Microsoft Azure and ... Gallery?!

So, today Microsoft, and Ray Ozzie, unveiled the Azure Services Platform. At first I didn't really think much of it, nor really investigate what they were up to this time. It all sounded a bit to Microsofty and to be honest not all that interesting for the normal Windows system admin. I mean, it's probably a good service and I'm sure there is lots of developers who will enjoy working with it and store their data in the Microsoft Cloud.

Then, Chris Kelly pointed me to a Port 25 posting about Azure. It goes into details as to what the service is, and how they envision people using it. Basically it's a way to use computational resources on Microsoft servers, like storage, SQL services and so on. I'm sure a lot of pretty cool services will come out of this, but I still didn't quite see why I should look into it in more detail. I did keep reading though, and much to my surprise, I found the following passage:

• A developer using the Eclipse IDE can write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure
• Gallery, the leading PHP photo application, can access Windows Azure cloud storage
• A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.

Specific to Gallery, we've done two simple things: we created wrappers to convert the Windows Azure API to PHP objects, and we created a Windows Azure subclass inherited from the Windows NT Platform class. The net of all this is that, with a small amount of code, we were able to connect one of the top PHP application to Windows Azure, specifically, photo images stored as BLOBs in the cloud.

Uhm, what?! Microsoft took Gallery and created a Azure subclass to create cloud based storage for Gallery 2?! How neat is that?

I mean, I knew about the Web Platform Installer and it's Gallery support, but I don't think anyone knew about this until now.

Oh, and by the way, Microsoft has also added OpenID support for Live ID. I wonder whatever happened to the Passport idea...

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel