounds perfect for custom MediaWikis.

flooha 17y ago
<shamelessplug>...until you have to install a lot of extensions, which you normally have to do manually. This is the problem Flooha solves. </shamelessplug>
- bayareaguy 17y ago
  This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds? I'm a heavy user of the DynamicPageList, SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, TeX Editor and Lua extensions and had never heard of Flooha before so I took a quick look. While it looks promising, I didn't see any of those extensions available :-( Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first? CORRECTION: based on http://flooha.com/build/addon_details/3559 http://flooha.com/build/addon_details/3559 it does appear you support DynamicPageList. I must have overlooked that earlier.
  - flooha 17y ago
    This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds? Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server. I didn't see any of those extensions available :-( You can upload any extension you want! The process is very simple. Here are instructions from our wiki: http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addon http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addo... Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first? No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It's easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.

smhinsey 17y ago

I've been following WPI for awhile, but I'm missing the actual connection to Azure here. From my perspective as someone who has been working in the Windows cloud ecosystem, Azure is more of a platform as a service than an infrastructure as a service play -- I'd love to hear how arbitrary apps a la WPI fit into that.

mbreese 17y ago
Agreed. I can't tell how Azure fits in here... It looks like this just installs the tools on your local machine (or I guess server). So, perhaps they are taking the next (perhaps logical) step and assuming that you can use this to install stuff on an Azure instance?
jungleg 17y ago
As I said above, I'm not saying there is a connection now, but if MS plays it right, there could be a connection.

bhousel 17y ago

I dunno about killer app - but the Web Platform installer is pretty sweet. Glad to see it's finally coming out of beta. Scott Hanselman blogged about web platform / web application installers about a year ago: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstallerOpenSourceWebAppsDeliveredAndInstalled.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstall... I haven't looked it at lately, it will be interesting to see how many of those apps they can integrate with Azure..

eam 17y ago

Sounds promising. I'll be sure to give it a try once I get the chance.

natch 17y ago

So, what's the catch, other than having to have annoying Microsoft naming conventions like ASP.NET show up in my field of vision?

mark_l_watson 17y ago

Interesting. Sort of like Heroku with "instant install", no admin. I don't touch .Net with a 10 foot pole (yeah, letting my M$crosoft biases show), but this does look cool.

leej 17y ago
it is not just .net tech anymore. now with php, ruby and most weird JAVA! but i have two reserves how is library support for dynamic languages and how does overall performance compare to the ec2+s3.
steveklabnik 17y ago
That's kinda what I thought. The "OMG MSFT THIS IS CRAZY!!!1" was a bit much. It's good to see people compete with Heroku and Engine Yard (and for more things than Ruby, as much as I love it.)
- sunchild 17y ago
  When Engine Yard and Heroku offer this kind of service, all you hear about from corporate IT is vulnerabilities in the VM layer and lack of security in the "cloud". But when Microsoft offers it, it's the next big thing. So sad.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    Yeah. This is slightly off-topic, but I find it moderatly disconcerting that I'm a Rackspace customer and I didn't even think to mention the Rakspace Cloud Sites. They're also totally technology agnostic... And they have good marketing! I wonder why my brain doesn't think of them first.

hvasishth 17y ago

I have tried Azure and I have to say it is super cool

timtadh 17y ago

So my graduate databases class recently took a look at several of these cloud computing environments, and Microsoft offering is clearly compelling both from an tool integration stand point and from the technical side. For instance Microsoft's incremental innovation in their S3 like utility, called Simple Data Storage (SDS), is that SDS provides guarantees for Durability and Consistency, while Amazon really only guarantees Durability. There has been some work on implementing idempotent logs on top of S3, and SQS to provide similar guarantees but this is third party academic work see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376645 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376645 for an introduction. While at first glance Microsofts innovation is an improvement however, there is the question of how SDS performs at scale. Providing consistency for such a system will incur some amount of overhead. Has anyone here used SDS to serve larges amount of data with frequent updates? I would be interested to know how it compares with S3.

teej 17y ago
I appreciate the call for a comparison, but I think Microsoft's solution and Amazon's solution fit way different needs. The biggest S3 usages I have seen in production environments have been for large asset hosting on websites, not data storage for backends. We use S3 because it's dev friendly, cheap enough, and doesn't require talking to a sales person at Akamai.
- j_b_f 17y ago
  I think he might mean "SimpleDB" where he says S3 and "SQL Azure" where he says SDS.
  - timtadh 17y ago
    I definitely mean S3 when I say S3, take a look at the paper that I link to.
sriramk 17y ago
I work for Windows Azure. I think the right equivalent to S3 is Windows Azure blob storage. I'm really not sure what you're refering to by SDS. SDS used to refer to an older version of what is now called SQL Azure but the technology there has been changed dramatically.

