Click here to read more.

Please check out Brad’s entire post below and you can visit the following links for more information on Microsoft’s private cloud or Windows Azure public cloud offerings. Thanks and let me know if you have any questions or comments.  Larry

Gartner just published the 2011 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure* and I’m very happy to report that Microsoft is listed among the leaders. Coming on the heels of InfoWorld’s Virtualization Shootout and a Microsoft-commissioned lab test by Enterprise Strategy Group, the Magic Quadrant rounds out a trifecta of independent recognition for Windows Server Hyper-V’s readiness in the enterprise. Added to this, a growing number of customers like Target and Lionbridge are running their businesses on Microsoft’s virtualization technologies.

What does this mean for you and your business? For one thing, it means the conversation about virtualization has changed for good. Now you can base your decision on value and which partner has the most compelling vision and strategy for the next logical step—private cloud computing. Private clouds provide elasticity, shared hardware, usage-based self-service—plus unique security, control and customization on IT resources dedicated to a single organization.

Throughout our industry, virtualization has become widely accepted as a means to a bigger end. In order to get the full advantage of cloud-computing you need to have world-class management capabilities that deeply understand the virtualized infrastructure—but more importantly have an in-depth understanding of the applications that are running virtualized. Microsoft’s management solutions provide that insight. System Center 2012 will System Center 2012 will offer the simplest solution to build private clouds at lowest price, using the infrastructure you are already familiar with and integrating seamlessly across the common virtualization platforms. “Concero,” a new capability in System Center 2012, empowers the consumers of cloud-based applications to deploy and manage those apps on private and public cloud infrastructures, helping IT managers deliver greater flexibility and agility to their business teams. 

But customers don’t have to wait for System Center 2012 to get started with private cloud. Microsoft and its partners—including Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC—already offer a range of private cloud solutions (custom, pre-configured, or hosted) built on top of Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center 2010. These solutions pool hardware, storage, and compute resources so you can deploy applications themselves, quickly and easily. With Microsoft’s private cloud solutions, IT can empower their business groups to deploy applications and ensure those applications perform reliably.

And our private cloud solution is the only one in the industry that builds a bridge between your existing investments—in both infrastructure and skills—and the public cloud. For many large enterprises, the best solution will be to adopt both public and private clouds, often using them in tandem as a “hybrid cloud.” Microsoft customers will be able to do this seamlessly with a common set of familiar tools—including development, management and identity solutions—that span the entire spectrum, allowing IT to manage their public and private clouds from a single pane of glass and to adapt the mix easily to changing business needs.

If IT’s primary role is to deliver applications that move the business forward, then an application-centric approach will help you stay focused on what drives business value. It’s this unique combination—private and public clouds built and managed with one set of tools—that enables Microsoft’s customers to focus on the applications rather than the underlying technology. As business needs evolve over time, you maintain control and flexibility over how you create, consume, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. With Microsoft’s comprehensive approach your applications drive the resources, not the other way around.

Thanks for your time.  Brad

*The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

The set of offerings provides businesses with powerful cloud-based communication and collaboration tools, which are already helping boost productivity while reducing IT costs. 

As part of the announcement a variety of partners supporting the release, as well as information on customers who have tried and are using Office 365 were included.  For example, over 20 service providers around the globe also shared plans to bring Office 365 to their customers this year as part of their service offerings for small and midsize businesses.  Customer stories are linked to from the announcement as well. 

For full details on the announcement and information on Office 365 please visit the links above.  If you’d like more information on Microsoft’s cloud offerings for businesses you can also check out the Cloud Power site here. 

Thanks and if you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to get back to you. 

Have a great day - Larry

Topics covered will include cloud adoption trends, Microsoft’s work in delivering the technology to help customers take advantage of those trends, and a discussion touching on our vision for the future of commercial cloud computing.

If you’d like to hear directly from Satya on what Microsoft is working on in the commercial cloud computing space check the event out live Wednesday around 11:10 a.m. PST here.  If you’re interested in finding more information on what Microsoft currently has to offer, check out the Cloud Power site as well.

Thanks for your time - Larry

He is a frequent speaker, prolific writer, and pundit. His book, Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2006, coauthored with Ron Schmelzer), is widely recognized as the leading business book on service orientation.

In this interview, we discuss:

- Fault tolerance and cloud brokering
- Architecting for failureMaking the cloud part of your enterprise architecture
- The shift from forecasting demand to forecasting usage costs
- Public versus private cloud
- Different models for multi-tenancy

Robert Duffner: Could you please take a minute to introduce yourself?

Jason Bloomberg: I am managing partner with ZapThink. We are an industry advisory firm focused on service-oriented architecture, enterprise architecture, and broadly speaking, helping organizations be more agile. We take an architectural approach to dealing with the issues large organizations face in leveraging heterogeneous IT environments.

Robert: You recently wrote, “Without cloud brokering, managing a hybrid cloud may be more trouble than it’s worth.” Can you expand on that a little?

Jason: Interestingly enough, I wrote that article just a few days before the most recent Amazon cloud issue, where several different parts of the Amazon cloud infrastructure went down. A lot of companies were caught unaware by that and had cloud-based applications that went down as a result, since they were under the common perception that the cloud is inherently fault tolerant, so by extension, Amazon’s infrastructure is inherently fault tolerant.

There are multiple availability zones. We are doing all this great stuff in the cloud and it’s still going down. In fact, companies that were betting on the Amazon cloud had actually violated one of the core principles of compute systems, which is no less true of the cloud than anywhere else: you need to avoid single points of failure.

By putting all of their eggs into a single cloud basket, those companies actually made the Amazon cloud itself a single point of failure. That’s where cloud brokering comes in. If you are using the public cloud, you need to have multiple public cloud providers and broker across them. That requirement obviously raises the bar in terms of how organizations can leverage the public cloud.

Robert: When all this happened, the last thing we were going to do at Microsoft was engage in any schadenfreude, and for us, it was an opportunity to bring the issue to our customers and partners around their deployment strategy, and have conversations about architecting for resiliency.

Jason: It’s inevitable that outages are going to occur to everyone, and you are inevitably going to get egg on your face when the problem hits you. There is nothing perfect in the world of IT, and you can depend on the fact that problems are going to develop where they are least expected, whoever you are.

Robert: That’s exactly right. We have some customers who deploy to just one data center, and we have other customers who deploy to multiple data centers. It seems that the Amazon customers that only deployed to a single data center probably experienced the most serious outage.

Jason: That’s the single point of failure problem again.

Robert: Indeed. You made another great post called “Failure Is the Only Option,” where you talk about the importance of architecting for failure. Can you expand a little bit on that?

