Three cloud services from Microsoft

I read this post with interest as it discussed similar stuff to the content Werner Vogels presented at Web 2.0 where I listened to him. It could almost have been a Microsoft presentation at times as I found myself nodding agreement on his insights in to the tough technological challenge that building data centres brings. 

For some organisations they will always want to run their own infrastructure be it for security, legal or other reasons but the era of cloud computing is upon on. It's different to the era of Network Computing that previously foretold the demise of the PC and with it Microsoft. In that model the intelligence was all at the centre. The big difference now is bandwidth and with it the ability to deliver experiences over the network but also have the choice over where the computing intelligence lies - be it on the client, in the cloud or a hybrid of the two. Some call this SaaS 2.0, Microsoft tends to use Software + Services.

Getting back to Werner's talk though. To provide cloud computing at scale requires data centres of vast scale and geographic distribution - again for legal reasons in some cases - but also to iron on the less broad pipes of the broadband era. To build these vast data centres requires several things, most notably power but also huge investment. Our recent data centre announcement for Dublin is a $500 million investment and along with Yahoo, Google, Ask, Amazon and very few others we are investing big in this arena.

I think Amazon has done some great work with EC2 and S3 and helped break a market for other in the industry. Where Microsoft will differ is our approach to offering 3 types of services from the cloud

• Finished services are complete, end-to-end solutions delivered over the Internet that provide full functionality that you can use immediately to become more productive.
• Attached services complement existing on-premises or sourced IT solutions by providing new capabilities or feature sets for IT pros.
• Building block services include basic capabilities that software developers can use to quickly create new services or applications

you can read more about these and examples at https://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx and I think they provide a very good way to think of the types of cloud services you may need or use. Of course there is more detail and arguably complexity than this as these services are focused on "managed" or "business" computing whereas our services such as Office Live Workspace are more focused on the unmanaged or SoHo and Small Business market whereas technologies like Virtual Earth and Silverlight are more focused on developers delivering rich applications to either business or consumer.

What that probably leaves you with is some confusion as to what Microsoft's is doing in this whole area. The answer is A LOT, much of which I can't really talk about but I hope the 3 services above at least help explain some part of our strategy a little more.

Any questions class?

 

NB: I'm from the UK and yes, we do spell it centre here, not center :)

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  PingBack from http://www.absolutely-people-search.info/?p=2611

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  Steve - you have an error here - you duplicate two of the services without listing the third.  You missed "Building Block Services" Rob

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  Microsoft is surely going to get into the EC2 + S3 sector and I bet Microsoft would have better cpompetence and feasibility here. Remeber guys a feature called "Virtual Labs" which most of us use for learning??? How different is that from an EC2 Instance. And how different and how long would it take to give a REST based API access to Skydrive to get it inline with S3.. And with all the Infrastructure Management technology (including Virtual infrastructure) the Microsoft offering would definitely be hottttttt!!!! I just hope Microsoft creates a traction among startups by giving some subsidized or free plan!!! The only fear I presume is the "EVIL" tag that has been inflicted upon Microsoft :-(.. It really hurts to see a company with such vision is looked down upon and some mere Search Engine  making money selling few Online Ads is considered the Good Guy who is presently recording and archiving all chats,mails,bio data!!! What a world we live in!!!! Anybody else got any thoughts about the would be Microsoft offerings???

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  Ahmad - we need more people like you :)

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  thanks to those who pointed out my spelling errors etc. saves me right for blogging late at night!

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  good questions Stefan some of which I can't provide answers to as there is stuff in the works I can't talk about but in terms of scaling and SaaS I'd highly recommend GianPaolo's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/gianpaolo/

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2007
  Thanks Steve... My pleasure to standby Microsoft!!

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2007
  @Ahmad

• I know most of MS commercial software, I just don't follow research
• I've used partitioned views since 2000 and SSSB and SSDB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910378) in SQL 2005 all the way back to NT/SQL 6.5, one can certainly architect good stuff, but one has to "architect" it -I know one can buy F5 and MSSQL clustering software or tweak/extend webdav (been seeing caldav in C# recently) -what I meant of is "implicit" scalability in the infrastructure, where one can just keep adding hardware and that's it
• at the moment, to be fair, Oracle -which as a company I don't like - has RAC and Tangosol, despite not being perfectly linearly scalable are much better than anything else On the other hand there are some MS tecnologies which scale pretty nicely, like BizTalk, IIS 7, even Sharepoint is quite Saasy