Windows Azure Goes Live — Sixteen Months After Its Unveiling

Microsoft Azure has two birthdays, and both are real. Microsoft announced it as Windows Azure on 27 October 2008, at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, and opened a limited preview. It became a commercial, generally available service on 1 February 2010, in 21 countries and with full service level agreements. The name changed to Microsoft Azure on 3 April 2014. In Japan, Azure began serving customers from local data centres in February 2014.

So "when did Azure launch?" has a short answer — 1 February 2010 — and a longer one that starts sixteen months earlier.

The timeline

October 2008: the announcement

Microsoft's press release of 27 October 2008 put Ray Ozzie, then chief software architect, at the front. Ozzie called the day a turning point for Microsoft and its developers. What he introduced was broader than a place to run code. The Azure Services Platform bundled several services:

• Windows Azure — hosting, storage, compute and networking
• Microsoft SQL Services — database and reporting
• Microsoft .NET Services — workflow and access control
• Live Services — synchronising documents and files
• SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services — business collaboration

At that point it was a limited Community Technology Preview: developers could try it, but not run paid production work on it. Amazon had been selling storage since S3 in March 2006, and Google had opened App Engine in April 2008. Microsoft was announcing a cloud platform after both.

2009: a price list and a date

The commercial terms came in July 2009, at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference. As reported by Redmond Channel Partner, the prices were:

The storage price matched what S3 had charged at its launch three years earlier.

On 29 October 2009 Microsoft set out the switch-over. New features would arrive at PDC on 17 November; the preview would remain open until 31 December; in January 2010 customers would register for the production service, with that month's usage free so they could see what they would be billed; and charging would begin on 1 February.

1 February 2010: general availability

On the day, Doug Hauger, general manager for Windows Azure, posted on the Official Microsoft Blog that Windows Azure and SQL Azure were generally available in 21 countries, and that production applications now had the backing of full service level agreements. He wrote that thousands of customers had already moved from the preview to production since January.

That is the date this page uses. The 2008 date is when the platform was revealed; February 2010 is when a company could pay for it and hold Microsoft to an SLA.

2014: Japan, and a new name

On 25 February 2014 Microsoft's Takeshi Numoto announced that two regions in Japan — Japan East in Saitama Prefecture and Japan West in Osaka Prefecture — would be generally available that day. Two regions meant Japanese customers could keep data in the country and still replicate it between two sites for recovery.

A month later, on 25 March 2014, Microsoft said that Windows Azure would be renamed Microsoft Azure from 3 April. The post explained the change as reflecting Azure's role as a public cloud platform both for customers and for Microsoft's own services, naming Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Bing, OneDrive, Skype and Xbox Live. The rename came in the first weeks of Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO, which began on 4 February 2014. The product was no longer tied, by name, to Windows.

Ten years later

Synergy Research Group, which measures cloud infrastructure services — IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud together — reported in February 2021 that Microsoft had reached a 20% share of the worldwide market in the fourth quarter of 2020, second to Amazon, whose share had stayed in a 32–34% band for four years. It is one firm's estimate, on its own definition of the market.

In 2019 Azure became the ground for an exclusive computing partnership when Microsoft invested in OpenAI. The company is covered on Microsoft, and the sequence of providers on the cloud computing timeline and the Microsoft timeline.