Jason: That also touches on this same topic of avoiding a single point of failure. You should expect failure anywhere and everywhere in your overall IT environment, asking what would happen if each piece failed: the database, the network, the processor, the presentation tier, and so on.

For every single question, you should have a good answer, and if anything fails, it shouldn’t cause everything to go down. The cloud actually makes that precept even more important, because the cloud’s inherent resilience leads cloud providers to use cheap hardware and cheap networks.

They use commodity equipment and rely upon dynamic cloud provisioning and failover to deal with issues of failure. The customer has to understand that the cloud is designed and expected to fail, and they need to build applications accordingly.

You can’t put everything into a single cloud instance, because the cloud provider doesn’t have any sort of magic, no-failure pixie dust. These considerations often mean raising the bar, in terms of how you architect your applications.

Robert: You deal with a lot of enterprises. Where do you often find the low-hanging fruit, in the sense of the things where cloud computing can make the most difference immediately?

Jason: Cloud computing is still relatively new, and most enterprise organizations are still at the phase of dipping their toe in the water. There are a few early adopters that are willing to place bigger bets on some of the more advanced capabilities, but that’s the exception more than the rule.

Most enterprises are still at the level where they will do some storage in the cloud or maybe some virtual machine instances, but they haven’t yet gotten to the point of thinking about application modernization or application consolidation leveraging the cloud.

That step requires much more of an enterprise-architected perspective on how to leverage the cloud. Some organizations are working through that now, and we are placing a great deal of focus there, helping organizations understand how the cloud adds to their options.

It has to fit into their architecture, and the cloud is not some sort of magic alternative to their data centers. The right approach is for them to think of it as one of the different options they have.

Robert: I get to do a lot of executive briefing presentations for customers from all over the world, and it seems that most of the enterprise interest has been around infrastructure-as-a-service versus platform-as-a-service. I think they are looking for the low-hanging fruit, in terms of just taking existing apps and having someone host them in the cloud.

Jason: That’s the most straightforward aspect of cloud adoption, and it’s something of a “horseless carriage” approach. Those organizations understand how to build an app and host it internally, and this approach allows them to extend that understanding to an external hosting model.

It does over-simplify the problem, and it carries some missed opportunity. On one hand, you need to re-architect your apps to take full advantage of the cloud. On the other hand, the cloud opens up new capabilities that you didn’t have before. That’s where the big win is, as opposed to something like just taking your existing ERP solution and sticking it in the cloud.

That’s not the right way to think about the problem. The way to think about the problem is that the cloud is going to reinvent what it means to have enterprise applications, but that’s going to take time. We are not ready for that yet.

Robert: What do you see as things that may never move to the cloud?

Jason: I’m reluctant to use the word never, because when you start thinking about the long-term prospects of a trend like this, what it means to do cloud computing becomes broad and ubiquitous. The cloud is just going to come to mean dynamic provisioning and virtualization deployed in an automated fashion.

We can do that internally or externally, leveraging resources wherever they happen to be. In 5, 10, 15, or 20 years, we probably won’t think of it as cloud anymore. It’s just going to be the way IT is done.

Therefore, it’s not really a question of whether something is cloud or not. It’s really just a question of where you want your virtualization. Where do you need dynamic provisioning? Where do you need your levels of abstraction? How are those abstractions going to provide flexibility to the users?

With that perspective in place, it becomes a continuum of best practices, more than seeing cloud as a particular thing where some things belong and some don’t.

Robert: Mark Wilkinson is giving a talk at the Cloud Expo on “Overcoming the Final Barriers to Widespread Enterprise Cloud Adoption,” where he says many organizations view moving to the cloud as a leap of faith. Do you think organizations typically worry about the right things?

Jason: The companies that are placing big bets on the cloud are early adopters, and they have a particular kind of psychology. They are willing to place the bet on something that has risks, because they perceive that they can get a strategic advantage by being first.

Those companies are willing to assume the risks of the cloud in exchange for beating their competition to the cloud, and then taking that to the customers before the other guy. Only certain companies have that psychology; most companies are too risk-averse to do that.

A few are willing to place larger bets, and most understand that there are risks from the fact that it’s still a new approach, with missing pieces, a lack of standard support, and all the other issues you have with an emerging technology.

Robert: Joe Weinman put up a recent post on the Cloudonomics blog, where he offers some details around his “10 Laws of Cloudonomics.” One is the notion that on demand trumps forecasting.  Do you have any thoughts around that?

Jason: I guess it depends on what you mean by “forecasting.” In the context of a traditional way of thinking where you have existing on-premises infrastructure, you know how many servers you’re going to need in the future, because you’re going to track your usage patterns and things like that.

The cloud frees you from matters such as having to forecast how many servers you need to buy, but on the other hand, it opens up new kinds of forecasting. We now need to forecast how we’re going to leverage the cloud and take advantage of cloud-based capabilities as they mature.

That different type of forecasting is very hard to do this early in the market, because there are too many unknowns. It’s easier to say, “Based upon the usage trends, I’m going to need to buy 10 servers next month.” That sort of forecasting is pretty straightforward.

Robert: More and more, I’m starting to see a blurring between infrastructure and platform-as-a-service, and even, to some level, software-as-a-service. A lot of what I call SaaS 2.0 vendors are fundamentally building platforms. Do you see infrastructure and platform-as-a-service coming together?

Jason: I would say, actually, that the distinctions among the three different deployment models were a bit artificial to begin with. That model was based on some early thinking about how these things would play out. Now we’re talking about how infrastructure as a service grew out of virtual servers and things like that, and we have this notion of platform as a service as well, sort of in between, as an outgrowth of middleware markets.

As time goes on, it’s really more of a continuum. How many capabilities do you put into your infrastructure before you have platform-type capabilities? Likewise, some of the elements that characterize platform as a service include application frameworks that you can build applications with. How robust does an application framework have to be before it’s software as a service? 

Those answers don’t really matter, of course, because these terms are just meant to help clarify. They’re arbitrary distinctions to help conversations along, more than they are hard and fast distinctions in the technology.

Robert: That’s a good point. For example, with Beanstalk, Amazon is offering abstraction layers on top of the simple ability to run a VM hosted on one of their servers.

Jason: Amazon’s an interesting case, because they’ll run anything up the flagpole they think is cool, and Google does the same thing. If it takes off, great. If not, they’ll do something different. That means that, just because they’re doing something doesn’t mean it’ll become an established market, or even that it’s necessarily a good idea. It just means it was something they could do and they thought it was cool, so they figured they’d do it.

