imageThe Microsoft Cloud OS provides enterprises with a highly elastic and scalable infrastructure with always-on, always-up services. Automated management, robust multitenant support, and self-service provisioning help enterprises transform their datacenters to support the coordination and management of pooled sets of shared resources at the datacenter level, replacing fragmented management of individual server nodes.

At the core of the Microsoft Cloud OS is Windows Server 2012.  The new operating system provides a comprehensive set of capabilities across the enterprise private cloud datacenter, and public cloud datacenters.

  • Agile Development Platform: The Microsoft Cloud OS allows enterprises to build applications they need using the tools they know, including Microsoft Visual Studio and .NET, or open-source technologies and languages, such as REST, JSON, PHP, and Java.
  • Unified DevOps and Management: The Microsoft Cloud OS supports unified DevOps and unified application life-cycle management with common application frameworks across development and operations. With Microsoft System Center integration with development environments such as Visual Studio, enterprises can achieve quick time-to-solution and easy application troubleshooting and management.
  • Common Identity: The Microsoft Cloud OS implements Active Directory as a powerful asset across environments to help enterprises extend to the cloud with Internet scale security using a single identity and to securely extend applications and data to devices.
  • Integrated Virtualization: To help enterprises achieve the modern datacenter, the Microsoft Cloud OS includes an infrastructure which provides a generational leap in agility, leveraging virtualization to deliver a highly scalable and elastic infrastructure with always-on, always-up services across shared resources and supporting cloud service delivery models with more automated management and self-service provisioning. With Windows Server 2012, the Microsoft Cloud OS is engineered for the cloud from the metal up with virtualization built as an integrated element of the operating system, not layered onto the operating system.
  • Complete Data Platform: The Microsoft Cloud OS fully supports large volumes of diverse data, advanced analytics, and enterprise BI life-cycle management, with a comprehensive set of technologies to manage petabytes of data in the cloud, to millions of transactions for the most mission-critical applications, to billions of rows of data in the hands of end users for predictive and ad-hoc analytics.

Ready to find out more?  Be sure to visit the Windows Server 2012 Launch site at http://www.windows-server-launch.com/Home.  You’ll see a wide variety of information on our cloud OS from a business and technical perspective. Also see Satya Nadella's blog post on some of the key development aspects of the cloud OS. We do of course have a press release on Microsoft.com if interested.

For those of you that are TechNet or MSDN subscribers, Windows Server 2012 is now available for download. If you don’t have a subscription, no problem.  Download the Windows Server 2012 Evaluation.  This link is currently describing the release candidate but will be updated soon.

Microsoft.com/WindowsServer2012 is always a good starting point for overview information, the data sheet, downloads and case studies.

For those of you that are looking for technical information, be sure to go to the technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver tech center.  There’s a wealth of deployment, security and management information there and you’ll see the release documentation light up through the course of the day.