Let The Battle For Hearts And Minds Commence: Amazon Eyes Microsoft Developers

Microsoft will take the wraps off the Windows Azure Platform, its cloud computing platform as a service (PaaS) offering, during their Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week. Not to be outdone, Amazon Web Services pre-empted all the fun with their release of the AWS SDK for .Net Developers. No matter how you slice it, the fact remains that the future success of any technology company rests, to a large extent, on its ability to attract developers. The cloud computing paradigm doesn't change that. As this news demonstrates, a healthy, vibrant ecosystem of developers is well worth fighting for.

The new (and free) AWS SDK aims to make it as easy as possible for Microsoft Windows developers to build .Net applications that leverage Amazon Web Services, including Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. According to Amazon, "developers get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with Visual Studio project templates, the AWS .NET library, C# code samples, and documentation". APIs are provided in the .Net library to make it easier for developers to focus on creating their application or service, rather than spending time managing the underlying "plumbing" for things like authentication, retries and error handling. You can find out more and download the SDK here.

Of course, what would make it even easier, and possibly better, would be the ability to do the actual application development on Amazon Web Service. That would be an interesting step and one that would put it head-to-head with the Azure Platform. Perhaps, that's where Amazon will ultimately go.

As I said, developers are critical for success; just ask Apple (or heck, Microsoft). Two things make them tick: a viable market and an easy way to get there. Amazon's new SDK is a step in the right direction. Let's see what Microsoft unveils this week with their cloud computing platform. The battle commence.