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Matt Rogers of Microsoft's Windows Azure Product Marketing team responded to the When Are We Going To Have an SLA for Microsoft Azure? article written by Alin Irimie.

Here is Rogers' response.

"Alin, the points you are making are very reasonable, and are largely due to being a service in Community Technology Preview (CTP) rather than a launched service.  Unfortunately some of your questions we are not able to answer while still in this mode, but will be resolved as we reach commercial availability later this year.

1) Is Windows Azure a .NET only platform?  No, we have committed to opening the platform to most programming languages over time, meaning you will be able to deploy it and run it in our cloud, and also access the services from outside the cloud as you describe above.  We took initial steps on this last month with the implementation of FastCGI and support for PHP.  This was a step forward, but not the end.  More on this later in the year.  You can read a recap of where we are now on programming language interoperability in Windows Azure from Steve Marx at http://blog.smarx.com/

2) What year will Windows Azure release?  2009, late in the year.  We have not backed down on this, no hedging...we will be commercially available by the end of this year.

3) When are we going to have an SLA? In just a couple months, we have said it will be "this Summer" and we are standing by that.

4) When will we update the case studies on the Windows Azure website?  By commercial launch this year, probably much sooner.  We are focused on building guidance around the service with the full features and capabilities that will be released later this year rather than the more limited CTP functionality.

5) Which Microsoft services are running on Windows Azure?  All online services from Microsoft will move to Windows Azure, and the migration process is underway.  We started this project for our own internal services, then added another dimension of making the service available commercially.  We will talk about which services have moved later in the year and use our own learnings as case studies including the challenges and benefits we derive. 

Matt Rogers
Windows Azure Product Marketing
twitter.com/mattrogerstx

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