We’ll have to see how all this plays out. Over time, the individual market categories will consolidate and become clearer, but for the moment, it’s sort of all over the place. Of course, from the customer perspective, that just makes things even more confusing.

Robert: Gartner just published a research note saying that three quarters of respondents were pursuing a private cloud strategy and would invest more in private cloud than public. I’ve also seen some good research from James Staten of Forrester. One piece I specifically remember was called “You’re Not Ready for a Private Cloud.”

I think that discussion centers around what it fundamentally takes organizationally to deploy a private cloud. It’s one thing to virtualize workloads and reduce the number of physical servers through consolidation, but it’s a whole other thing to fundamentally deploy a private cloud and services layer.

What advice do you have for organizations looking at a private cloud strategy? And do you think this is really only for the IT shops that have huge budgets, such as large multi-national banks?

Jason: I would offer different advice for different customers, depending on what problems they want to solve. Keep in mind, though, that there’s been a disproportionate emphasis put on private cloud, and I see that as being a result of vendor spin.

From the vendor perspective, private cloud is a great way to sell more gear, so the big middleware and hardware vendors are pushing private cloud on the one hand because it sells more gear. On the other hand, particularly in IBM’s case, they see themselves as providing the gear to the service provider market.

They’re looking to the telcos who have been IBM customers to provide cloud capabilities to their customers. And of course, who are the telcos going to buy the underlying gear from other than IBM?

So there’s this emphasis on that because the vendors want you to do that. In reality, in many cases, there’s a better value proposition available from public cloud for enterprises, as they get a handle on what that means.

After all, public cloud gives you a lot of the cost advantages, the shift to operational expense, and some of the dynamic provisioning capabilities. One of the challenges of the private cloud is the need to support the ability to handle spikes in traffic, just as with your own data centers since day one.

With the public cloud, there are multiple customers, and hopefully everybody has spikes in traffic at different times. That’s the bet, anyway, and if it comes true, everyone benefits from much better utilization of the servers. The private cloud doesn’t provide that advantage, so in many ways, cloud value propositions are watered down in the private cloud.

Vendors are giving a lot of play to security and governance issues with the public cloud. Some of that is true, but you also have those issues in the private cloud as well. So some of it is vendor “fud”—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and some of it is just a reflection of the immaturity of the market.

It is important for cloud consumers to consider the role of vendor spin, as they are trying to push big enterprises to buy more gear. Many times, the story they tell is, “You have a data center, but now you need to build another one, which we’re going to call a private cloud. You need to buy all new racks, blades, and software.”

Some telcos want to build a private cloud to offer cloud capabilities to customers, and essentially, they’re building a managed service provider infrastructure. Conversely, some large enterprises think of a private cloud as their own internal service provider that will provide cloud capabilities to multiple divisions across a large enterprise.

There are still value propositions for companies in the public cloud, and over time, they’ll figure it all out. They’ll say public clouds are good for this and private clouds are good for that, with best practices that help define the pros and cons of each. For the moment, though, there’s an excessive emphasis on private cloud, in large part because the vendors see more dollar signs there.

Robert: That’s the end of my prepared questions. Is there anything else you’d like to address or expand on?

Jason: I recently published an article called “Cloud Multi-Tenancy: More Than Meets the Eye.” Multi-tenancy, as you know, is a key characteristic of public clouds, but I have found that there are actually different kinds of multi-tenancy at different levels.

First, there’s full multi-tenancy, or shared-schema multi tenancy, which is the kind that Salesforce has, for example, where everybody is essentially in the same application and the same tables. That model brings certain advantages, such as being easy to manage and scale, but it’s a one-size-fits-all kind of option.

There are other approaches as well. For example, there’s the clustered, shared-schema approach, where there are clusters of customers on different SaaS applications. Each of those can be configured to meet the needs of particular customers, which provides a bit more flexibility, but it’s also harder to manage.

Another model is what you might call isolated tenancy, where a big vendor might move a legacy app into the cloud, with a different instance for each customer. It’s not really multi-tenancy at all, at that level, but from the customer perspective, it can look like multi-tenancy.

That could actually encompass a bit more vendor spin, where every customer still gets their own application stack, but it’s now theoretically in the cloud, although, in reality, it’s more of a hosted provider option.

Robert: That’s great. Thanks for taking the time to share your perspectives.

Jason: Thank you; it’s been a pleasure.

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CDW talks Cloud Computing

It is an interesting time for the IT industry right now; a pivotal point in IT history that has a profound effect on our lifestyle.  The “Cloud” has reached mainstream status, infiltrating everyday life with offerings from email to minute by minute status updates on aspects of our personal lives.   Cloud services are changing how we deploy and use technology more and more.  There are many customers I speak with who are either saying it is just another XaaS (substitute X to make your favorite offering as a Service) or believe it simply means running servers in a 3rd-party datacenter.  Though a vast number of IT professionals are still digesting the cloud’s potential, those on the leading edge or those that have a mature IT services model as a pervasive part of an operational framework understand that the Cloud promises to be the most compelling IT story yet. 

Currently, the cloud can primarily be divided up into two general types; Public and Private (although there are others such as community and hybrid).  The public cloud is a bit more mature and understood as a collection of capabilities that come together to offer just what we ask of it; an application, a specific service, a server or even an entire infrastructure.  Additionally, the public cloud’s pay-for-what-you-use model is exceptionally cost effective, eliminating upfront capital investments.  Most importantly, you can focus more time on adding business and operational value to your organization’s strategic initiatives rather than chasing down the reason a network port just went offline, for example.

Cloud’s potential impact on driving efficiencies and cost savings is not yet well defined.  CDW’s recent Cloud Computing Tracking Poll surveyed 1,200 IT professionals from eight business segments to gauge organizations’ progress toward cloud adoption as well as their future plans for moving to cloud solutions. The results are surprising and illustrate how quickly the cloud is being adopted.  For instance, large businesses and higher education institutions lead cloud adoption at 37% and 34%, respectively. 

It is interesting to note that 50% of the respondents indicate they have not put together a cloud strategy, providing them with an opportunity to take advantage of the many flavors of cloud offerings including SaaS, IaaS or PaaS.

Business and IT leaders will dictate their rate of progression to the cloud based on organizational goals. In fact, many organizations have already moved one of their most critical applications to the cloud, email. This is a good indication of an organization’s wiliness to enable seamless remote access to a critical application running in the cloud.

There are many services beyond email that can benefit from moving to the cloud. Expect to see many other offerings from major software vendors in the near future.  While the public cloud has dominated the offerings from major providers, we shouldn’t overlook the private and hybrid cloud approaches.

