

Microsoft launches Windows Azure, its "cloud OS" - bdfh42
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/10/microsoft_launc.php

======
mkn
Am I wrong in wondering if cloud computing might do for computing what hedge
funds and CDSs did for finances? By this I mean that in both cases we're
talking about attaining the last iota of efficiency by consolidating a
resource in the hands of a few. What happens when the MS cloud goes down? (I
know. Impossible.) We've seen the stories about people who have lost access to
their gmail accounts. What if a large portion of the economy has their
applications tied up in the cloud and there's an interruption in service. Or a
natural disaster.

Analogously, should these cloud providers be required by law to maintain a
(geographically distributed) computing reserve? A second (or third, even)
clone of the current cloud?

I understand that the communication between the cloud and the world is
distributed, but the actual cloud seems to be as distributed as a rock.

~~~
bstadil
Amazon currently have 3 separate data centers and additional S3 storage in
Europe. This trend will continue as SLAs become more of a selling point for
all Cloud purveyors.

Second why do people think that your own data center will be better? It is
like putting your money under the bed rather than in the bank. So people do
that but not a good idea.

Lastly we will see a common API emerge that will allow us to move with little
impertinent. The emergence of Eucalyptus is an early indication of this.

~~~
mkn
Your reply seems to be a spot-on agreement with my post, except that you don't
realize it. Your choice of analogy is particularly amusing in that, right now,
if you'd had your money under your mattress, you'd be better off than if you'd
invested in one of these highly-leveraged and over-exposed financial vehicles
that I'd mentioned. Mattressing one's money may have been the best idea of
them all for a large class of investors.

That aside, the proper way to make the analogy you're making is not to compare
investing in a CDS against putting money in or under your mattress, but rather
to compare it with putting it in a certificate of deposit in your locally-
owned bank or loaning it to a locally-owned business. Either of these would
very likely have less return and a higher risk for you. However, you would be
less susceptible to a global default cascade like the one that is happening
now.

The reason that _...your own data center [would] be better..._ isn't that it's
less likely to go down, but rather that, if everybody has their own data
center, the chances of a _global_ blackout go down drastically. This is
precisely the analogue I was pointing out. If banks had stayed _non-optimum_
and _local_ , then (arguably) we would not be facing a (potential) global
economic meltdown.

You may argue (rightly) that if you pursue these localist strategies when
everyone else is pursuing these more profitable consolidated strategies, which
_carry this systemic risk of catastrophic failure_ , that you'd succumb to
competition from others. This is the point of asking for regulation in the
market, and (possibly) the case for asking for it here. At some point, almost
by definition, the cloud computing market will commoditize. When that happens,
the only way to cut costs will be do do without redundancy, if that is a
legally available option.

The underlying problem is that people discount the cost/benefit of events that
happen in the distant future, and the global catastrophes in these two systems
always seems distant.

Finally, one may object that if redundancy is such a good idea, then it will
happen naturally and never be eroded by market forces. In this case, then,
there can really be no objection to legislation on the matter, because
everyone will naturally comply anyways.

~~~
mattmaroon
Almost nobody has yet lost money on typical retail bank products. Even a
checking account is better than the mattress. Retail banking is doing just
fine. Not that that's too relevant.

~~~
gaius
What about Icesave?

~~~
mattmaroon
A few banks in the entire world have failed. That qualifies as almost nobody.

Do they have anything like the FDIC over there? Even if retail banks did fail
here, everyone would get 250k back per.

~~~
gaius
They did... Until the Icelandic government reneged. The UK government (lots of
UK citizens had money there) then seized all their assets in the UK. It's a
huge diplomatic mess.

------
Viper
Is there a problem this solves better and cheaper than other available
solutions?

If there is I can't see it. Did they even do a proper business case?

I can't see startups using it for a ton of reasons.

I can't see most businesses using it. They want their data in their data
center.

The only use I can see would be a way for MS to sell software as a service to
companies that want hosted Exchange, sharepoint, etc.

------
josefresco
One question that comes to mind: How does this effect the market for private,
dedicated (managed) servers? Or rather the platform providers for today's
online apps?

------
dmose
Whitepaper on it:

[http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/4/3/e43bb484-3b52-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/4/3/e43bb484-3b52-4fa8-a9f9-ec60a32954bc/Azure_Services_Platform.docx)

~~~
sriramk
[disclaimer - I work for the Windows Azure team].

The root website is www.azure.com - that should link to all the relevant docs,
bits, sites. We're turning on all the switches as I write this so you may see
a few 404s before noon PST.

~~~
DenisM
A bit of feedback:

I would be hesitant to start using this because there is no way to anticipate
the pricing scheme whenever it shows up. Last thing I want is to commit to a
platform andthen find out it's cost-prohibitve. Also, google promises to keep
certain level of usage free which makes me more likely to try because I know I
won't get suddenly hosed with high prices.

~~~
dmix
I've heard this come up many times today. I'm curious if everyone questioned
the financial motives of Google App Engine when it first came out.

Then again the target market for Azure seems to be enterprise IT depts, who
tend to be involved with proprietary technology, and not start-up developers
looking for a cheap and efficient host.

~~~
DenisM
1\. Yes, I did question it back then too. Google has since rectified their
stance and published their pricing scheme. The paid service is not operational
yet but it's a neccesary piece of inforation to plan the projects ahead. I
have started learning pyhon based on that information (python is required for
google's services) but did not commit the project itself yet because the ship
date is still up in the air.

