Microsoft unleashed a raft of features for its Azure cloud service this week, bringing it several degrees closer to a true cloud infrastructure service. New features, announced in beta, include remote desktop viewing for Azure “roles” (or virtual machines), full support for Internet Information Services (IIS) roles, the ability to create and maintain customized virtual machines (VMs) in Azure and a host of other services.
“We’ll see if it works,” said Chris Bardon, chief software architect at Toronto-based ComputerTalk, a unified communications and automated voice interaction software maker. Bardon said he thought Microsoft was walking a tightrope between letting users mess around on their own versus delivering a headache-free service people would actually pay for.
