Mark Russinovich is a legendary figure in the IT world because of his company Sysinternals.
He did so much reverse engineering of the Windows kernel that he ended up knowing it as much as the Microsoft architects. Microsoft acquired his company in 2006 and appointed him as Technical Fellow.
So far, his job has been related to the development of the Windows kernel (Windows 7 and beyond), taking care that its architecture was fully virtualization-aware.
Now a Microsoft developer evangelist, Matthijs Hoekstra, reports that he moved to the Windows Azure team.
While this may be completely unrelated, it seems yet another sign that Microsoft is preparing to launch the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) component of Azure.
While the platform is powered by a variant of Hyper-V, so far Microsoft only exposed its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities. But company clarified in multiple occasions (here and here for example) that Azure will compete with Amazon EC2 in offering hosted virtual machines.
Thanks to ZDNet for the news.