Today I was speaking with some co-workers about the various Cloud players out there. Specifically we were talking about Microsoft's Azure service vs. other offerings like Amazon. Amazon will actually give you full control over a virtual OS like Microsoft Server 2008 or Linux. Essentially a VM. Where as Microsoft’s offering requires you to code against an API to take advantage of its architecture. The initial gut reaction to Microsoft’s implementation is why in the world would someone spend the time to specifically build an application to fit Microsoft’s Cloud? You could just as easily make a VM and upload it to Amazon’s service? Microsoft could easily implement the same with their Hyper-V virtualization technology.
Let’s assume for a second that Microsoft is looking beyond the public cloud. Now this starts to make sense. At the enterprise level there has to be some reservations about opening up applications to the public cloud. I work in Healthcare and there is no way I could go to the CIO with a straight face and say that it’s a good idea to put all of our applications and data in the public cloud. I imagine it’s much the same for banking, government, etc, etc.
So let’s now look at what could be Microsoft’s strategy in terms of a private cloud. Setup a cluster of Windows Servers, SQL Servers, and some cloud management servers and now you have a private cloud. To deploy additional application resources you don’t need to spin up a new VM or physical box that needs to be named, patched, copied, assigned an IP or managed. Your Production Support staff or automated system simply scales the application. Additionally, license management for these resources is already taken care of at the cluster level. How about licensing around CPU usage? Now when your web apps run heavy between 9am and 8 pm they automatically scale out. At night they are reduced. SQL processes that run at night then scale up. Disaster planning becomes a breeze. Your large machines with tons of memory and cores should be fully utilized, not sitting idle eating up electricity and cooling resources. It’s a great scenario, the OS and infrastructure are completely abstracted from the applications. Now building applications that use the API make complete sense.
Microsoft swears that this will never happen. Their current position is that Azure should be another ‘choice’ and should never be implemented at the clients site. I would argue that there might be a high demand for it. Enterprise application providers will eventually demand it. I think Microsoft has an opportunity to introduce a real game changer in Enterprise Architecture because if they don’t, someone else will.
As an Enterprise Architect, would you ever be interested in a private cloud, or would you always use the public cloud?