With Microsoft’s unveiling of Windows Azure at the PDC last week, I’ve been trying to get my head around exactly what Azure is, or more specifically, why this “cloud computing” thing is so important to Microsoft. What is cloud computing? Heck, what is the “cloud”? According to Wikipedia:
The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet (based on how it is depicted in computer network diagrams) and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.
Ok, so the cloud is the Internet. Why not just call it the Internet? Evidently, it’s a more abstract, architectural way of looking at the Internet that’s not concerned with all the hardware and network protocols under the hood. You connect a router to the “Internet”. You put a service in the “cloud”. Indeed, when talking about cloud computing, people often refer to delivering “software as a service” or “software + services”. It’s broader than that and actually has been around for a while, so what’s the big deal? “Cloud computing” is a buzz-word, to be sure; a repackaging of existing concepts and sold as something new. In this case, the packaging could provide some benefits.
So, what is Windows Azure then? First of all, let’s state the obvious: this is web hosting from Microsoft. When it comes to hosting, you have a couple of options: inexpensive shared hosting, which is fine for static web sites and sites that need little processing power, and dedicated hosting, where you get your own machine(s) for mission-critical stuff. Azure Services is kind of a hybrid approach, where you pay for dedicated resources on Microsoft’s data center, but it’s all virtualized and you don’t know about the hardware underneath. Windows Azure is the base platform for managing all of that, an operating system of sorts with APIs exposed to developers.
My first thought is that this would be something Microsoft could sell to ISPs, but once I realized the scale of what they are trying to do, you really do want a Microsoft, a Google, or an IBM behind it. Scalability and reliability are the name of the game. When you sign up, you get an instance on the data center, which is presumably a virtual machine running Windows Server, but I don’t know the exact details and there’s probably more to it than that. You can have as many instances as you want (or can afford) on-demand, and you pay for exactly what you use and for how long you use it. Microsoft demonstrated scaling instances up or down by simply changing a setting in a config file.
How could that be useful? Imagine you’re offering a new web application and you need to easily scale up as you grow. Or maybe you’re an online retailer and you need to quadruple your web capacity during the holiday season. To get more granular, maybe you need 10 servers running your web site during peak hours but only 2 in the middle of the night. That’s the pitch, anyway. Whether or not anyone actually needs that much flexibility remains to be seen, but it could be enough to convince some people to buy in.
So, how much is this gonna cost? Good question. Microsoft hasn’t released pricing yet, but they are going to have to be competitive with Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud“. I looked at their pricing, and since everything is a-la-carte down to the hour and the gigabyte, I still don’t know. As far as I can tell, a single instance running 24/7 costs about $150-$200/month. That’s comparable to dedicated hosting, but if you added on the managed features you get with EC2 (backups, etc.) to dedicated hosting, EC2 may actually be cheaper than dedicated (I’m sure people will be analyzing and debating that for some time). Of course, Microsoft has services such as .NET Services and SQL Services that sit on top of Windows Azure, as well as full-blown applications like Office and CRM, so it’s really going to depend on what you need. I hope Microsoft makes it easier than Amazon to determine your costs.
With this highly scalable and supposedly reliable system, will businesses move their applications to the cloud? I think you’ll see some of that, but the basic rules for determining if an application is a good candidate for the web haven’t changed. If a company relies on their line-of-business software for daily operations, I doubt they’ll risk being shut down because their DSL or T1 line goes down. However, maybe the cloud is the ideal place for their CRM system. Microsoft realizes that businesses are not going to put everything in the cloud, so part of .NET Services is to help companies bridge the gap between their on-premises and cloud systems. For example, logging in to your local network can also log you in to the CRM app in the cloud.
Now, for the million dollar question: Can you run FoxPro applications on Azure? Maybe, but not yet. Azure will initially be for managed .NET code only, but Microsoft claims they will open it up to unmanaged code in 2009. We’ll have to wait and see if that includes VFP.
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