Microsoft delivers 'almost ready' Azure cloud
Play now, play later - much later
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
PDC Microsoft is fiddling around with the launch dates of the highly anticipated Windows Azure while showing off the cloud service's latest advances.
The company said on Tuesday that Azure, unveiled in October 2008, would continue as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) through to the end of this year.
Azure will be opened to paying customers on January 1, but you won't actually be charged for using Azure until a month later, as Microsoft tries to get its provisioning and billing systems up and running.
Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie told Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, California that the company will test the systems that allocate compute resources and charge customers for "accuracy and completeness."
Also, it sounds like the full complement of data centers actually running Azure won't be fully in place until the turn of the year.
Data centers in Europe and Asia - Dublin, Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Singapore - follow those in Chicago and San Antonio. All three zones will go live in January, Ozzie told PDC.
So is Azure late?
Chief executive officer Steve Ballmer said in February Microsoft would "have the ability to go to market" by the end of year at PDC. "[Azure] will reach fruition with the PDC this year," he said.
From that perspective, you could argue Microsoft has hit Ballmer's stated goal.
However, Microsoft will still be refining the very systems that allocate computing and storage resources and that then charge people for them one month after the "official" launch and up to three months after Microsoft had the "ability" to go to market.
There is a precedent. This was kind of soft and hard launch dates Microsoft used on Windows Vista, with the staggered November "business" launch and January consumer release.
It fell to the white-haired chief software wizard to spin the Azure features developers can use now. New features that Ozzie said go live Tuesday at PDC are single sign-in for Windows Azure and SQL Azure storage.
Ozzie noted Azure also now offers multiple sized virtual machines with the ability to support any Windows code or programming model.
Windows Azure will come in four sizes of virtual machine, starting at $0.12 per service hour and with 1.75Gb of memory. The Azure virtual machines are priced the same as Amazon's own Windows service, but Microsoft has squeezed in an additional virtual machine SKU - called medium and charged at $0.24 per service hour and with 3.5Gb of memory.
But Amazon's Linux service still undercuts Azure.
Microsoft's Azure virtual-machine prices
Microsoft has also packed a lot of development into a short time. It's built the computing fabric, a programming architecture and ability to program not just using all Microsoft's programming languages and Visual Studio but also PHP, Java, and Ruby with a Fast CGI bridge and SDKs.
Also, the storage mechanism underwent a massive change, as Microsoft decided to give developers the familiarly of SQL Server, only in the cloud. Ozzie noted Tuesday Azure now offers features for updating and accessing data such as entity group transactions and block blobs.
Another feature coming next year is Windows Server AppFabric, a set of application services for building and deploying Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow services on servers and in the cloud. Released as a beta Tuesday, AppFabric combines hosting and caching from the previous Dublin and Velocity projects with the Azure AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control layer that was previously called .NET Services.
Server and tools president Bob Muglia said AppFabric would let you create an easy to mange infrastructure with Microsoft taking care of things like fail over and load balancing.
He also promised a set of predefined Windows server images would be loaded on Azure, which you could download, mount, take a virtual machine snap shot, and save for future use. Muglia said this would make it simpler to deploy applications you've built to Windows Azure.
Also, in Visual Studio 2010, will be Azure templates that Ozzie said would let you move cloud applications backwards and forwards between your systems and the cloud. ®
COMMENTS
Seriously. Seriously. We're in a recession people.
Whatever happened to the recession?
I don't think the "cloud" is any good for "always-on" services. I run a small business and I worked out that with an Amazon instance it would cost twice as much to host a 24x7 server in the cloud than it would to rent my own dedicated server (or even VPS.)
For example - I'm currently renting a quad-core 2.4GHz processor, 2GB RAM, dual-160GB hard disk server for £69 a month. That's 9.6GHz of effective processing power. I'm upgrading it in the next month or so to have 8GB RAM which will increase that to £89 a month.
Now what if I wanted to match that with an Azure instance?
Well it would sit somewhere between the Large and X Large instances, which would give me 10.5GB RAM and the same amount of processing power. That's without knowing how much disk space I'd get.
That would set me back $0.72 per hour. There's an average of 722.4 hours in a month, which leaves me a bill of $520.13 a month! Translate that into GBP = £313!
I'm planning on getting another server of the same spec, sync'ing the systems data storage, which means I will be able to run 8 VMs of the same spec as the Small Azure instance for less than £200. Which will include live migration of the VMs across physical nodes, about 260GB storage for all 8 VMs and the option of load balancing them.
A Small Azure instance, running 24x7, will cost approx £52 a month, if I had 8 of them that'd be £416. DOUBLE THE PRICE.
Now, if I wanted one or 2 Azure instances to do some heavy processing for a couple of hours a day (which would be useful for exactly 1 scenario if I didn't need my own servers for anything else) then I'd get my head straight in the cloud but for anything else, it only deserves a grenade.
This should be good
After T-Mobile staff selling customer data: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8364421.stm How anyone would trust the cloud with anything other than a grocery list baffles me.
It's not so much hackers that one needs to worry about when trusting ones data to the cloud... It's with the custodians of that data where the real worry lies.
More of my opinion on data theft and the cloud in general on my blog: http://www.propergander.org.uk/properblog/?p=40 should anyone be interested in debating further. And yes it is a shameless plug for my new website, so please forgive me, and there is no advertising I am trying to garner interest and debate not make money.
Highly anticipated Windows Azure
Uh, highly anticipated by who exactly? The only anticipating I'm doing is for the sweeps that will be run predicting its first highly spectacular crash.
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