Blue Vs Blues: Azures real shade

Amitabh Srivastava, senior VP, Windows Azure, Microsoft

Some call it ‘better late than never’. But there’s also ‘the last but surely not the least’. It’s not that easy to figure out which applies best for traditional software czars like Microsoft, when you see them sharpening their edge like never before, as they enter the foggy stratosphere of clouds and challenge early birds like VMware and others.

Just how precise the edge is, stays to be seen, but MS is definitely brandishing the sword with aplomb. And that makes one wonder whether Azure would still stay the colour of so many blues that ‘Cloud’ players are grappling with. Or would it be the fresh stark blue confidence that one sees in the eyes of Amitabh Srivastava, senior VP, Windows Azure, Microsoft

Market strategy against competition, beta stage outages, virtualisation standards, open cloud manifesto and enterprise-readiness of Azure; on his recent visit to India, Srivastava talks on all these issues enveloping its cloud strategy, and more, in this exclusive chat with Pratima H of CyberMedia News.

What exactly is the status of MS’ strategy on cloud market with ‘Azure’, specially in view of rival pioneers who are ahead in terms of market entry?

Well, as to being early or late, MS has been doing cloud for over a decade now. MSN and internal data centers spread on this stuff, are a historical point there. It is just that it wasn’t called 'cloud' back then. Then, Amazon, Google etc showed good work on Cloud’s larger potential.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services platform. Azure provides developers with on-demand computing and storage facilities to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.

It is currently in Community Technology Preview and commercial availability will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009.

But does the current limelight for ‘Cloud’ suggest it is the right time to accentuate portfolio and strategy around it?

Right now, hype has overtaken reality. Cloud is a massive geographically distributed computing mechanism made available as a utility service. We are among the first ones to build an operating system for it, with Azure. It allows for better efficiency on hardware, drives costs down and takes the complexity away (unlike our competition).

A good operating system is crucial to realizing the real worth of clouds and managing it better. Automating various elements, instead of letting it go the manual way, brings opex and capex down and reduces complexity. That’s what we are trying to offer.

Lot of people think of Cloud as a replacement of IT. But it’s an extension at times. There are certain things ready to go for cloud. But due to data security, compliance and control issues, customers have to take a mixed route also, with some stuff put on cloud while the rest remains on premises. Now that’s where there should be seamless flow in between the two, and you need a good technology to orchestrate that well.

On the programming side also, MS believes and works on how to make it easier for developers. It’s important that we provide capabilities that allow a developer to generate any number of applications, as per his choice and take the complexity bit out.

There was some 22-hour outage with your Washington data centre beta, apparently due to some load balancing problem. How did you assess that?

The business application for managing the entire data centre was an issue. Fabric controller works on a logic. The Fabric Controller technology in Windows Azure, enables to scale applications seamlessly, as demand rises and falls. The built-in management services give monitoring and tracing capabilities.

If a machine goes down, it brings another machine automatically to ensure uninterrupted and absolutely smooth work. Now here, in this incident, there was no breakdown or machine downtime issue, but just some networking issue.

Still, the application made sure and brought in another machine. Now that compounded the problem. It was not a problem due to some loophole, but because of the system being extra-alert and proactive. It definitely gave us another area to address.

Talking about the developments on Open Cloud Manifesto, what is MS' standpoint now? Are you still staying away from participating? What’s your argument if that’s so?

We are very interested in an open dialogue and figuring out clearly on how cloud works. But it’s important that all stakeholders, be it users or developers, are involved. It should be a publicly open forum. We are all for it. But it is very important to understand what the customers want. One cannot just standardize without it and then push it across.

All our formats are XML Open, and we have built upon a platform that is wired well for interoperability, be it Red Hat, Google etc.

Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. It supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.

Enterprise-readiness of Cloud products is a critical issue today. What’s your progress on this?

A customer wants costs to come down, and wants agility without hassles on security, compliance etc, when he opts for a cloud. Then there are SLAs (Service Level Agreements) ranging from normal to severe, depending on various business requirements. We will definitely learn as we go.

We have a large enterprise business. And the readiness would be evolutionary. Some workloads would move onto clouds, some will stay. Issues and practical areas of concern will start emerging. It would be a stage-wise approach.

As of now, with Azure, customers can add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications. They can build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.

In addition, they can perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations etc.) off premises. In short, they can reduce costs of building and extending on-premise resources and reduce the effort and costs of IT management.

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