azure

Party’s over, kids: Microsoft has private cloud all sewn up. In 2010. Maybe

Microsoft says it will have the definitive virtualized public/private/platform cloud solution ready to go in a “shrink wrap” package by 2010, and that, by the way, hosters that aren’t fully virtualized will go the way of the dodo. Of course, this may come as a surprise to all the hosters already going great guns with any variety of managed, virtualized and dedicated offerings, including cloud computing models.

Zane Adam, Senior Director of Virtualization at Microsoft announced the Microsoft model for hosting companies and data centers at Tuesday’s Hosting Con 2009 keynote. He said that lowering “human touch” and “fabric management” were the new face of hosting and “those that pull the plug [on virtualization and automation] too late will become dinosaurs.”

Adam pitched Microsoft’s “System Center Solutions” and Dynamic Data Center Tookit as the provisioning and management glue for Microsoft’s new server products. Get on Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, he said, download the software kit and away you go: virtualized, managed, cloud-ready. A wonder no one’s thought of that before.

Adam was perhaps too farseeing for those at the keynote. Some attendees felt the conversation might be getting a little blurry, a little too fast. That’s not surprising given the audience — rock-ribbed rack-em-and-stack-em hosters — many of whom see an inextinguishable need for physical hosting, even as cloud computing grows.

Adam said the “vNext” version of the Toolkit will complete the vision with dynamic provisioning for virtual machines, application monitoring and “one-click” provisioning by Q1 of 2010.

Microsoft is justly famed for a pie-in-the-sky product lines, but there may be some meat to the announcement. Server 2008 R2 with be released this October, and Azure is slated for the general availability at the same time. The “System Center” and the toolkit are already out, in crude fashion.

So, hosters, if you were tired of watching Amazon and Rackspace do it for free, or hadn’t heard of VMware or Xen, or just start feeling a little antediliuvian, all you have to to is wait. Microsoft will have this whole virtualization/cloud thing sewn up tight some time next year.

Big Week In The Clouds

Most weeks are pretty cloudy for me these days. However, this one was chock-filled with exciting stuff. In case you missed any, here goes…

Rackspace Cloud API

Rackspace has three cloud offerings, ( Cloud Files, Cloud Sites, and Cloud Servers). Cloud Sites is their PaaS offering that use to be called Mosso. Cloud Files is, of course, their cloud storage offering. The big question for Rackspaces’s IaaS has been no-API (i.e, Cloud Servers). Some people believe that you really can’t be called an IaaS unless you have an API to manage the infrastructure. This week Rackspace answered this question.

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Azure Pricing

This week Microsoft announced the long awaited pricing for their new PaaS offering called Azure. Microsoft announced that their bare bones windows services, running on Azure, will be $0.12 per hour. The big debate this week has been focused on comparing the Azure pricing with Amazon’s EC2 Windows pricing at $0.125 per hour. The answer is, you really can’t compare. First off, Azure is a PaaS that doesn’t offer OS level access and Amazon is an IaaS that gives you Administrator (root) level access.  Secondly, Azure applications can only run as .Net or Win32 based applications.  Azure runs similar to the way Google’s PaaS works. You can install your application code into their Paas; however, you can’t install an already packaged application. For example, you can’t install something like Drupal on Azure, at least not easily.  One last point is that, Amazon EC2 Windows instances run as Windows 2003 Servers only.  In the end the primary choice will most likely not be price, and more likely will be based on the target application.

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GSA To Build A Store Front To The Clouds

The General Services Administration is plaining to launch an online application, (i.e., storefront), to enable agencies to purchase cloud computing applications like Amazon Web Services. The Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, announced this on Wednesday.

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BMC Offers A Deployment Solution For Amazon Web Services

BMC Software announced this week that they are leveraging Amazon Web Services to manage hybrid cloud environments by managing deployments to Amazon’s EC2.  BMC has had a solid story for behind-the-firewall-management ever since their acquisitions of BladeLogic and Remedy.  By combing service management solutions with strong provisioning in a cloud environment could make this move exciting.

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