I’ve recently come back from the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in LA where they announced their Cloud platform – Azure. Micro Focus were there demonstrating for the first time how to take an existing COBOL application and deploy it out to the Azure platform without changing a line of code (see the announcement at microfocus.com). Obviously these are still very early days, but as a proof of concept, it’s an amazing achievement (I know, I may be a little biased!)

The Cloud can mean a lot of different things. There’s quite a bit of difference between the Amazon model and Azure and it’s possible there will be space for both (and more?) in the future. I found Dare Obasanjo’s post a very good summary of the basic architectures and a developer’s view of Azure.

It was interesting to hear Microsoft talking about the kinds of issues that traditional data centers have had to deal with for a long time – security, upgrades, reliability, deployment architectures, etc. But they’re also starting to think about some of the more tricky topics I’ve not seen discussed very much so far, such as coping with data protection laws where geo-location of data could be an issue when that data is being stored in some unknown machine room outside the enterprise’s physical buildings.

Obviously, MF World is going to be covering a lot of issues around creating new applications and moving existing ones onto Cloud platforms but what do you think are the “elephants in the room” when considering Cloud deployments? What solutions could there be? What support would you need in development and operational environments? This is something we’re actively considering at the moment and your input would be valued.

By the way, I should introduce myself – I’m the Product Management Director for Application Development solutions here at Micro Focus and recently rejoined the company after a spell away (I first started a long, long time ago!). In that role, I’m working on identifying what is needed for COBOL application development and deployment products over the next few years.