One of the questions we get a lot from customers is how they can connect their Azure application to a database on premise(for legal considerations,…). A logical scenario, but not an easy one to answer. One possible answer on this question is Project Sydney, announced by Microsoft last year at PDC 2009. It would be a technology that enables customers to connect securely their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example.
Unfortunately it became really quiet after this first announcement. But now as PDC 2010 is approaching, I hope they’ll finally lift the curtain.
It’s an exciting time for cloud developers…