Microsoft Azure

Azure to blaze the way for hybrid cloud

Infosys believes Microsoft is staking out the cloud as the inevitable future of IT — and designing Azure to be a seamless bridge between hither and thither in order to make the transition in small steps for enterprise consumers.

According to Jitendra Pal Thethi, principal architect for Microsoft business intelligence at the Indian IT giant, Microsoft’s aim with Azure to hopscotch right over the Infrastructure-as-a-Service part of the cloud and sell what it already has – software — in the approved cloud fashion, on-demand, scalable and transparent at the hardware level. Why should the baker sell wheat, after all?

Thethi has been involved with Azure since development began, some three years ago. He said that Azure is designed to let developers to carve off sections of their projects and put them in Microsoft’s cloud without having to re-learn or revamp anything. Databases already developed in Microsoft SQL can go right into Azure’s SQL Data Service without a hitch, storage, processing and all, for example.

“This concept [is that] not everything will be in the cloud; not everything will be on-premise—it will be a hybrid world,” he said. Thethi said businesses already using Microsoft for development “can pick off the low hanging fruit” without having to leave their comfy Microsoft environment or design an interface to a non-Microsoft cloud.

“Azure today gives you an on-premise experience….It’s something none of the other cloud providers provide,” he said. Thethi said that cloud computing will fundamentally change development and design, but it’s years away and Microsoft is well aware of that.

“The fact of the matter is that they want to get the ball rolling,” he said, and get developers comfortable with using online services in small ways before thinking bigger. “The entire architecture and development [model] is going to change,” he said, but Microsoft is betting businesses will want to move into the cloud in safe, familiar steps.

Microsoft plans to make Azure as compatible and useful as it can, reasoning that the less developers have to do, the easier it will be for them to make the switch. Some people already call Azure “on-demand Server 2008.”

Furthermore, it should be noted that Microsoft has no real advantages in delivering computing power itself; it neither makes computers nor helps people run them. Hosting companies and data centers do that, and they are already cutting a broad swath in the public cloud market.

So Redmond, by virtue of ubiquity, has the opportunity to carve out the Platform-as-a-Service territory very neatly. It already makes the software that (mostly) everyone is using, it has plenty of spare cash and plenty of big iron on the ranch for users, and it can scoop up subscribers and users just be being that little bit easier to use, and just a few cents cheaper than the competition, and by letting enterprises come in at their own pace.

After all, Microsoft is nothing if not patient. With cloud computing, it has everything to gain here, very little to lose and an audience it doesn’t have to chase. All it has to do is make Azure run, and wait.

Gartner VP predicts thousands of clouds

Gartner’s Vice President and distinguished analyst Tom Bittman spoke with us about the IT industry evolution led by virtualization and cloud computing, and why big players like VMware won’t be the virtualization software of choice.

Since virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing, clouds are the next logical step for virtualization vendors like VMware and Citrix Systems, but Bittman said if these vendors don’t make pricing changes, cloud platform providers like Google and Amazon won’t use them.

“Cloud computing is a wide open market, dominated by open source Xen. It is a market that is there for the taking, and for VMware that would require a significantly different pricing model,” said Bittman, who also blogs about virtualization and cloud computing. “Sun and Citrix could get a major foothold in the cloud market as well, if they get their act together.”

VMware has taken steps towards becoming cloud friendly with its Vcloud initiative, but Vcloud is limiting because the provider has to use VMware, Bittman said. Microsoft also has its own cloud service, Azure, supported by Hyper-V.

Microsoft will probably try to turn Azure into a platform for ISV’s to build software as a service, so “in a lot of ways, they are trying to build a platform for a cloud,” Bittman said. But, “there is no reason Windows will be a prominent player in the cloud…[because providers] like Amazon EC2 don’t care what the OS is; all they care about is what is being provided.”

The future of clouds; more providers, fewer OSes

Today, cloud computing is dominated by a small number of large providers, but in the years ahead there will probably be ecosystems built around those islands; Software as a Service (SAAS) built upon the existing clouds, and the sharing of resources between cloud providers, Bittman said. He also expects fragmentation from the few general cloud platforms of today into many specialty cloud providers with applications and infrastructures that cater to specific industries, like healthcare, which have specific compliance requirements, Bittman said.

