Microsoft Azure details cloudy
The second half of 2009 promises to be an exciting time for Microsoft fans with the company not only releasing the final version of Windows 7 but also its Azure cloud computing platform. Although Azure is already in a community technology preview mode, details of exactly how Azure will be priced, structured and guaranteed will only be made available later this month at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference.
Azure is essentially an Internet-hosted operating system offering users a development and hosting environment based in Microsoft’s datacentres. The platform will offer a range of services which will provide users with a runtime environment for deploying, hosting and managing Internet-based applications.
Originally announced late in 2008 Azure’s costing and service agreements have not yet been outlined by Microsoft. But, at its Partner Conference in mid-July, the company is expected to explain exactly how the service will be charged out to customers and what service guarantees the platform will offer. Although not a great deal is yet known about Microsoft’s Azure plans these are the few things that we do know.
Uptime and service agreements
As more and more users migrate both their personal and business services online, service level agreements for platforms such as Azure become increasingly important. With millions of GMail accounts signed up, Google’s occasional downtimes now have far wider implications than merely inconveniencing a few hobbyists. Many businesses rely on GMail and Google’s AppEngine to conduct day to day business and a day’s worth of downtime has major ramifications.
Unlike Google’s services which are mostly provided free of charge, and therefore with limited guarantees, Azure will be a paid-for service and will have to have service level agreements built in to ensure uptimes in the region of 99.9%. And even at that level, a 0.1% downtime means around 40 minutes a month of outage. Azure’s first public downtime was in March this year which was for 22 hours. That kind of outage in the future could be costly for Microsoft.
Cross platform and interoperability
Over the past couple of years Microsoft has been increasingly moving towards interoperability with other platforms, operating systems and programming languages. With Azure Microsoft has made it clear that it intends to continue this. In its original announcement of Azure Microsoft said that the computing platform would not simply be for .Net and Windows users but that other development environments would be included. To date Microsoft has announced software development kits on Azure for PHP, Java and the Ruby development environment. All of which bodes well for Azure being seen as a cross platform hosting environment.
Costing
Although Microsoft is yet to announce prices for its Azure service, doing so is now becoming a key step forward for the platform. Azure will enter the market as a latecomer. Google has been offering a range of cloud-type services for many years already and has a head start on Microsoft.
The bigger obstacle for Microsoft, however, is Amazon. That company’s web services, which include EC2 cloud compute, S3 storage service and SimpleDB, already have in excess of 60 000 users and most of those are large corporates, the market Microsoft is after. Amazon also has about three years’ headstart so Microsoft is going to have to be very aggressive in its pricing to attract users across to Azure.
To date Microsoft has been very quiet on exactly what its plans for Azure are but at its Worldwide Partner Conference, which starts on July 13, users can expect to finally find out those details.
Loading ...