ordinaryman 17y ago

After seeing http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx, I feel sad that Google App Engine (GAE) still does not have a "click to install" Currently, there are two options for application developers in GAE 1. The code needs to handle segmentation of customer data based on login and also arrive at billing strategy for the resource usage. 2. Ask customers to sign up for GAE, create an application and invite the developer; after which, the developer can manually deploy the application. Code need not have segmentation logic and resources can be purchased directly from Google. Though my application http://crm.ifreetools.com http://crm.ifreetools.com supports both options, it could be better if there was a marketplace allowing a "click to install", rather than the current marketplace which focuses on services.. http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/ ..and a GAE application gallery acting as just a directory... http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm

rbanffy 17y ago
A GAE application marketplace would be a great idea. Is anyone from Google googling this?
Tichy 17y ago
Yeah, I was really expecting GAE to turn into this. But it would be a first of Google bringing a side project to it's full potential, I guess.

nearestneighbor 17y ago

MS has some interesting technologies, like F# & .NET, but I wonder if people trust MS to do the right thing on the server? (One braindead misfeature can screw up everything)

sarvesh 17y ago
They have had one too many braindead misfeatures already in .Net e.g., Linq-to-SQL. C# and F# have come long pretty good, kudos to them on that. Integrating Azure with their development stack is a really good move.
dagw 17y ago
Given that Microsoft has anywhere between 25-45% market share (depending on where you get your numbers) on servers obviously someone is trusting them. And it's not like the Unix world hasn't had its share of "braindead misfeatures" over the years.

jlees 17y ago

An idiotproof, point and click cloud solution is definitely what's needed for cloud to go mainstream (i.e. Joe User thinks nothing of putting his wordpress blog on the cloud). I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft, but kudos to them if they get it right. AWS, GAE etc are still all too hard just to push stuff out - I've tried explaining them to tech-savvy laypeople and had zero luck so far.

patio11 17y ago
Joe User can already get 100% of the benefits of "the cloud" (whatever that means) by getting joeuser.wordpress.com . I don't see there being much upside for anyone whose relationship with their computer is similar to their relationship with their toaster. What I do see happening is Microsoft doing what they usually do: figure out a way how to become the standard platform for smaller software companies writing niche software for businesses. There are an awful lot of businesses out there who have essentially infinite technology needs and very little capacity to absorb it. Previously, Microsoft said "Here's a windows computer. Run this installer which cost you $50 from some company using our products. Bam, you now have a need filled without learning how to program yourself." In the future, I expect it sounds like "Hey, you've already got a computer. Cool. Click once and pay our vendor $50, and BAM we'll give you a website with X business software installed on it. You don't have to learn anything about programming or system administration." Now personally, having done downloadable software and web apps, I would prefer to have users pay me directly for access to my web app rather than having them host a copy locally. However, that won't fly for all businesses, and if Microsoft totally took all the technology pain out of it for them and reduced barriers to purchase by getting payments totally right, well heck, I'd be happy to sell hosted apps. (Particularly hosted apps which you have to pay for every month or MS will turn off your access for me.)
- Tichy 17y ago
  One problem with joeuser.wordpress.com is the price, though. At least if you want your own domains, most services seem to cost at least 10$/month (for example also GitHub, Issue Tracker, email?, storage > 2GB, ...). Using an individual provider for each service one might need quickly gets expensive. Atm it would be cheaper to deploy a single vServer with all the required apps. No idea how much Azure & Co will cost, though.

ivenkys 17y ago

I am sorry i don't get it , how can a new "Killer App" be Windows only ? The installer only works on Windows , what happens to the rest of us.

rbanffy 17y ago
According to Microsoft, there is no rest of us. At least, there won't be for long. I'll flag the article as it looks an awful lot like Microsoft astroturfing. I suggest you do the same.
yxhuvud 17y ago
Lets see, their previous killer apps also either required Windows, or WAS Windows. I don't really see how being platform specific affects ability to be a killer app. Obviously depending on how a "killer app" is defined.
- ivenkys 17y ago
  Platform specific does effect the ability to be a "killer app". Ms Windows being a killer app was in a completely different time period. Any app that has to have game changing ability has to be cross-platform or perhaps run on the web. Anything else and its not a "killer app". It might get the bills paid and be profitable but "killer app" it ain't.
  - richardw 17y ago
    The definition of a killer app is one where somebody will buy the platform just to use your app. By its nature it makes you choose a platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application