“We will see a growth to thousands of cloud providers and they won’t want to write their own software using Xen; they will want to buy software and that is where companies like Sun could make a play,” Bittman said.

Cloud computing is also changing the game when it comes to operating systems; the concept of the Meta-OS (like VMware’s Virtual Data Center OS) is changing the paradigm of using one OS per physical server, Bittman said.”The old idea is you build one platform to manage one box, but if I have 10,000 boxes, I don’t want 10,000 OSEs managing everything independently,” Bittman said. “If I turn an OS into a dumb container, it can work in a much more distributed way, like Microsoft’s Azure, which is essentially Windows 2008 sprinkled all throughout the data center. This is changing the way we look at OSes going forward.”

Cloud computing has the power to change things in the IT industry because of what it offers companies; flexibility and agility, Bittman said.

“Most infrastructures today focus on cost, but we are beginning to see a focus shift towards agility. People are using [cloud environments] not because of the cost savings, but because it is flexible. The ability to make changes according to demand qickly is becoming a more important factor for data centers,” Bittman said.

Cloud computing, are you in or out?

While the cloud is a new dimension of technology that IT managers and administrators will bake into the technology landscape, we have to make one fundamental decision: will the technology be in our out of our traditional data centers? This is a loaded question in regards to policy, security, compliance and a myriad of other categories that are very line-of-business specific.

One element than help give perspective for making this type of decision can be applied from basic management challenges. One important thing that I learned from working with various project managers is that in any engagement it is important to determine what you can manage and what you can (or cannot) control. When back-end components of the cloud reside outside of traditional internal data centers, we can manage the cloud — but not entirely control it. Part of this – identified in Lauren Horowitz’ post on this site – concerns the topics of transparency, service issues and cloud standards. When it comes down to it, if the back-end components of the cloud are outside the traditional data center, it cannot be fully controlled internally.

For offerings such as the Amazon EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, and Rackspace, these offerings are off site from internal data centers. With this parameter, decisions have to be made about what lies inside and outside traditional data centers. The alternative to the cloud back end being external, however, may not be as attractive and the time to market compared to a provided solution is inferior.

Building a cloud internally may be a daunting task for some organizations, especially when some of the more primary components may not already be in place. One mechanism that can truly enable an internal cloud is a virtualized server environment. In quantifying the virtual environment, it is not necessarily how many virtual machines or hosts are in use but the percentage of systems that are virtual machines. Along with that, another building block of a cloud is a storage grid for ultimate flexibility on data protection. Lastly, network capabilities are a pillar that defines the internal cloud. This can include the use of load-balancing and traffic-managing switches. With all of that, it becomes pretty clear that the costs and growing pains could be significant.

Make no mistake, there will be cloud computing success stories. But in the case of your own implementation — determining where the back-end cloud components reside will be a critical question that will need answering sooner than later.

Microsoft launches Azure for cloud computing

Following on the heels of an IDC report predicting that cloud computing will capture IT spending growth over the next five years, another major player came to the cloud game on Monday. During a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform.

The Azure platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services hosted by Microsoft’s global datacenter network, providing developers the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enabling experiences across a range of business and consumer scenarios. A limited community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform was initially made available to PDC2008 attendees.

“Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community,” Ozzie said. “We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web. Most important, it gives our customers the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based Internet services or through on-premises servers, or to combine them in any way that makes the most sense for the needs of their business.”

The key components of Azure are summarized:

• Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking

• Microsoft SQL Services for database services and reporting

• Microsoft .NET Services that are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control

• Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and websites

• Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud

Nicolas Carr shared some of the nitty-gritty details:

During its preview stage, Windows Azure will be available for free to developers. Once the platform launches commercially - and, according to Ozzie, Microsoft will be “intentionally conservative” in rolling out the full platform - pricing will be based on a user’s actual consumption of CPU time (per hour), bandwidth (per gigabyte), storage (per gigabyte) and transactions. The actual fee structure has not been released, though Ozzie says it will be “competitive with the marketplace” and will vary based on different available service levels.

Now, it’s not horribly shocking that Microsoft has joined the movement to the cloud. But it’s a bit amusing because a lot of the cloud effort has been generated by those anti-Windows programmers, looking to share applications that directly compete with the Microsoft product suite. As I read through David Chappell’s Azure white paper, I couldn’t help but chuckle when I read this: “The Windows Azure compute service is based, of course, on Windows.”