Can Windows Azure deliver on IT’s interest in it

On InfoWorld, Paul Krill Writes,

Windows Azure, Microsoft‘s fledgling cloud computing platform, is piquing the interest of IT specialists who see it as a potential solution for dealing with variable compute loads. But an uptick in deployments for Azure, which becomes a fee-based service early next year, could take a while, with customers still just evaluating the technology.

“We’d be targeting applications that have variable loads” for possible deployment on Azure, said David Collins, a system consultant at the Unum life insurance company. The company might find Azure useful for an enrollment application. “We have huge activity in November and December and then the rest of the year, it’s not so big,” Collins said. Unum, however, is not ready to use Azure, with Collins citing issues such as integrating Azure with IBM DB2 and Teradata systems.

“From a scale-out perspective and for the future, it’s kind of interesting to hear” about Azure, said Michael Tai, director of development at Classified Ventures. But his company is probably not looking to use Azure in the short term, he said.

Meanwhile, an advertising agency that has done ads for Windows 7 already has used Azure. An official of that company also cited benefits in offloading of compute cycles to the cloud. “We’ve used Azure on a couple of projects already and had great success with it,” said Matthew Ray, technical director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. “I think what helps us is we don’t have all the time and money” to build huge server clusters for projects that get a lot of traffic but only live for a month, Ray said. Using traditional platforms, “you can spend inordinate amounts of money — hundreds of thousands of dollars — to support something like the Super Bowl, something like that, and you’re done in a day, basically,” he said.

Microsoft has improved Azure since the last time the company looked at it. “It wasn’t as rich as it looks now,” said Sean Gordon, an architect in the strategy architecture emerging technology team at Chevron. “We’re looking at offloading compute resources, potentially, into the cloud,” he noted.

A Microsoft SharePoint software vendor sees Azure‘s potential for purposes such as extranets. “A lot of applications I can see being extended to the cloud,” said Stephen Cawood, community director at Metalogix. “For big companies, they’re still going to want to have their own datacenters and host things like SharePoint, but I can see them using cloud computing possibly for extranet scenarios where they’re working with partners or even customers.”

David Nahooray, software developer for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an international intergovernmental agency, said any decision to go to the cloud would be made a higher level. “[Azure] looks interesting, but it’s probably up to my boss to decide if we can go and put stuff outside in the cloud,” Nahooray said. Data such as economic indicators could be deployed on Azure for access by other organizations, he said.

Cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.

Synergetics is a premium brand in the Indian IT industry with an experience base of over 15 years in the area of people   competency development;   engaged in delivering it thru  its   training and consulting interventions , primarily focusing on their productivity with regards to the project and deliverables on hand.Its primary differentiator has been its solution centric approach and its comprehensive client focused    service portfolio.

The data interoperability challenge for cloud computing

Cloud computing won’t have as much value unless we get the data-integration mechanisms right

In a recent InfoWorld article by Paul Krill, Vint Cerf, who is a co-designer of the Internet’s TCP/IP standards and widely considered a father of the Internet, spoke about the the need for data portability standards for cloud computing. “There are different clouds from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Google, but a lack of interoperability between them,” Cerf explained at a session of the Churchill Club business and technology organization in Menlo Park, Calif.

Interoperability has not been a huge focus around the quickly emerging cloud computing space. Other than “we support interoperability” statements from the larger cloud computing providers, there is not a detailed plan to be seen. I’ve brought it up several times at cloud user group meetings, with clients, and at vendor briefings, and I often feel like I’m the kid in class who reminds the teacher to assign homework.

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Data interoperability is not that hard. You’re dealing with a few key concepts, such as semantic interoperability, or the way that data is defined and stored on one cloud versus another. Also, you need to consider the notions of transformation and translation, so the data appears native when it arrives at the target cloud, or clouds, from the source cloud (or clouds). Don’t forget to add data governance and data security to the mix; you’ll need those as well.

There has been some talk of concepts such as the Intercloud, or a data exchange system running between major cloud computing providers. Also, a few cloud standards organizations, such as the Open Cloud Consortium, are looking to drive some interoperability standards, including a group working on standards and interoperability for “large data clouds.”

So how do we get down the path to data interoperability for the clouds? Don’t create yet another standards organization to look at this by committee. They take too long, and this is something that’s needed in 2010 to drive cloud computing adoption. Instead, the larger cloud computing providers should focus on this behind the scenes and create a working standard enabling technology to solve the data interoperability problem. If the larger providers are all on the same page, believe me, the smaller providers will quickly follow.

This article, “The data interoperability challenge for cloud computing,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments on cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.

cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.

cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, Cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.

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Synergetics is a premium brand in the Indian IT industry with an experience base of over 15 years in the area of people   competency development;   engaged in delivering it thru  its   training and consulting interventions , primarily focusing on their productivity with regards to the project and deliverables on hand .     Its primary differentiator has been its  solution centric approach and its comprehensive client focused service portfolio.

Ballmer bets Microsoft’s future on the cloud

Seventy percent of the 40,000 people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday at the University of Washington.

