Microsoft’s Data Stack Goes Up to the Cloud
Date : 2008 03 13 Category : Tech & Development ProgrammableWeb
Building on their flurry of announcements around last week’s MIX08 event, Microsoft’s Live Platform Services GM, George Moore has just outlined in the dev.live blog how Microsoft plans to unify their storage solutions from on premise all the way up to cloud storage. As you can see below, the strategy spans a range of products and services. As a driving theme, the post makes reference to Ray Ozzie’s MIX08 keynote and ideas around having a connected “mesh” of synchronized devices and services.
As George describes “For the first time ever we have a unified protocol and developer tooling story across most of our major storage products from Microsoft”. Microsoft provides the following table to help summarize the layers on this stack. The four layers build up from Microsoft-specific products and services, the open standard protocols, developer tools, and at the highest level is a synchronization infrastructure.
Technically, two key pieces of the puzzle are: a) using Atom as the “unified on-the-wire format” with AtomPub as the “unified protocol”, and b) “a set of URI namespace conventions to address scalar values and feed-of-feed hierarchy navigation which also work uniformly across the above storage products and services, regardless of the top level DNS address of the underlying service.” The latter are outlined in this table:
Earlier this month ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley wrote about Microsoft working to stitch together a comprehensive story on unified storage. It’s safe to assume there will be additional Microsoft announcements before long as more pieces of the Live Services puzzle fall into place (23 Live APIs so far).