Microsoft Azure – Life in the Cloud
I had a chance to view the Microsoft Azure platform last night. It was presented by the DC DotNet Users Group in Washington DC. I am quite familiar with both Google and Amazon cloud’s and the advantages, and disadvantages with them. For my enterprise, they are not very helpful as we are a 100% Microsoft shop and run tons of apps, both off the shelf, and custom .asp/.net. So most clouds are difficult for us for the following reasons.
- Can not install .exe or .msi apps and run out of the box. Most clouds require some proprietary process for getting apps created and uploaded to the cloud. Kinda like creating an image for a desktop/laptop. There is a process to follow and you have rules to follow or you end up with a messed up image.
- Because of the proprietary nature, it requires changes in internal processes, additional training, and plain just changing the way you do stuff. It also requires you to conform to the cloud and you possibly loose flexibility.
- Linux – Open source based. We are a Microsoft shop, so the application-development team would have to switch or create and maintain two code bases. Neither is attractive for us.
Now comes Azure from Microsoft. It has been out since January and building some steam. Here are the pros!
- Its all Microsoft Stuff. Yeah.
- No need to procure Microsoft licenses. Its all built into the costs.
- Developers will like it. Create apps for in-house or the cloud. If you do it right, you can deploy either.
- Typical cloud. Spin up virtual servers pretty quickly. Networking, firewalls, load balancing, etc all built in.
- Geo-location. You can scale to multiple data centers pretty easily. Just costs more.
- TCO is ok. Scalability is key. Just depends on your requirements. No CAPEX. All Expense!
Now the cons.
- While its all Microsoft software. Its not the same. There are lots of limitations. You can not tweak most of the stuff you want to tweak.
- No installing .exe or .msi’s like you do on a standalone boxes or VM’s.
- No access to IIS configs. No access to registry. No access to boot drives.
- Azure VM boxes are throw away’s. You need to store code and temp stuff on some type of storage. So if you do certain things now, you have to learn the cloud way. This is likely to be painful the first few deployments, upgrades, mistakes, etc. I have it down now, but now I need to learn the cloud way. Its new and you will need to learn it.
- Costs. Can get expensive. You pay for everything. Development, staging, production environments all cost $$ as they need to be running. So if you run a typical three tier environment, it all adds up, and that erodes the cloud TCO compared to running in-house.
It would be tough for us to use Azure at this time. We use a lot of off the shelf applications and tools. No way to install into the cloud. Applications want to install and modify the local drives, copy files, change the registry, and all that is not cloud compatible. I am sure if we could redo some apps, start all over with the latest development tools and develop for the cloud, then that may be an option, but it would require a wholesale redo of an application. Given available resources, its not likely, nor is it cost effective.
Why? Because we do data center stuff pretty good and we concentrate on availability. The big advantage is DR/BCP. The cloud could certainly could help us there. But our largest web apps are not suitable for the cloud, because they are built on a third party applications, so its not really an option. There are some suggestions for putting Exchange and IM in the cloud and somehow reducing CAPEX costs. Not really! We do it pretty good and we also integrate Exchange and IM with voicemail, Blackberry’s, and mobile devices. Shortly we will step it up and integrate with our Cisco phone and Tandberg video platforms. So outsourcing Exchange and IM to the cloud, would be painful given our integration points, and certainly make it more complex and expensive.
My $.02 on the Azure cloud. But it will change and improve over time. I will certainly keep an eye on it. Ts-Admin.
3 Comments to “Microsoft Azure – Life in the Cloud”
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By WP Themes, August 3, 2010 @ 8:07 am
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By David Chou, August 7, 2010 @ 11:11 pm
Hi Ts-admin, thanks for taking a look at Windows Azure! Your observations are correct, though I’d like to suggest a different way to look at Azure, as it’s why you’re finding the differences that contribute to the con’s you noted. Basically, we think cloud computing is not exactly the same as cloud hosting; and Azure was designed from that perspective – to enable agility (much more so than cost reduction) and to support Internet-scale applications.
From the agility perspective, we wanted Azure to allow people to deploy applications and have them up and running within a matter of minutes, without having to maintain and interact with server OS. From Internet-scale applications perspective, we wanted Azure to allow people to be able to start with a small footprint, but can easily scale out to thousands of servers supporting millions of users. For example, applications like Facebook and Twitter; Azure can help simplify the engineering efforts required to build and operate these applications in on-premises environments. That’s the primary use case for Azure today, and thus why it isn’t ideally suited for hosting all the same things we host in our own environments today.
Plus, Microsoft has a whole ecosystem of hosting partners. To offer Azure as pure cloud hosting would mean competing with our own ecosystem. Furthermore, we do think that many data center teams can do hosting themselves much more effectively (like you stated), kind of like the analogy between owning and maintaining your car (and being able to tune and optimize it any way you want), versus taking public transportation (which is what Azure is more like).
Of course, the current state in Azure will be changing very rapidly. Many of the new features to be rolled out this year will make Azure a lot friendlier to more existing workloads, such as Admin Mode, VM Role, full IIS control, and eventually the Appliance.
Now let’s look at Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy. It has never been our intention to position Azure as something that will completely replace data center environments today. Our servers and tools business will continue to evolve and support on-premises deployment of software and building private clouds, for example. Azure is a public cloud environment that is more appropriate for things that live on the Internet, and less ideally suited for things that just need a place to host. Thus Microsoft’s overall cloud strategy is to provide both software and cloud services as options for customers to choose from; as both are still very valid models in today’s world.
Just my thoughts. Best! -David Chou (Microsoft)
By Danny O, August 9, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
Ts-Admin,
Thanks for you post. I am presently reading up on Cloud Hosting and Testing for the company I work for and after reading your post it opened my eyes a bit more about MS Azure. I wish I could say the say for Mr. Chou at Microsoft, your post simply came off as defensive of the MS product rather than talking to the cost issue and inflexibility of the application. But I do believe your statement that Azure “will be changing very rapidly” is accurate, Microsoft does like to improve on itself and that at least is a plus in my opinion.
I will continue on in my research. Thank you Ts-Admin.