Microsoft Azure Becomes Commercially Available
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Microsoft Azure became commercially available in February 2010. The service represented a major strategic shift for a company whose business had been built around software installed on customer-owned PCs and servers.
Early Azure emphasized a managed application platform rather than simply copying Amazon EC2. Developers deployed applications into Microsoft-managed roles and used services such as SQL Azure and cloud storage. Over time, Azure expanded to virtual machines, containers, identity, analytics, and a huge range of infrastructure products.
The technical significance was the abstraction boundary. Companies could treat compute, storage, and databases as remotely managed services and automate their deployment through APIs. For Microsoft, Azure also required learning to operate software continuously at global data-center scale, a very different engineering problem from shipping boxed server products every few years.