Private cloud promises much of the same value as the public cloud; we can start to liberate ourselves from the nitty gritty details of IT and start to think (and act) at a higher level.  We want to deploy line of business applications, not hard drives, network cards, servers, operating systems, etc..  Private cloud enables us to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud while knowing that our data and security are still completely within our control or domain.  This does not mean, however, that a private cloud has to be on premise; it can be housed in a 3^rd-party datacenter with proper physical security controls.  Private cloud, no matter the location, is an assembly of technologies, processes, automations and flexibility rolled into one package. 

For many there is an erroneous understanding that virtualization = private cloud.  While virtualization is an important enabler to private cloud, it is important to note that it is just one part of the overall story.  Private cloud provides for ease of deployment and advanced systems management. Virtualization lets us build a Virtual Machine by selecting the processor, network and storage. Following these decisions, it would be necessary to install the operating system and any necessary applications.  With a private cloud solution however, a user can provision a pre-staged, fully operational service in just minutes with only a few mouse clicks.  This may include multiple virtual servers, network load balancers, storage provisioning and application configuration.  Not just a single virtual guest server.  Through the combination of process and automation, a private cloud streamlines virtualization, allowing VMs to be fully managed, not simply run as separate servers operating on a consolidated host.

Building a private cloud requires deep knowledge of server, storage and networking coupled with an understanding of the business workflow and process automation.  For large organizations this means coordinating activities across many teams or groups.  In small organizations, it can increase the necessary knowledge to levels that may not be found currently inside the company.  It is essential to have specialists with deep technical knowledge that understand the needs of the organization when implementing a private cloud solution. 

1. Identify the business goals – Work with stakeholders to identify how a private cloud fits into the overall organizational strategy.
2. Support and Maintenance – Anytime a new technology is brought into operation you must consider support resources and costs.  Incidents rarely happen when we are ready and available to take on a new task.  Formalizing a support process will ensure incidents are addressed in a timely manner.
3. Avoid Shelf-ware.  It is easy to fall into the lure of the “Deluxe” “Pro” “Plus” technology packaging schemes. Understand your organization’s needs and requirements to avoid over purchasing. 
4. Business process analysis – Private cloud helps streamline the manner in which services are deployed and maintained in the datacenter.  Determine what functionality can be moved away from high cost sys-admin personnel to other personnel in the organization.  Your investments should not be to simply make it easier on IT, but to enable the business to be more nimble and agile.
5. Leverage a partner – Technology providers can bring perspective and knowledge that is often difficult to know unless you specialize in that particular technology/solution.  It’s not really a cloud if you have to start from square one.  Your time is valuable too.  When creating solutions from scratch, many times the best of breed philosophy comes into play.  Though there are some advantages to a best-of-breed approach, it is important to consider how this may impact the level of support you receive from each of the chosen vendors.  A technology partner should be able to help identify reference architectures which have been deployed and have the deep vendor relationships necessary to escalate issues to knowledgeable resources on your behalf. 

Ultimately, the goal of cloud computing is the ability to be more efficient in IT operations.  It brings technology together so it is cheaper, faster and easier to deploy.   Not too long ago the industry disputed the details of each component to determine which one would work best in any given architecture.   Today, there is less concern, as functionality has become so evenly matched between suppliers.  When the technology just works, we don’t need to question and examine each little detail.  The commoditization of computers and components has simplified the industry a great deal.  Virtualization is fast becoming a commodity offering as well.  From a performance and reliability standpoint, there is little difference between any of the major Hypervisors. 

As technology evolves, it is the natural course that technologies which become commonplace get adopted by every vendor.  We are moving past differentiation in many hardware and software technologies to differentiation solely in how these almost identical technologies are implemented and managed.  The real value of the private cloud is that it promises to provide the glue to bind together many of the various common hardware and software technologies. It allows a large part of the functionality to be managed as a whole rather than as numerous individual technologies.

In CY 2011 Q1 Microsoft announced the release schedule for an overall update to its System Center family of products.  Within this release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 will be some very promising capabilities for private cloud management.  The most compelling part of the story is the commitment of support for many of the major technology vendors.  Regardless of which brand of storage, virtualization and servers are being used, everything to support a cloud environment will be manageable thru a single console.  This unification is game changing.  Coupled with Service Desk functionality and data center process automation enabled by new orchestration tools, this vision is a fresh approach to what has been coming from Redmond for the past couple of years.  We are excited to see where this takes us.

Thanks for your time - Derrek

In this interview we cover:

-The pros and cons of infrastructure-as-a-service

-Maximizing data throughput in the cloud

-Cloud adoption in computational science

-The benefits of containerized computing

-Architecting for the cloud versus architecting for on-premises

Robert Duffner: Could you take a moment to introduce yourself?

Rob Gillen: I am a solutions architect for Planet Technologies and I work in the Computer Science and Mathematics division here at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and I'm doing work focused on scientific and technical workloads.

Robert: To jump right in, what do you see as advantages and disadvantages for infrastructure and platform-as-a-service, and do you see those distinctions going away?

Rob: Each of those aspects of the technology has different advantages. For many people, the infrastructure-as-a-service platform approach is simpler to start using, because your existing codes run more or less unmodified. Most of those services or offerings don't have requirements with regard to a particular OS.

As we receive more technically-focused offerings of unique network interconnections and so forth, people are able to deploy cloud-based assets that are increasingly similar to their on-premises assets.

We have seen some interesting pickup in platform-as-a-service offerings, particularly from the lower end of scientific computing, among people who have not traditionally been HPC users but maybe have been doing a lot of computing on their local machines and have become machine bound. We've seen tools written and developed that can extend their problems and algorithms directly into the cloud using the APIs that are  inherent in platform-as-a-service offerings.

As far as the distinctions going away, I think the days of a particular vendor only offering one or the other will be over soon. If you look at some of the vendors, there's a lot of cross-play across their offerings. Still, I think the distinctions will continue to live on to some degree. Additionally, don't think that platform-as-a-service offerings will be going away any time soon.

For example, Amazon’s elastic compute cloud service is very much an infrastructure-as-a-service play. However, if you look at their elastic MapReduce product or their Beanstalk product, both of those are very much platform-as-a-service.

When we compare offerings from our perspective as computational researchers, as you start with the infrastructure offerings, you have a great deal of control from a programmatic standpoint and an infrastructure details standpoint, but you give up a lot of the “magic” traditionally associated with clouds. As you move along the cloud spectrum toward platform as a service, you give up some control, but you gain a lot of magic, in the sense that there are a lot of things you don't have to worry about. So depending on the type of computation you're doing, they have different value to you.

