The era of the cloud Operating System

BANGALORE, INDIA: For decades, those of us in the realm of IT have been aspiring for ever more economical and agile means of running of our businesses. Lately, the 'cloud' has emerged as a prime solution to those needs, and as we move more and more of our infrastructure into clouds, it is important to reflect on what benefits the cloud really provides.

I find it valuable to do so in the context of the cloud operating system.

At its most basic level, any operating system has two primary responsibilities. It needs to manage the underlying hardware of the system, and it needs to provide a platform for applications to run on that system.

These fundamentals have not changed over the years, however, what has changed is the scale of the hardware being managed. Historically, this has manifested as 'scaling up', with an operating system managing ever more resources in a single box.

However, with the cloud, the 'unit' of hardware abstraction that a server operating system manages has gone beyond a single machine and has reached the level of a 'data centre', from a small cluster of servers all the way up to massive global deployments of thousands upon thousands of machines that are geographically distributed.

When I think about a cloud operating system and how it powers a modern data centre, I think about four key attributes. First, there is the need for scalability and elasticity. We choose the cloud because we want the illusion of infinite scale (at least at the application level), and that scale has to be elastic, enabling us to ramp up or down as our business needs evolve.

Second, there is the need to be always on, always up. Developers can build great applications, however, those applications can be worthless without high availability. Third is the need for sharing of resources. This means multi-tenancy, ensuring that one application does not consume more resources than it deserves, governors on applications, and policies that IT can configure.

And fourth, there is the need for automation and supporting self-service. Automation is a necessary aspect of achieving total cost of ownership; with thousands and thousands of machines, you need to be able to have a very high machine to ops person ratio.

All four of these attributes are chiefly the responsibility of a modern cloud operating system.

It is helpful to see how these attributes come to fruition by looking at a few examples of operating systems that are being cloud optimized to run the world’s largest apps and to operate at a global scale, 24x7.

I think about cloud in terms of operating systems not just to have a theoretical discussion about terminology. Rather, focusing on the key attributes of cloud-optimized operating system can help you to make informed decisions about what technology and provider to bet on.

As you look to move your business to the cloud (whether on-premises, a public cloud, a cloud provided by a trusted partner, or a hybrid across any of these), it is helpful to look at the capabilities provided by the system through the lens of operating systems. In this context, some of the things to consider would be your requirements and goals around scalability, availability, sharing of resources, and automation.

The author is corporate vice president of Server & Tools Business at Microsoft.