Microsoft has opened Windows Azure to many other non-MS technologies in an attempt to lure companies and developers to deploy their applications on the Azure cloud rather than on their competition’s. One such technology is Ruby on Rails.
Microsoft has demoed at PDC 2009 MySQL/PHP/Apache running on Azure announcing that WordPress is live on Azure. Also, Java applications can be deployed on Tomcat within Microsoft’s cloud. Practically, Microsoft has opened Azure for .NET, PHP, Python, and Ruby languages offering Eclipse plug-ins for those not using Visual Studio, and PHP, Java and Ruby SDKs to speed up development.
Simon Davies, a Microsoft architect on Azure, has remarked that the latest Azure SDK improvements, the ability to communicate with worker roles over HTTP(S) and TCP, has opened up the possibility for new scenarios including running “various applications and technologies such as MySQL, Mediawiki, Memcached and Tomcat”. He has set up a demo web site built using Ruby on Rails and deployed on Azure. While the site is quite basic, having a very simple SQLite database, the experiment proves that Ruby on Rails and Azure are compatible.
Now that many non-Microsoft technologies can be deployed on Azure, it remains to see if the world will enter into Microsoft’s cloud, marrying open source and proprietary code, or will chose to go with Amazon, Google, etc.