To summarize, I think that individual technologies will continue to grow, but the distinctions at the vendor level will fade over time.

Robert: It seems that, in the current state of the market, infrastructure-as-a-service is better suited to migrate existing applications, and platform-as-a-service is really architecting a whole new type of cloud-based applications. Would you agree with that?

Rob: Mostly, yes. Infrastructure-as-a-service is definitely easier for migrating, although I am would want to clarify the second half of your statement. I think it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve. The platform-as-a-service offerings from any vendor are generally very interesting, but they have constraints, and depending on the type of problem you're trying to solve, those constraints may or may not be acceptable to you.

So, I agree with you, with the caveat that it's not a blanket statement that green-field implementations should always look at platform as a service first – you have to evaluate the suitability of the platform to the problem you are trying to solve.

Robert: You've interacted with government agencies that are looking at the cloud, and you've blogged about your company's launch of GovCloud. What are some of the key differences between government and other uses of the cloud?

Rob: One of the biggest things comes down simply to data privacy and data security. The first thing every customer we talk to about cloud brings up, both inside and outside the government space, is data privacy. While there’s some good reasoning behind that, the reality is that cloud computing vendors often do better there than what the customers can provide themselves, particularly in the private sector. For many of those customers, moving to the cloud gives them increased data security and data privacy.

In some areas of the government, that would also be true (especially in some of the smaller state and local government offices) – cloud vendors might actually have a more secure platform than what they're currently using. But most often there are policy and legal issues that will prevent them from moving into the cloud, even if they want to.

I think some of the major vendors have recently been certified for a base level or what we would call low-security data, allowing public sector customers to put generally available data in the cloud. But anything with any significant sensitivity can't be moved there yet by policy, regardless of the actual appropriateness of the implementation.

That's a major consideration today – which  is unfortunate – because as it stands, the federal government has many tasks that could benefit from a cloud computing infrastructure. I get excited when I see progress being made toward breaking down some of those barriers. Certainly, some of those barriers should not and will not go away but there are some that should, and hopefully they will.

Robert: You did a series of blog posts on maximizing data throughput in the cloud. What led you down that path? And was there a scenario where you needed to maximize a file transfer throughput?

Rob: One of the aspects where we think cloud computing can be valuable for scientific problems is in post-processing or post-analysis of work or datasets that were generated on supercomputers.

We took a large selection of climate data generated on Jaguar, which is one of the supercomputers here at Oak Ridge, and we modeled the process of taking that data and moving it into the cloud for post-processing. We looked at different ways to get the data there faster while making sure that data integrity remained high.

We also worked through problems around data publishing, so that once it’s in the cloud, we can make it available in formats that are consumable by others, both within and outside the particular research domain. We're working through the challenge that many scientific domains use domain-specific file formats. For example, climatology folks often use file formats like NetCDF and HDF5. They have particular reasons for using those, but they are not necessarily widely used in other disciplines. Taking that same data and making it available to a wide set of people is difficult if it remains in those native formats.

Therefore, we're looking at how to leverage the infrastructure in the platforms provided by the cloud, whatever data structures they use, to actually serve that data up and make it available to a new and broader audience than has previously been possible.

That was the main problem set that we were working on, and we found some interesting results. With a number of the major providers, we came up with ways to improve data transfer, and it's only getting better as Microsoft, Amazon, and other vendors continue to improve their offerings and make them more attractive for use in the scientific domain.

Robert: Data centers are pretty opaque, in the sense that you don't have a lot of visibility into how the technology is implemented. Have you seen instances where cloud performance changes significantly from day to day? And if so, what's your guidance to app developers?

Rob: That issue probably represents the biggest hesitation on the part of the scientists I'm working with, in terms of using the cloud. I'm working in a space where we have some of the biggest and brightest minds when it comes to computational science, and the notion of asking them to use this black box is somewhat laughable to them.

That is why I don't expect, in the near term at least, that we’ll see cloud computing replace some of the specifically tuned hardware like Jaguar, Kracken, or other supercomputers. At the same time, there is a lot of scientific work being done that is not necessarily as execution-time-critical as others. Often, these codes do not benefit from the specialized hardware available in these machines.

There are certain types of simulations that are time-sensitive and communication heavy, meaning for each step of compute that is performed, a comparatively significant amount of communication between nodes is required. In cases like this, some of the general cloud platforms aren’t as good a fit.

I think it's interesting to see some of the cloud vendors realizing that fact and developing platforms that cater to that style of code, as illustrated by some of the cluster computing instances by Amazon and others. That’s important in these cases, since general-purpose cloud infrastructures can introduce unacceptable inconsistencies.

We've also seen a lot of papers published by people doing assessments of infrastructure-as-a-service providers, where they'll look and see that their computational ability changes drastically from day to day or from node to node. Most often, that's attributed to the noisy neighbor problem. When this research is done in smaller scale projects, by university students or others on constrained budgets, they tend to use the small or medium instances offered by whatever cloud vendor is available. In such cases, people are actually competing for resources with others on the same box. In fact, depending on the intensity of their algorithms and the configuration they have selected, they could be fighting with themselves on the same physical nodes, since the cloud provider’s resource allocation algorithm may have placed them on the same physical node.

As people in the scientific space become more comfortable with using the largest available node, they're more likely to have guaranteed full access to the physical box and the underlying substrate. This will improve the consistency of their results. There are still shared assets that, depending on usage patterns, will introduce variability (persistent storage, network, etc.) but using the larger nodes will definitely reduce the inconsistencies – which is, frankly, more consistent with traditional HPC clusters. When you are running on a collection of nodes within a cluster, you have full access to the allocated nodes.

The core issue in this area is to determine what the most applicable or appropriate hardware platform is for a given type of problem. If you're doing a data parallel app, in which you're more concerned about calendar time or development time than you are about your execution time, a cloud will fit the problem well in many cases. If you're concerned about latency and you have a very specific execution time scale concerns, the cloud (in its current incarnation, at least) is probably not the right fit.

Robert: Back in August of last year, you also posted about containerized computing. What interest do you see in this trend, and what scenarios are right for it?

Rob: That topic aligns very nicely with the one we touched on earlier, about data privacy in the federal space. A lot of federal organizations are building massive data centers. One key need for the sake of efficiency is to get any organization, government or otherwise, to stop doing undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Every organization should focus on where it adds value and, as much as possible, it should allow other people to fill in the holes, whether through subcontracting, outsourcing, or other means. I expect to see more cases down the road where data privacy regulations require operators not only to ensure the placement of data geographically within, say, a particular country’s boundary, but specifically within an area such as my premises, my corporate environment, or a particular government agency.