“A year from now, that will be 90 percent,” he said.

In a wide-ranging talk to computer science students at the university, Ballmer explained why he thinks cloud computing is important and how Microsoft aims to take advantage of the trend toward hosted computing services.

“Our inspiration, our vision … builds from this cloud base,” he said. “This is the bet, if you will, for our company.”

All Microsoft products including Windows, Office, Xbox, Azure, Bing, and Windows Phone are driven by the idea of being connected to the cloud, he said. While some recently introduced products like Windows 7 included a lot of work that is not cloud-based, the inspiration for the product starts with the cloud, he said.

Beyond software, Ballmer also described Microsoft‘s different strategies for creating devices that connect to cloud-based services. “The cloud wants smarter devices,” he said.

He admitted mistakes in the way that Microsoft historically approached the mobile market, giving hardware makers a wide range of potential for form factors. “We didn’t standardize enough. The cacophony of form factors for you, the user, was too high,” he said.

Microsoft has unveiled a new version of its mobile software, Windows Phone 7, which has a much stricter set of hardware requirements. Still, it should have more options for hardware makers to innovate than some Microsoft competitors like Apple and Research In Motion where “you get what they choose to build for you,” Ballmer said.

In the case of its Xbox gaming console, Microsoft uses that same strategy. But Ballmer hinted that there could be some variety with the Xbox. “You might have more form factors in the future for different price points and options,” he said.

Ballmer also said that Microsoft wants to help foster the development of different cloud computing services, both private and public. “How does the cloud become something that not just Microsoft and four other companies run on the behalf of the whole planet? How do we give the cloud back to you?” he said. “You should be able to, if you want, run your own cloud.”

In some cases Microsoft may be eager to help organizations run their own hosted environments because it doesn’t make sense for the company to do so itself. For instance, a government might have regulations that hosted data be kept within the country’s borders. But in a small country, Microsoft may not be interested in making the investment. “This company is not likely to build a public cloud in Slovenia any time soon,” Ballmer said. Instead, Microsoft would like to sell a set of products built around its Azure cloud services that a country like Slovenia can buy and implement itself.

The potential benefits of cloud computing for companies and researchers are immense, Ballmer said. For instance, he talked about how bringing the world’s poorest out of poverty will likely mean that those people will consume more energy. “We need to speed up the rate of scientific innovation” that can help solve climate change issues before that happens, he said. Researchers might be better able to run experiments quickly and analyze more data if they are able to access public cloud services, he said.

The cloud “will create opportunities for all the folks in this room to do important research and build important projects,” Ballmer said.

The hosted computing model creates new possibilities for businesses too. “I think we are seeing and will continue to see where there are literally new software investments that create new business models, new opportunities to start and form businesses because of this commercial software infrastructure that’s never existed before,” he said.

For instance, a new company might only have the resources to offer a product to people in its local community. But if it can use hosted computing, it can offer the product to a wider audience, paying for the compute services as it uses them rather than investing in a data center up front.

Ballmer also suggested that the cloud might even make some open-source developers more interested in commercializing their developments. “With the advent of this new commercial infrastructure, some inventors can now ask, how can I monetize this, how can I get an economic value from the innovations that I get a chance to create,” he said.

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“Need a job in IT? The cloud needs you?”

It’s always interesting to me to see the job growth in emerging spaces, such as cloud computing. Typically, the hype is huge around a concept (such as SOA, client/server, or distributed objects) about 8 to 12 months before there is notable job growth. This is often due to companies not understanding the value of the new technology, as well as to the lag in allocating budget and creating job reqs.

Cloud computing seems to be a different beast. After no fewer than four calls last week from headhunters looking for cloud architects, cloud engineers, and cloud strategy consultants, I decided to look at the job growth around cloud computing, using my usual unscientific measurements. This included a visit to the cloud job postings at indeed.com, which provides search and alerts for job postings and tracks trends.

I figured that I would see a line that looks like the bunny slope, gradually sloping up from left to right. Instead, as you can see below, I saw extreme heli-skiing: Since January 2008, the growth in job postings that mention cloud computing has hit 350,000 percent. (Of course, those are all kinds of job postings that mention cloud computing, and some are perhaps not cloud computing jobs. But still.)

While I just have my personal experience to draw upon, this seems to be the largest inflection around a hyped space in IT that I’ve ever seen, especially considering we’ve been in a downturn in which many companies have reduced IT jobs.

There are only a handful of qualified people out there who actually understand the basics of cloud computing, much less the details behind cloud computing architecture, implementation, development, testing, and security. Thus, I suspect we’ll see many jobs filled by the wrong people — and the bad results that come from that. The larger issue is that the people doing the hiring also don’t understand cloud computing, so they don’t realize that the “expert in Amazon cloud service” claim on a résumé actually means the candidate can purchase books and shoes using the site’s “one click” feature.

First, and foremost: I will stay fully employed. 🙂

Second, the salaries of cloud computing experts will be driven up significantly as too many jobs chase too few qualified candidates.

