Richard Quinn's Blog

Kim Cameron (Architect – Distinguished Engineer) is giving an interesting talk about Microsoft’s new “Geneva” project, which was mentiioned by Ray Ozzie in the keynote.

Apperently, Geneva is a Windows Server product (and developer’s framework) which authenticates claims about a user’s identity against, potentially, a multitude of 3rd party systems.

It supports SAMl2.0, WS Federation, WS Identity, Kerberos, Active directory, Windows CardSpace. The system uses standards and open protocols at its core.

Application developers need only use “Microsoft Federation Gateway” in order to authenticate the credentials of millions of Live ID users. Together with the .Net Access Control Service an application can request authorization for an authenticated user to perform particular operations. These, together with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, builds the Microsoft Services Identity Backbone – an essential part of WIndows Azure.

Potentially, Geneva will allow developers to provide globally provisioned, cloud based and federated identity management at very little cost. If it lives up to the claim of being open, extensible and standards-compliant, it might just be adopted, too.

So, today at the PDC 2008 in Los Angeles Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft’s new Operating System, Windows Azure.

Some key claims:

• Virtualization technology, based on a tuned Hypervisor
• Separation of user-space and System-space
• Ultimately scalable, global, cloudlike
• Based around Windows Server 2008, invisible
• Tight integration for deployment and provisioning with MS Visual Studio

Some potential problems:

• As yet an unclear pricing model (”market competetive with Amazon”)
• risk of vendor lock-in (no clear roadmap for data portability)
• Currently very beta-like tools, no worldwide data centers

My take: Microsoft have finally published a counterpoint to Amazon’s and Google’s cloud services. This is Microsoft’s big shot, it has to work, they have to transform, because the desktop OS is dying.