microsoft

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.

Microsoft Was Out of Line

Reuven Cohen, the founder of Enomaly, has been one of the brightest voices in the cloud computing revolution. Reuven, a self proclaimed Instigator, has been working tirelessly to get the word out about cloud computing. I first met Reuven on a plane ride from Austin to Chicago last year, and in that time he schooled me on everything “cloud”. I often refer to that trip as my cloud baptism. Since that trip I have stayed in touch and followed his activities. Reuven was responsible for the formation of the extremely popular Cloud Camp events. He also has started the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) to help pave the way for standards within cloud computing . Most recently he is the Instigator of something called the Cloud Computing Manifesto that will be announced this coming Monday (3/30/09).

A few of us who cover the cloud-o-sphere have been under embargo about this document and its upcoming announcement. I actually had the first opportunity to read this document last week and I had not planned on discussing it until Monday. Actually, I still do not plan on discussing the details of the document until Monday, as I promised; however, what I would like to talk about is the irresponsibility of Microsoft’s actions yesterday regarding this manifesto document. To be clear, Reuven Cohen, first and foremost is an entrepreneur and like all of us he is always looking for angles to create opportunities. Regardless, he has done some great work for the cloud computing community of which myself and software companies like Microsoft have benefited. Therefore, in an effort to coordinate this “Cloud Computing Manifesto”, he needed to share it with hundreds of organizations and numerous individuals, and all he asked the recipients were two questions in return. One, “Are you on board with this?”, and two, “Please keep it under wraps until the announcement date.”. In my opinion Microsoft was totally out of line to pre-announce the manifesto. Millions of analysts, developers, bloggers, and reporters honor Microsoft announcements all of the time and I feel it was completely hypocritical of Microsoft to jump the gun for selfish reasons, and pre-announce this document yesterday. It is obvious they have issues with the document and that is their right; however, they should have voiced their opinions about the document this coming Monday as will I.