Third, the need for cloud computing training will explode, including architecture, planning, testing, security, and deployment. There’s lots to learn there, and it’s very different than on-premise systems, trust me.

Finally, we’ll have to deal with the many positions that will be taken by less than qualified staff. Thus, there will be some frustration around the productivity of cloud computing that in most cases will be traced back to a talent issue, not the technology itself. We saw the same thing with SOA.

Start that training and update your résumés, people.

Cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the Cloud.

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, Cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they us.

Provocative predictions for cloud computing: How realistic ?

I was taken back a bit by this recent article talking about some big predictions from Gartner around the adoption of cloud computing:

Cloud Computing will become so pervasive that by 2012, one out of five businesses will own no IT assets at all, the analyst firm Gartner is predicting.

The shift toward cloud services hosted outside the enterprise’s firewall will necessitate a major shift in the IT hardware markets, and shrink IT staff, Gartner said.

This is very interesting to me, considering that many new and small businesses are finding a great deal of value in moving to cloud computing. However, I’m not sure I agree with Gartner over the amount of movement that will occur by 2012. Sorry to once again be the buzzkill, but a sure way to bury a space is to overhype and under deliver.

Don’t get me wrong: Cloud Computing will have an impact. I suspect that most midsize and small businesses will use e-mail and document management systems that are outside their firewalls. We’ve seen a lot of movement in this direction in 2009, and with the rapid expansion of Google Enterprise services and the emerging online version of Microsoft Office, this trend will only accelerate.

At the same time, major enterprise systems are now SaaS-delivered, platform-as-a-service is giving open source platforms a run for their money, and infrastructure-as-a-service is becoming much more compelling when considering the technology, as well as the business case. Things are actually moving along nicely.

However, “no IT assets at all” by 2012 in one out of five businesses? That’s a huge shift in a short amount of time. While analysts and thought leaders love to make revolutionary statements such as this because they are provocative, in the real world most businesses, large and small, are still struggling with the place that Cloud Computing will have in their IT strategy, and they are far away from complete outplacement of major IT assets. In other words, I appreciate Gartner’s enthusiasm, but I don’t see it based on what I’m seeing with my clients or in the industry in general.

Ozzie, Muglia and the Microsoft cloud

LOS ANGELES – Porting an on-premise application to the cloud is not as easy as flipping a switch, according to Microsoft’s Bob Muglia. But the company will work with developers to help them adopt successful cloud development patterns.

SD Times sat down with Muglia, vice president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business unit, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Topics ranged from how Microsoft can make cloud application development easier, to how it will leverage the cloud for development and testing in Visual Studio, and whether Silverlight was part of the open Web.

When asked how Microsoft would help its customers understand how to comply with regulations and data privacy laws that could prohibit moving data to the cloud, Ozzie emphasized that Microsoft has experience working in different countries throughout the world, and that it could parley those experiences to guide its customers.

Microsoft had to modify Windows Messenger features in different countries at the behest of regulators, but it still managed to ship its software, Muglia added.

Additionally, Microsoft has data centers located throughout the world to give customers that are located in countries with restrictive regulations the ability to use Windows Azure within their borders, Muglia said.

Ozzie said that he expected that laws will become less restrictive over time, because governments themselves have an interest in using cloud computing. Encryption is a model of how laws were adapted to changing technology, he added. “It’s as if they don’t know that encryption exists,” he quipped.

When asked about how Azure fits into development and testing, Muglia confirmed that Microsoft intends to integrate Azure into Visual Studio for provisioning test environments.

Microsoft will provide preconfigured virtual machines for Windows and; more customization (such as changing system configurations) will be added over time, he said.

That integration could represent another click up in level of “coopetition” with Hewlett-Packard, said Forrester principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond.

Lastly, Muglia and Ozzie were insistent that Silverlight was part of the open Web. They pointed to Mono Moonlight as an example of that, and they noted that Microsoft has licensed associated intellectual property, including Windows Media codecs, to open-source developers.

Mono project lead Miguel de Icaza said that he wanted Microsoft to go a step further by contributing technology to ECMA International. Muglia responded by saying that Microsoft was trying to balance standards with its ability to rapidly innovate the Silverlight platform.

Ozzie also gave a nuanced explanation about how Silverlight is meant to help developers leverage existing application and tool investments on the Web, and it was complementary to (and not meant to suppress) HTML 5. The draft specification of HTML 5 includes a framework for building Web applications.

In a follow-up conversation regarding the cloud, Jamin Spitzer, director of platform strategy for Microsoft, said that “Developers need to have a realistic sense of what changes and what stays the same by moving to an instance-based IaaS cloud.” Microsoft announced an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offering for Azure at PDC.

The “true promise” of cloud computing is fully realized through transforming applications for the cloud, he added, saying that developers needed to identify the core set of functional capabilities required for specific application scenarios, and then choose the right deployment location to best satisfy those capabilities, whether that is on premises or on the computing. Some workloads should stay on premises if moving to the cloud does not justify future cost savings, or if data needs to remain behind the firewall, he admitted.

cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.

cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.