You can imagine a model wherein a cloud vendor actually drops containerized chunks of the data center inside your fence, so you have physical control over that device, even though it may be managed by the cloud vendor. Therefore, a government agency would not have to develop its own APIs or mechanisms for provisioning or maintenance of the data center – the vendor could provide that. The customer could still benefit from the intrinsic advantages of the cloud, while maintaining physical control over the disks, the locality, and so on.

Another key aspect of containerized approaches to computing is energy efficiency. We’re seeing vendors begin to look at the container as the field-replaceable unit, which allows them to introduce some rather innovative designs within the container. When you no longer expect to be able to swap out individual servers, you can eliminate traditional server chassis (which, beyond making the server “pretty” simply block airflow and reduce efficiency), you can consolidate power supplies, experiment with air cooling/swamp cooling, higher ambient temperatures… the list goes on and we are seeing some very impressive PUE numbers from various vendors and we are working to encourage these developments.

There are also some interesting models for being able to bundle very specialized resources and deploy them in non-traditional locations. You can package up a generator, a communications unit, specialized compute resources, and analysis workstations, all in a 40 foot box, and ship it to a remote research location, for example.

Robert: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just released a report on cloud computing, where they say, and I quote, "Without proper governance, the organizational computing infrastructure could be transformed into a sprawling, unmanageable mix of insecure services." What are your thoughts on that?

Rob: My first thought is that they're right.

[laughter]

They're actually making a very similar argument to one that’s often made about SharePoint environments. Any SharePoint consultant will tell you that one of the biggest problems they have, which is really both a weakness and strength of the platform, is that it's so easy to get that first order of magnitude set up. In a large corporation, you often hear someone say, “We've got all of these rogue SharePoint installs running across our environment, and they're difficult to manage and control from an IT perspective. We don't have the governance to make sure that they're backed up and all that sort of thing.”

And while I can certainly sympathize with that situation, the flip side is that those rogue installs are solving business problems, and they probably exist because of some sort of impediment to actually getting work done, whether it was policy-based or organizationally based. Most of those organizations just set it up themselves because it was simpler than going through the official procedures.

A similar situation is apt to occur with cloud computing. A lot of people won’t even consider going through months of procurement and validations for policy and security, when they can just go to Amazon and get what they need in 10 minutes with a credit card. IT organizations need to recognize that a certain balance needs to be worked out around that relationship.

I think as we move forward over time, we will work toward an environment where someone can provision an on-premises platform with the same ease that they can go to Amazon, Microsoft, or whoever today for cloud resources. That model will also provide a simple means to address the appropriate security considerations for their particular implementation.

There's tension there, which I think has value, between IT people who want more control and end users who want more flexibility. Finding that right balance is going to be vital for any organization to use cloud successfully.

Robert: How do you see IT creating governance around how an organization uses cloud without sacrificing the agility that the cloud provides?

Rob: Some cloud computing vendors have technologies that allow customers to virtually extend their physical premises into the cloud. If you combine that sort of technology with getting organizational IT to repackage or re-brand the provisioning mechanisms provided by their chosen cloud computing provider, I think you can end up with a very interesting solution.

For example, I could imagine an internal website managed by my IT organization where I could see a catalog of available computing assets, provide our internal charge code, and have that platform provisioned and made available to me with the same ease that I could with an external provider today. In fact, that scenario could actually make the process easier for me than going outside, since I wouldn’t have to use a credit card and potentially a reimbursement mechanism. In this model, the IT organization essentially “white labels” the external vendor’s platform, and layers in the organizational policies and procedures while still benefiting from the massive scale of the public cloud.

Robert: What do you think makes architecting for the cloud different than architecting for on-premises or hosted solutions?

Rob: The answer to that question depends on the domain in which you're working. Many of my cloud computing colleagues work in a general corporate environment, with customers or businesses whose work targets the sweet spot of the cloud, such as apps that need massive horizontal scaling. In those environments, it's relatively straightforward to talk about architecting for the cloud versus not architecting for the cloud, because the lines are fairly clear and solid patterns are emerging.

On the other hand, a lot of the folks I'm working with may have code and libraries that have existed for a decade, if not longer. We still have people who are actively writing in Fortran 77 who would argue that it's the best tool for the job they're trying to accomplish. And while most people who are talking about cloud would laugh at that statement, it's that type of scenario that makes this domain unique.

Most of the researchers we're working with don't think about architecting for the cloud or not, so much as they think in terms of architecting to solve their particular problem. That's where it comes to folks like me and others in our group to help build tools that allow the domain scientist to leverage the power of the cloud without having to necessarily think about or architect for it.

I've been talking to a lot of folks recently about the cloud and where it sits in the science phase. I've worked in the hosted providers’ space for over a decade now, and I’ve been heavily involved in doing massive scaling of hosted services such as hosted email (which are now being called “cloud-based services”) for many, many years. There are some very interesting aspects of that from a business perspective, but I don't think that hosted email really captures the essence of cloud computing.

On the next level, you can look at massive pools of available storage or massive pools of available virtual machines and build interesting platforms. This seems to be where many folks are focusing their cloud efforts right now, and while it adds significant value, there’s still more to be gleaned from the cloud.

What gets me excited about architecting for the cloud is that rather than having to build algorithms to fit into a fixed environment, I can build an algorithm that will adjust the environment based on the dynamics of the problem it's solving. That is an interesting shift and a very different way of solving a problem. I can build an algorithm or a solution to a scientific problem that knows what it needs computationally, and as those needs change, it can make a call out to get another couple of nodes, more storage, more RAM, and so on. It’s a game-changer.

Robert: What advice do you have for organizations looking at porting existing apps to the cloud?

Rob: First, they should know that it's not as hard as it sounds. Second, they should take it in incremental steps. There are a number of scenarios and tutorials out there that walk you through different models. Probably the best approach is to take a mature app and consider how to move it to the cloud with the least amount of change. Once they have successfully deployed it to the cloud (more or less unmodified), they can consider what additional changes they can make to the application to better leverage the cloud platform.

A lot of organizations make the mistake of assuming that they need to re-architect applications to move them to the cloud. That can lead them to re-architect some of the key apps they depend on for their business from the ground up. In my mind, a number of controlled incremental steps are better than making fewer large steps.

Robert: That seems like a good place to wrap up. Thanks for taking the time to talk today.

Rob: My pleasure.