ErrantX 17y ago

We sell some ASP.NET (dont get me started) software and this was a god send when it appeared a little while ago. Before our setup procedure (we usually let clients do it themselves due to them being paranoid about letting people on their networks) was just complicated enough to require a phone walkthrough. This makes it a breeze. Click XYZ, then install. Install our app. Slight cfg tweaks. Win.

sriramk 17y ago

I work for Windows Azure. I'm going to try hard to not make this into a marketing thing. I want to clarify a couple of things from the blog post - The web platform installer is really quite distinct from Windows Azure. The WebPI is a nice installer which gets all the right SDK+ tools installed to get you up and running with MSFT's web dev stack Windows Azure can run any code that runs on Windows Server (with caveats) and it just so happens that the webpi is a nice way to get something running. - Windows Azure isnt really MSFT-stack specific (.NET/IIS) though that works real well. There was a bunch of content at PDC this year on how to run MySQL/memcached/php/python/RoR/whatever. Matt Mullenweg did a keynote demo running Wordpress on Azure for example. - The blog post 'Microsoft is taking applications but in reality, you can just go and sign up and get a token in a very, very short time. After January, the platform billing kicks in so anyone can sign up anytime.

Locke1689 17y ago
Interesting -- assuming that it's a true cloud compute environment (mostly application and language agnostic), is there a reason why the "installer" is Windows only? Is there a way to install and configure a compute node without using Windows?
- bad_user 17y ago
  My impression is that WebPI is for developers ... it installs on your computer the stuff you need for developing / running your application, with the bonus that you can also quickly install a prepackaged web app like Drupal. I'm sure it wouldn't make any sense to make it available for Linux / Mac OS X since it's a Windows complement. The problem here is that the TFA is wrong ... Microsoft hasn't released an "iTunes Store for Web Apps". It's just a convenient way to get your Windows Server up and running, or am I missing something?
  - Locke1689 17y ago
    Agreed -- I didn't think it was an "app store" it that sense, but it totally makes sense to make it cross platform. Django will run fine on ISS and I'm not sure a simple web interface and sftp is too much to ask for (so I could do updates from my macbook). Btw, as a VMM developer I would be very interested to know if Azure is built off the type-1 Microsoft Hyper-V.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

flooha 17y ago

I have an interesting perspective on this since my startup, flooha.com is extremely similar, but actually better in some ways IMHO. First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC, but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure. Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server). There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps. It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though most website will never need it. Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps, especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores, private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain. I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my comments. If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing budget.

jacquesm 17y ago
Flooha is cool & useful stuf people, go check it out!

brown9-2 17y ago

What in the world does this have to do with Outlook?

gvb 17y ago
Nothing. It is just an analogy. According to the article, what Outlook is for Microsoft's application suite, Microsoft's Azure (or web platform installer per another comment) will be for cloud computing.
- bumblebird 17y ago
  Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer. So I think I'll give Azure/whatever a miss.
  - gvb 17y ago
    Yes, I originally had a parenthetical comment comment about it being locked-in because of PHBs, but deleted it because the comment was snide and detracted from the point.
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    Correction: Outlook is to most people on Hacker News the most irritating ... To most people who don't read this site, its a tool that reliably does everything they need it to do.
    - Hoff 17y ago
      Which usually means the shark fins are starting to circle, regardless of whether the folks in the boat have noticed the mindshare leak.
    - billybob 17y ago
      Yeah, until they need to find an email from 2 months ago. Then they wish they had Gmail at work.
    - 17y ago

erikstarck 17y ago

The App Store model extends to just about everything and everywhere. Is this what web 3.0 will be all about? An internet of many walled gardens? If so, is it really that bad?

stcredzero 17y ago
Interoperability will suffer! Interoperability and open standards are two of the lynchpins of the Internet. Ultimately, if a large group of users keeps to the interoperable philosophy, the large walled gardens will fall. (Witness AOL.)

irrelative 17y ago

"Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications." Wow, buzzword overload!

wastedbrains 17y ago

Amazon AWS really should have a 'app store' of pre configured EC2s with wordpress, drupal, etc. Online interface boots the EC2, makes sure it loaded, and links you to the admin interface, links to backedup s3 dumps, etc

wmf 17y ago
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=171 http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.js... http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization

bediger 17y ago

This smells like an MSFT PR hit. I bet this goes the way of ".NET" or "HailStorm" or some other all-encompassing, vague-enough-to-impress-corporate-types acronym-laden "vision".