Azure To Introduce Virtual Machines [Blog]

Reports today suggest that Microsoft will introduce Remote Desktop and Virtual Machine support for Azure in March 2010.

This marks a major shift in Azure’s focus, previously Azure was intended to perform all hardware configuration chores from developers. SearchCloudComputing attributes the change to easing the migration pains for existing Windows apps, however resource isolation and allocation seems a much bigger step forward. A lot of developers who are new to clouds are surprised to find that their apps are not fully isolated from other cloud apps. For this reason Azure imposes a lot of restrictions on apps – for example the execution time of a SQL Azure query is limited to 5 minutes after which the connection is terminated and must be re-established. A VM would allocate a user a finite amount of resources to use as that app wants thus removing resource throttling.

No firm release schedule or other feature details were announced.