2\. This is not true, they target several markets and among them both
corporate develoers and web developers:
<http://www.microsoft.com/azure/corpdev.mspx>
<http://www.microsoft.com/azure/webdev.mspx>

------
dcurtis
Microsoft has destroyed their brand so completely that I don't even consider
this a viable product. I don't _trust_ Microsoft.

~~~
dejb
When did you actually trust Microsoft with online computing? Before Vista? I
don't see a huge relationship between Vista and their online efforts. Sounds
like a bit of MS bashing propaganda from somebody who has never liked or
trusted them.

~~~
axod
Microsoft has never "gotten" the internet. They still don't. I don't see any
reason to suppose they have suddenly "gotten" it here.

~~~
mattmaroon
Not entirely true. They've really gotten it where console gaming is concerned,
moreso than anyone else. The Xbox has been consistently better than its rivals
at that.

They're now serving up millions of dollars worth of games per month (allegedly
70% of Xbox owners have used Live Arcade) and are moving into streaming video
too. I can now watch MSNBC through it.

They've achieved the dream an internet-connected box on millions of people's
TVs. Apple tried and failed miserably with their TV product.

There clearly are people at the company that get it.

~~~
axod
I'm not sure how you're measuring console success. For me, Nintendo is the
clear winner of the current console wars. Nintendo makes hideous amounts of
profit on everything. XBox as far as I understand still makes a gargantuan
loss. It's a long term strategy, and who knows, maybe it'll play out for
microsoft, but I don't think it's relevant to the question of ms understanding
the internet. It just shows they understand getting people to use something
and taking a massive loss on it.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
The Xbox division is now actually turning a profit. Not enough to offset the
massive losses it's had in the past, but it is actually generating revenue
now.

The Xbox itself is a good product. They overlooked the market the Wii pursued,
but then again everyone but Nintendo did. If I recall Nintendo has never had
an unprofitable quarter, even during the GameCube days when they were doing
much less volume than the competitors.

~~~
mattmaroon
They've always viewed it as an investment. Honestly, it's worked out pretty
damn well. I'd never have guessed they'd have gotten to 2nd place so fast.

Moreover, they've just begun to capitalize on it. As I said, they've got an
internet connected box tethered to everyone's TV. They've been working on the
dream of the living room PC for years, and now they've finally gotten there.

~~~
axod
"they've got an internet connected box tethered to everyone's TV"

Teenage male bedroom TVs perhaps. Lets not get carried away here.

~~~
mattmaroon
Most people I've seen keep their gaming consoles in the living room since
that's where the best TV is.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
In fact, my father plays video games much more than I do.

And I consider myself a pretty "hard-core" gamer.

------
bigthboy
I'm interested to see how well the service fairs when it launches and I'm just
as interested in seeing the response from those developers who are being able
to test the platform. I think that this could potentially be a "step in the
right direction" for Microsoft to stay relevant in a world that's changing how
and where data and processing is handled. However, unlike many speculators who
talk about how someday the "Cloud will completely engulf the world," I don't
think that will happen anytime soon. As available as the Internet is and the
number of providers grow, there still is going to be a need for localized data
processing and handling to a certain extent. This is one of the places that I
agree with Microsoft in saying that it needs to be "Local + Cloud." The
concept of it all strikes me as something best used to enhance local
applications to have access to more information, seamlessly, and dynamically,
and be able to tailor that information to meet the needs of the end-user.

------
anamax
Vista only for the SDK is a problem.

------
jwilliams
Is it just me or is the Azure website having a lot of problems at the moment?
<http://www.microsoft.com/azure/>

I'm getting a lot of "page not available" errors and broken image links.

------
andr
Definitely interesting! From what I see at first glance, there's a queue/MQ-
like service, a scalable database (is it SQL or key/value?), a workflow
service, and the whole thing works whether you want to use .NET or not.

~~~
sriramk
You can find more docs on Windows Azure tables (distinct from the blobs
service which you missed :-) ) at
<http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=131257> . Sorry about the doc link.
I'm sure there's a web version somewhere which I can't find right now thanks
to the flaky connection I'm on

------
amvp
Maybe I'm missing something here, because nobody is mentioning it, but isn't
this a major shift for MS? Microsoft is a software company basically (other
than mice and zunes and 360s), but here they are offering essentially
hardware-as-a-service. If, last week, I would have gone to Dell and bought a
server with a windows license (Disclaimer: I'd never do such a thing!), I'd
now just pay MS to run my app on Azure . Dell, HP, IBM and whoever else make
windows servers have just been cut out of the equation, right?

~~~
grantc
H/w vendors are only cut out if MSFT invents a replacement for metal. Granted,
utility computing in the cloud is about squeezing more utilization and value
out of a given piece of h/w, so it's not without impact. You might perceive
this as a change, but I'd say it's a change in the paradigm moreso than a
change in MSFT.

Also, people tend to overlook this but cloud isn't really about infrastructure
or hosting. Sure those are the current analogs--cloud is about what happens
next, and I think it's more about shifting architectural tenets so that we do
what works well with cloud scale and lifecycle. When you do those things,
other interesting things start to become possible (e.g., in the cloud, it's
hard to have misaligned test and prod envs, not the rule like it is most
everywhere else).

------
cmars232
I wonder if their Python support will run "real Django"...

~~~
grantc
Google can help your wonderment.

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ironpython+django)

------
TweedHeads
Their "cloud" is already down, looks like vapor to me.

