I was invited as an “influencer” to attend the 2009 Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference by Brian Prince. This is my first PDC and I’m absolutely stoked to be here. The event is important because it is the official launch of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
In case you don’t know what Azure is, here’s a description from Microsoft’s web site:
The Windows Azure platform offers an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.
The Windows Azure platform is comprised of Windows Azure: an operating system as a service; SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud; and .NET Services: consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.
Currently in Community Technology Preview (CTP), the services are free to evaluate through January 2010. We will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010.
I’m excited to be a part of such a big event for Microsoft. One thing that seems to be consistent is that this is not your dad’s Microsoft. Their cloud group started with twenty engineers and has ramped up over the last couple of years.
Like I’ve done in the past, here’s a “What I want out of PDC09″ list. If there’s something you would like out of PDC, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.
- Get the latest updates on the Azure stack
- Understand the limitations and where different services are best used
- See how Azure addresses challenges like deployment, scaling, security and private cloud integration
- Understand how Microsoft is making their software cloud-aware
- Talk to more people using Azure and see examples of how they are using it
Much of it is cloud-focused because I spend a bit of my time running Indy Cloud Users and involved with CloudCamp. It has been awhile since I’ve spent time with developers so I’m sure I will be learning a lot. I’ve been impressed with the dynamic nature of the company and individuals like Brian who deliver the message about what Microsoft is doing.
Cloud Strategy - VMware’s cloud strategy is still maturing and growing. We have been hearing from Maritz and others that technology is built into vSphere and other products to leverage it as a cloud platform. I expect we’ll be hearing more about some tangible developments with cloud providers out there today. It will be interesting to see if VMware continues to build itself as a cloud platform or if it shifts gears and starts chasing after Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure platforms. Though they have invested in Teramark, without some good explanation, it would be detrimental for VMware to try to be the provider. I suspect the folks at VMware know this and are have no desire to be the provider but instead need to seed the field.
Enhanced infrastructure awareness - VMware and its network and storage partners need to more visibility to each other. Not only do people need to be able to see what is going on under the covers (storage and network) with things like AppSpeed but they also need to be able to make intelligent decisions on how to fix problems. It should be easy for an admin to see what LUN on the storage side has too many VMs without having to interpret naa392dxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx numbers. This is continuing to happen but still has a ways to go.
Desktop Virtualization – The improvements from VDI (2.0) to View (3.1) and continuing to View 4.0 have been good but there is so much work to do. When I meet with customers, the challenges that they face aren’t just getting applications and desktops virtualized from a technical perspective. We need more flexibility to determine not only what desktop a user receives but what kind of desktop a physical location receives. We need application persistence with a physical endpoint. This is counterintuitive to what virtualizing desktops is all about but this is all going to drive back to the persona of both the person and the endpoint. Entrigue Systems, which is being acquired by Liquidware Labs, and other ISV’s are doing this but it needs to be seamless and well supported.
If you have anything you want to know or news to share with me about some of these things, let me know.
It’s obvious VMware and virtualization are playing a huge role in cloud computing from the perspective of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). VMware’s lead Cloud Architect, Mike Dipetrillo, was gracious enough to provid some great insight into VMware’s strategy.
IaaS is where most managed service providers focusing on today for their cloud offerings. We discussed that developing self-service infrastructure as a service provider offering is tricky. The folks who have done infrastructure understand the glue that is needed for provisioning and allowing users control over their own environment. Giving users the ability to turn the knobs that control things takes a lot of work. Today that is VMware Lab Manager under the covers with some special glue for provisioning. Lab Manager has some challenges today because it wasn’t designed for a multi-tenant environment. Over the next year you’ll start to see products come out that address this for service providers. VMware is also heavily focused on delivering more APIs which allow companies like RightScale to hook into VMware to provision and manage virtual machines. VMware categorizes all of its cloud computing initiatives under the vCloud umbrella. This will include all of their cloud-focused products and APIs. The roadmap has developed rapidly over the last year or two.
Helping small, medium and large businesses build out their internal clouds has been a big focus as well. It needs to be easy to allow people to have the flexibility to move things between the internal and external cloud. One of the questions I get asked the most is “How can I move my applications out into the cloud?” It is a lot cheaper and easier to virtualize your existing software stack compared to rewriting things to fit on exotic platform as a service software at the moment.
Another thing we discussed is how enterprise companies don’t really like “elastic” or “usage-based” billing models. They actually prefer allocation-based where they billed in a consistent fashion. I’ve never given a lot of thought to this but it makes sense. A lot of companies do business the way they do because it works well for them.
Today VMware has over 500 service providers who are either in the process to getting a cloud offering off the ground or have one today. The team at VMware is small when compared to the rest of the organization but things have been progressing fast.
We discussed competition briefly but both agreed how things are changing rapidly. It was obvious that VMware is agressively ramping up its vCloud offering and the internal structure to go along with it. The benefit they have as a company is that they’re able to leverage so many of their existing products and IP.
Many thanks to Mike for sparing some time to discuss VMware’s vCloud initiative.