Today is an exciting day for the AppFabric Platform.
Over the last two years, we have been talking about two “AppFabrics”: Server AppFabric as an on-premise platform for hosting and monitoring composite applications 
and providing a fabric for managing persistence and elastic scale. We have also talked about Azure AppFabric, a set of cloud-based services including the Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control Service. In various talks and articles over the last several months, I’ve talked about how we really need to start thinking about AppFabric, not just as a single brand, but more importantly as a single platform for seamlessly hosting, managing and optimizing both on-premise and cloud assets.
| Today |
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The Azure AppFabric Service Bus is probably one of the least understood, and therefore under-appreciated Azure services. Part of this is a marketing problem, but the other part is that it is middle-ware under middle-ware. The Service Bus is a bridge between Windows Server AppFabric; your WCF, WF and ASP.NET applications running on premise, and Azure services including Web Roles, Worker Roles and SQL Azure. This isn’t just a dry infrastructure thing, and to suggest that it is merely a internet-scale pub-sub story undersells its value. This is a fundamental technology that is the cornerstone for enabling enterprises to take advantage of both on-premise and cloud assets. What does this mean? In short, we have have been drunk on request-response message exchange patterns over the last decade, making request from behind our firewalls to a service hosted on some commodity hosting provider. What remains a very, very difficult problem is talking to on-premise services from outside of the firewall. While there are very good reasons for this, this is the single greatest inhibitor to 
truly realizing the potential of a hybrid platform. Azure AppFabric Service Bus solves this problem, and I believe it is one of the sleeper technologies that once awoken has the potential to do for composite applications and SOA what Web.20 did for the Internet. If you want to learn more about it, please check out my presentations, decks and videos here:http://rickgaribay.net/archive/2010/05/19/desert-code-camp-2010.1-content.aspx
| Tomorrow |
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Windows Server AppFabric is a huge leap forward in brining first class hosting, monitoring and scale to WCF, WF and ASP.NET applications. It provides a simplified deployment model, a dashboard for monitoring your applications and services and a drill down perspective in the domain of service era applications. From a consumer perspective, the Azure Development Portal is the equivalent for managing your services in the cloud, and up until recently what you give up in terms of knobs and switches you gain in terms of convention. That said, while functional, most would probably agree that the Azure management experience is lackluster compared to its on-premise Server AppFabric sibling.
I am very pleased to see how far the platform has come and I look forward to the day when the AppFabric platform delivers the benefits of location transparency that a logically centralized but physically distributed platform can provide. In speaking with various PMs, it looks like the AppFabric Platform will be one step closer to fully landing by the end of the year.