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Why build a cloud when you can get one ready made?

Microsoft is source and solution of sysadmin Trevor Pott's problems

Trusting relationship

Ultimately, there were always solid business cases for hosting some of my clients' workloads in my data centres. For some it was because I would be doing post-processing on imagery for them.

Others were using this sort of setup as a bridge to shuffle things onto one of my 3D render farms. For still others it was simply being able to use my pre-existing email, web servers or backup infrastructure.

This created a symbiosis between my clients and me that lasts to this day. Our businesses are so intertwined that our IT has merged. The disentangling of our relationship would be a slow and carefully considered process.

This gives me a hold over my clients that places me in a position of enormous trust. I have found that so long as I give my all to maintaining that trust, it is a price they are willing to pay.

As with my spam server, however, the time has come to give serious consideration to the economics of bothering to light this stuff up on my own. My uptime is almost as good as Amazon for 2012 – and better then Microsoft – but not by enough to matter.

When you take into account that cloud providers tend to replace equipment more frequently than I do – and have the resources for actual network operations centres – it is safe to say that most cloud providers simply provide better service than I or most of The Register's readers can.

What is more, my little hybrid cloud made sense back when servers were fairly underpowered and it was reasonable to assume each customer would end up with their workloads virtualised on its own physical server.

Now that I can put all 25 of my clients on a single physical system (with a second as a failover) the complexities of Microsoft's service provider licensing start affecting my ability to compete against those who can do this at scale, especially since many of my customers are dependent on VDI.

Thank you Microsoft

Fortunately, Microsoft is both the source of and the solution to all of my problems. Microsoft is the ultimate COTS provider. Its CloudOS model is as far advanced over the start-up hybrid cloud solutions I have looked at as those same solutions are over my duct-tape hybrid cloud.

I can stand up my own Microsoft private cloud with an Azure portal in my own small data centre. I can also rent a virtual private cloud or use managed services from another service provider. Finally, I can use Microsoft's Azure public cloud.

This is powerful stuff for me. A lot of the companies that I expect to start offering Microsoft's new private cloud stack – complete with Azure portal – are also co-lo providers.

I can offload onto them the responsibility of dealing with Microsoft's licensing and sizing the infrastructure to meet the workloads while I plop my own cluster in on another rack in the same data centre. I can even move data from A to B by simply driving to the service provider's facility with disks. Try that with a tier 1 public cloud.

Bandwidth between the service provider-managed cloud and my cloud is "free" because it is east-west within the same data centre, meaning that for a nominal fee a huge chunk of licensing and infrastructure headaches simply go away.

The more widgets there are to look after the more there are that can break

To put it more succinctly, I can simply offload responsibility for the parts of IT where others have sucked out the margin and concentrate on new projects that others haven't commoditised yet.

I don't really want to run a huge pile of servers on each client’s premises. The more physical widgets there are to look after the more things there are that can break. There is no margin in fixing broken boxes and there is certainly no margin in replacing old ones with new.

Microsoft's solution isn't perfect. I think it still has a lot of growing up to do before it is all things to all people. Yet I think Microsoft is on the right track here. Its approach will meet most needs for most people.

Today it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for most companies to host their own email. If Microsoft keeps doing good work on its hybrid tech, it is going to keep making less and less sense to keep other workloads in-house as well.

The "drop everything and migrate everything to the cloud now" is not something I can get behind. But one workload at a time, one less server to maintain and one less licensing agreement to negotiate – that sounds like the steady drumbeat of inevitability to me. ®

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