Microsoft plans for cloud space which is already crowded with competitors

Some call it better late than never. But theres also the last but

surely not the least. Its not that easy to figure out which applies best for

traditional software czars like Microsoft, when you see them sharpening their

edge like never before, as they enter the foggy stratosphere of clouds and

challenge early birds like VMware and others.

Just how precise the edge is, stays to be seen, but MS is definitely

brandishing the sword with aplomb. And that makes one wonder whether Azure would

still stay the color of so many blues that cloud players are grappling with.

Or would it be the fresh stark blue confidence that one sees in the eyes of

Amitabh Srivastava, senior VP, Windows Azure, Microsoft?

Market strategy against competition, beta stage outages, virtualization

standards, open cloud manifesto and enterprise readiness of Azure; on his recent

visit to India, Srivastava talks about all these issues enveloping its cloud

strategy, and more. Excerpts

What exactly is the status of MS strategy on cloud market with Azure,

specially in view of rival pioneers who are ahead in terms of market entry?



Well, as to being early or late, MS has been doing cloud for over a decade

now. MSN and internal data centers spread on this stuff, are a historical point

there. It is just that it wasnt called cloud back then. Then, Amazon, Google,

etc, showed good work on clouds larger potential.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the

development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure

services platform. Azure provides developers with on-demand computing and

storage facilities to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet

through Microsoft data centers.

It is currently in Community Technology Preview and commercial availability

is likely at the end of calendar year 2009.

But does the current limelight for cloud suggest it is the right time to

accentuate portfolio and strategy around it?



Right now, hype has overtaken reality. Cloud is a massive geographically

distributed computing mechanism made available as a utility service. We are

among the first ones to build an operating system for it, with Azure. It allows

for better efficiency on hardware, drives costs down and takes the complexity

away (unlike our competition).

A good operating system is crucial to realizing the real worth of clouds and

managing it better. Automating various elements, instead of letting it go the

manual way, brings opex and capex down and reduces complexity. Thats what we

are trying to offer.

Lot of people think of cloud as a replacement of IT. But its an extension at

times. There are certain things ready to go for cloud. But due to data security,

compliance, and control issues, customers have to take a mixed route also, with

some stuff put on cloud while the rest remains on premises. Now thats where

there should be seamless flow in between the two, and you need a good technology

to orchestrate that well

On the programming side also, MS believes and works on how to make it easier

for developers. Its important that we provide capabilities that allow a

developer to generate any number of applications, as per his choice and take the

complexity bit out.

There was some twenty-two hour outage with your Washington data center

beta, apparently due to some load balancing problem. How did you assess that?



The business application for managing the entire data center was an issue.

Fabric controller works on a logic. The fabric controller technology in Windows

Azure enables to scale applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls.

Built-in management services give monitoring and tracing capabilities.

If a machine goes down, it brings another machine automatically to ensure

uninterrupted and absolutely smooth work. Now here, in this incident, there was

no breakdown or machine downtime issue, but just some networking issue.

Still, the application made sure and brought in another machine. Now that

compounded the problem. It was not a problem due to some loophole, but because

of the system being extra alert and proactive. It definitely gave us another

area to address.

Talking about the developments on open cloud manifesto, what is MS

standpoint now?



We are very interested in an open dialog and figuring out clearly on how

cloud works. But its important that all stakeholders, whether users or

developers, are involved. It should be a publicly open forum. We are all for it.

But it is very important to understand what the customers want. One cannot just

standardize without it and then push it across.

All our formats are XML Open, and we have built upon a platform that is wired

well for interoperability, be it Red Hat, Google, etc.

Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and

non-Microsoft languages and environments. It supports popular standards and

protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

Enterprise readiness of cloud products is a critical issue today. Whats

your progress on this?



A customer wants costs to come down, and wants agility without hassles on

security, compliance, etc, when he opts for a cloud. Then there are service

level agreements (SLAs) ranging from normal to severe, depending on various

business requirements. We will definitely learn as we go.

We have a large enterprise business. And the readiness would be evolutionary.

Some workloads would move onto clouds, some will stay. Issues and practical

areas of concern will start emerging. It would be a stage wise approach.

As of now, with Azure, customers can add web service capabilities to existing

packaged applications. They can build, modify, and distribute applications to

the web with minimal on-premises resources.

In addition, they can perform services (large volume storage, batch

processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc) off-premises. In short,

they can reduce costs of building and extending on-premise resources and reduce

the effort and costs of IT management.

Pratima Harigunani/CMN



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