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Windows Azure is here! Great – what the heck is it and should you care?
With little fanfare, Microsoft made its cloud computing service known as Azure generally available this week. When was the last time Microsoft released anything so quietly, and why don’t we know more about it?
I suppose the answer is fairly simple: Microsoft likely released Azure with little expectation of it being a revenue or technology game changer. Amazon Web Services, as well as many others, have been in the space successfully for some time, and Azure is not bringing anything new to the game, nor is the pricing anything game changing. So why is Microsoft playing the game? We’ll get to that in a minute. First, I would like to explore Azure and cloud computing a little more.
So, what is Azure (or more broadly, what are cloud computing services)? Cloud computing has many definitions, depending on who you ask and what their offering is. Personally, I like the following definition “Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic — a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access).” If I had to explain it to my dad, however, I’d just say “It’s sort of like renting computing power through the internet instead of owning it, with the idea being to not have to buy expensive machines so often”.
Microsoft is specifically focused on the Infrastructure as a Service part of the market at this point and their Platform is focused around storage and flow of data in and out, along with all the normal complexity in pricing we know and love from Microsoft, such as transaction pricing for:
- Each 10,000 storage transactions (that will be one cent please)
- Number of web databases
- Access control transactions
- Service bus connections
- Data transfers (differing by world region)
While I have no intent of going into that stuff, it does show that there is some complexity to deal with here, though in all fairness, there are some all inclusive bundles for fixed monthly amounts that solve for 90% of all basic needs.
So what does this all mean?
As to whether you should you care about this at all, the answer for most small businesses is “Not today, but someday.” The concept of moving all of your infrastructure offsite and ‘renting’ capacity is compelling in a strange futuristic way, but there are many things to be worked out for this to make sense from a daily computing standpoint. Security, access, application integration, compliance, and other issues lead this list. Today, these services are most heavily used by those who need short term excess space for project or transactional work, or for those who chose to move a certain aspect of their infrastructure to the cloud. In small business, cloud computing needs are most often seen as offerings to host email or another simple application, but of course, that is not what Azure is doing just yet.
At some point in the relatively near future, this base of storage and capacity will start to be the underlying infrastructure for a robust offering that will include the full breadth of Microsoft’s software offerings, and likely will even include tools for management, integration, etc. At this point IT infrastructure looks much the same as it does today, it just lives somewhere else. As things stand today, the simplistic view of this offering is really just a server replacement, when what we really care about is what the server is running. Very few people really want to think about hardware and technology, and outsourcing this. What we want is a solution, fully fleshed out, simple, and cost effective. When that is offered, we’ll start paying attention.
So back to the last of the unanswered original questions: Why did Microsoft roll this out, and why with so little fanfare? No one has told me the answers, but I suspect they fall into the following groups:
- Because cloud computing is the future and waiting to ‘get it right’ before launching is too risky
- Because Microsoft can’t afford to let Amazon and other players gain a reputation as being the big players in the hardware game if it eventually has a big impact on the software game
- Because Microsoft doesn’t like to risk being left out of any potential game changers
I expect that much will change in cloud computing over the next few years, and while the big guys quietly evolve, it will be an innovative smaller guy that will provide the leap frog advancement that charts the path to the future (and then will be bought by one of the big guys). Such is the way of the world.
Each vendor builds their version of the cloud from what they know: Microsoft has an operating systems view, Amazon has a storage and transactions view, etc. What is missing is working backwards from what consumers want! We don’t care about operating systems, or transactions. We care about delivery of applications in a compelling, usable, and cheap fashion. Once cloud computing begins to embrace that there is a reason we want all of that hardware hidden somewhere else, the innovators in that space may begin to figure out what we have been saying to them all along – make it usable, make it cost effective, and make it work the way I want to, not the way the technology dictates.
Well, let’s give it some time and just see who gets it right first!
Happy Computing,
Richard Brunke
