There is conundrum that Mark Souza wants to solve once and for all.
“I get strange looks when I talk to developers about the difference between developing an application to a product versus developing an application to a service,” Souza wrote in a Windows Azure blog post seeking to untangle the mystery.
Souza, a general manager in customer experience at Microsoft, suggests thinking about the difference in terms of what the person who uses the app can do with it.
“When you write your application for your on-premises server there are expectations that you have from this set of hardware and software,” he wrote. That includes connecting successfully every time you log on, expecting a high level of performance every time you use it, and controlling the security context of data.
On the other hand, in the cloud, the user can do everything they can do on-premises – the difference is they can do much more.
“You also have significant new opportunities such as ability to scale on demand and the cost benefits of pay-as-you-go on commodity hardware,” Souza explained. “If you desire you can develop your application to these services similarly to how you wrote your on-premise application and for the most part it will work.”
Visit the Windows Azure blog to find out about all the extra things you can do when you build an app for the cloud, and what you need to do to make it happen.
Lukas Velush
Microsoft News Center Staff