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Some of the benefits highlighted in the announcement include enabling customers to quickly build elastically-scalable applications using familiar Windows Azure platform technologies, and the ability to store their business data domestically in Japan if they prefer, which can help address compliance issues and also minimize the time accessing data due to network latency.  Fujitsu datacenters utilize some of the most advanced technologies in the industry to offer cutting-edge disaster-readiness, security and environmental friendliness. 

The service offering will be available globally, and will be geared towards a wide range of customers, from leading enterprises to value-oriented small and medium-sized companies. Building on a core platform of Windows Azure compute and storage, SQL Azure, and Windows Azure AppFabric technologies, the new service will also help customers with the development of new applications and the migration of existing applications. 

Full details of the announcement are available in the official press release and on the Windows Azure blog.  If you’re looking for more information on Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings for businesses, check out the Cloud Power site. 

Thanks for your time and if you have any questions, please post them in the comments - Larry

In this interview we cover:

• Identity management in hybrid environments
• The role of partners in providing customized cloud solutions
• SLAs and cloud outages
• Migrating to the cloud vs. building for the cloud
• Things in clouds work better together
  

Robert Duffner: Could you take a moment to introduce yourself and Orbit One?

Olivier Mangelschots: I'm Managing Director of Orbit One Internet Solutions. We have been in business since '95 here in a city called Gent, Belgium. Today, we have 18 people, and we mainly focus on developing web portals. We use technology such as SharePoint, Microsoft CRM, and Umbraco, which is an open source CMS based on ASP.NET.

We also try to help our customers realize the new world of work, making use of technology such as Microsoft Lync to be able to work from anywhere while staying in contact with their teams. We're really interested in the cloud and looking forward to this change.

Robert: You've been involved in building customer solutions since well before cloud computing. How have you seen the cloud impact the solution that you're providing to your customers?

Olivier: We've always tried to make solutions in such a way that the impact on the internal IT structure for the customer is as low as possible. Even as far back as 2000, the solutions that we've developed have mostly been hosted by us.

We try to minimize the need for customers to implement local servers, so they can focus on making the best use of the solutions instead of the technical infrastructure behind it.

Robert: Jericho Forum president Paul Simmonds says that new rules are needed for identity in the cloud and that passwords are broken. Can you talk about the challenges and solutions for identity management in the cloud? How is it different from traditional hosting?

Olivier: Identity is one of the key elements to make the cloud successful, and I think we've come a long way. Today, most cloud solutions are starting to incorporate identity management the way it should be done, using federated identity and single sign-on. In the past, an organization had to choose between doing everything on-premises or moving everything to the cloud.

It was difficult to have part in the cloud and part on-premises, because you had to manage users and synchronization separately. It was quite a pain. But now, large and small companies can move to the cloud and have centralized user management, so they are able to handle user services in a very transparent way.

It shouldn't matter for the users whether an application is hosted on-premises or hosted in a cloud at Microsoft or hosted at a partner, so long as everything is nicely integrated. Of course, the first thing the user notices is the fact that he has to enter a username and password, so that should be very transparent.

Robert: Customers can choose between cloud, on-premises, and partner hosting. How do you explain the differences between these options to the customers you work with?

Olivier: Cost is obviously one of the factors to take into consideration. Most customers are coming from an on-premises history, and by moving to cloud technologies such as Windows Azure, Office 365, and CRM Online they can save a lot on costs. Of course, one has to look at the complete picture: not only licensing, but also factors such as human resources, hardware, and electricity.

In addition to saving on costs, they can make things happen more quickly. If they want to deploy something new, they can do so in a matter of hours in the cloud, where they would need days, weeks, or sometimes months for an on-premises deployment.

Partner hosting is still very important, mainly because not everything is possible in the public cloud. There are certain limitations with Azure and Office 365, for example. The price is very affordable, but you get what's in the box, and partners can offer customization.

In addition to offering more personalized solutions with regard to technical features, partners can also provide customization in terms of service-level agreements, security considerations, encryption, and those sorts of things, which are very important for some organizations.

Robert: At EMC's recent conference, CEO Joe Tucci said that hybrid clouds are becoming the de facto standard. Can you talk a little bit about hybrid solutions that may use a mix of options?

Olivier: As an example, one of the things that is very easy to migrate to a public cloud is an organization’s set of Exchange mailboxes with contacts, calendars, and so on. The level of customization that users need is quite small, and most people are happy with the product as it comes out of the box.

If you move the mailboxes to the cloud, users typically don’t even notice. They just keep using Outlook and Outlook Web Access, synchronizing their phones as they need to. Still, it saves a lot of costs, as well as allowing many companies to have much larger mailboxes than they would otherwise be able to.

This is one of the mixed situations we see, where companies are moving part of their services to the cloud, such as Exchange mailboxes, while keeping, for example, SharePoints sites internally because they need some custom modules in there that are not available in the cloud.

Mixing and matching in that way can be a smart approach, because it allows companies to save costs while also being more productive and agile.

Robert: Following the recent Amazon outage where full service wasn't restored for about four days, are you seeing customers question the reliability of the cloud? What do you think is the lesson learned from that?

Olivier: Almost all companies are a bit scared of moving their data away to some unknown location, because they have less control over those systems. The event at Amazon was, of course, very unfortunate. The cloud on a massive scale is still very new, and certain technologies should really be considered to be in a beta phase.

I think we have to be realistic about the fact that in an on-premises situation, uptime is not guaranteed at all. Many organizations have far more than four days of outages a year because of human error.

Many companies are not ready today to move certain critical applications to the cloud. I believe that, as the cloud grows bigger and more mature, service-level agreements will be available from cloud systems that are far more demanding than those that are possible from on-premises situations.

This is also where partner hosting can come into play. You can combine certain things in the public cloud for very affordable mass-usage scenarios while putting specific, mission-critical solutions at a partner that will do a custom replicated solution.

In the long term, I believe that the public cloud will come in several flavors, including an inexpensive mass market flavor and a more enterprise-focused flavor with high levels of redundancy and availability, which will cost more.

Robert: Lew Moorman, the chief strategy officer at Rackspace, likened the Amazon interruption to the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It's a major episode with widespread damage, but airline travel is still safer than traveling in a car. He was using this as an analogy to cloud computing being safer than running data centers by individual companies. Do you think that analogy holds up?

Olivier: I think it does in certain scenarios, although not all. But I think you're absolutely right that when an airplane crash occurs, it garners a lot of attention, even though statistically, it is far safer than driving a car.

If a big cloud goes down, that’s a major news story, and everybody's talking about it. But actually, this almost never happens, and a very large scale public cloud can be much safer than environments run by individual companies.

