A Decade of Microsoft Azure: From its Creation to its Many Successful Transformations

Windows Azure--no, that was not a typo... "Windows" and not "Microsoft" just yet--had its debut in 2008 at The Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's former chief software architect, revealed Windows Azure as "a service, hosted and maintained by Microsoft on an array of distributed data centers. Then two years later--on February 1, 2010-- it was generally available. The operating system designed to become Microsoft's cloud launched as a PaaS offering (Platform as a Service). A community of developers was the first to build a precise class of web applications.