At the same time, there is always a balance between how much you pay and what you get for it. I don't think it's possible to get the service with the maximum possible guarantees for a very low fee. If you're willing to pay more, you will get more possibilities.

Azure is a nice example, because you can choose what geographical area your data and services will be running in. And you're completely free, as a developer or as an architect, to create systems that are redundant over several parts of the Azure cloud, which allows you to go further than what's in the box.

Robert: Customers aren't always starting from scratch, and sometimes they have something existing that they want to move to the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about migration to the cloud and things that customers might need to be aware of?

Olivier: This is a major issue today. For certain services, migration to the cloud is more difficult than it should be. The issue is going to be addressed step by step. First, of course, you need to have the cloud. Then you can start building migration tools. When I look, for example, at Microsoft Exchange, it's very easy and there are lots of good tools to move from an on-premises or a partner-hosted solution to the cloud.

SharePoint, for example, or Dynamic CRM, is much harder to migrate. You need third-party tools, although Microsoft is working on creating its own tools. There is still work to do there.

Azure, I think, is a completely different beast, and you can’t just take an application and put it on Azure. To make it really take advantage of the Azure opportunities and added value, you need to redesign the application and make it Azure-aware. That can take quite some time to do, and it's a long-term investment for product developers.

Robert: As more people move to the cloud, there's the chance to integrate one cloud resource with another. I know you've been thinking about the combination of Office 365 and Azure. Can you tell us your thoughts on that?

Olivier: The combination of Office 365/Dynamics CRM Online with Windows Azure is a very interesting thing. For example, we have customers using CRM Online, which is kind of out of the box, you get what's in there. We combine it for them with custom Azure solutions to do things that are not foreseen in CRM.

To give you an example, there is a company called ClickDimensions that has an email marketing plug-in for Microsoft CRM. You can send out mass e-mails to people from CRM, and there is tracking functionality about who opens the e-mail and who clicks on your website. You have a whole history about your prospects and your leads.

Actually, all this is running in the Azure cloud. It's all custom-developed, and it's always up, piping this information through to your CRM system. This is a nice combination of using out-of-the-box standards, shared hosting products such as Office 365, and CRM Online, combined with custom-developed solutions running in Azure. You get the best of both worlds.

Robert: At Microsoft, we see cloud as a critical back-end for mobile applications. You probably saw the recent announcement around our Toolkits for Devices that includes support for the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Do you have any thoughts around the combination of cloud and mobile?

Olivier: I don't really have special thoughts, although cloud and mobile, of course, work very well together. On the other hand, I think that any application is nice to have in the cloud, and the nice thing about the combination of cloud and mobile is making sure it's available from anywhere, since mobile users can be coming from anywhere in the world.

It's very difficult to know when you roll out a mobile application how much people are going to use it, and hosting these kind of things on the cloud makes very much sense, because you can cope with the peaks, you can cope with identity issues, and you have a nice kind of platform to start with.

Robert: Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about or any other subject you want to discuss?

Olivier: Today, I see Azure as a tool kit, or a large system to build new applications and solutions, so the group using it is mostly developers and other technical people. It would be nice to see a layer between Azure and other scenarios, where Azure is the engine and Microsoft or other partners create front ends for it.

To give you an example, if I want to host simple websites running a CMS solution, I can choose any of a number of partners that have management modules that allow me to easily configure the website, hit start, and it's running. It would be great to see an integration between for example Microsoft WebMatrix and Azure, allowing less technical people to get their website running in Azure in a few clicks.

These extra layers on top of Azure are a big thing for partner opportunities, but I also think that Microsoft should also participate to speed up things. I see Azure as the first big infrastructure step, we are just at the beginning!

One thing that developers might be afraid of is that if today you build an application specially for Azure, you're going to use the Azure tables, the Azure way of doing message queuing, and so on, making it very hard to move away from Azure.

Of course, today, Azure is only available through Microsoft, but I think it makes sense in the future to have the Azure platform also available in custom flavors through service providers that are competing with one another on innovation and pricing.

Of course, Microsoft probably doesn't want to give everything away, but there are a lot of partner models. It will be interesting to see how this will evolve in the future.

Robert: Very good. Thanks, Olivier.

Olivier: Thank you.

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A Recent Smart Salon presented by WIRED: Innovation and Opportunity in the Cloud

The cloud – for some it’s an evolution, for some it is a revolution and for others that perspective remains to be seen. For most, cloud is a critical part of how IT will shift from being a technology provider to becoming an innovation engine that delivers business value.  That was what I heard in early May when we invited more than 100 senior technology and business leaders to join us at a Microsoft sponsored Smart Salon event, presented by WIRED, to talk about the ways businesses are dealing with the disruption of cloud today and into the future.

Facilitated by WIRED Contributing Editor Spencer Reiss, the event featured two broad-ranging panel discussions, as well as a no holds barred Q&A session with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Bob Kelly.  It was a great opportunity to hear senior leaders talk about their cloud reality in candid, real world, terms and so I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few of my takeways from the day.

The first was how divergent, yet aligned, people’s point of view is about the business considerations and opportunities of cloud computing.  For some, the cloud is driving a revolution in how they approach computing – from the technology they use to how they run their business.  For others, it is a technology evolution – helping them do things better than they have before.  To nobody’s surprise though – whether evolution or evolution – the cloud’s ability to dramatically speed up time to market (or time to innovation) was clear to everyone - as one CIO said, “in the cloud model, it’s days, not six months to a year.”

My second takeaway was around how cloud is really making people think about the future of IT – specifically how it will look in our somewhat cloudy future.  While no one had a perfectly clear vision of our cloudy future most of the attendees – especially our CIO panelists – were bullish on the potential of the cloud to help them deliver more business value.  Their path to delivering more business value varied: For some, it was about improving overall business processes, and for others it was about becoming a critical source of innovation for their organization. But the need to deliver business value was clear.

My third takeaway was that, to no one’s surprise, throughout the day it was clear that there were a LOT of different definitions of cloud computing. That was one of the first things Bob Kelly addressed in his Q&A – during which he outlined Microsoft’s perspective on the core attributes of cloud computing and how the breadth of Microsoft’s cloud offerings gives businesses the option to transition to the cloud on their terms.

Whatever cloud computing is for you - an evolution, a revolution or an uncertainty – Microsoft is here for you.  We understand the journey to cloud may be disruptive and we know the cloud is not one-size-fits-all. That is why we are committed to helping you do cloud on your terms. To learn more about this approach to cloud computing, check out the Cloud Power site.  

Thanks for your time – Mark Miller, Director, Server and Tools, Microsoft