What you need to know about moving to the Azure public cloud

The right mix

I have been – and probably will be for some time – a critic of cloud computing. I have issues with many of the vendors. There are legal unknowns surrounding the use of US public clouds that are beyond my risk tolerance, and quite frankly I am voting with my wallet on this one.

The sojourn of these workloads into Microsoft's public cloud will be brief. There are no local Azure service providers yet, so necessity dictated a distasteful choice.

Despite my misgivings, I learned a lot. I have a great deal of respect for the technology Microsoft has on the table. I am a trenchant critic of much of what Microsoft does but I am pretty much sold on this Cloud OS idea.

Microsoft's server tech is good. The Azure public cloud is good. The Azure service provider and Azure on-premises stack of technologies is a decent installer away from excellent.

Like it or not, some combination of local and public cloud is the future of computing. With the on-premises, service provider and public cloud triad, I think Microsoft currently has a better chance of winning this than anyone else.

Pay the price

Using a public cloud – and Microsoft is no exception here – is expensive. I am sure that someone will be along in the comments to explain in abstracts with some unverified assertions or irrelevant case studies why the TCO is lower in the public cloud and the ROI is higher. After years of consistent research and testing I remain unconvinced.

According to the Azure calculator a single medium virtual machine with a pair of anemic 1.6GHz cores and 3.5GB of RAM will cost me $134 per month for Windows Server and $89 for Linux. That is $1,607 per year for Windows and $1,071 for Linux, not counting bandwidth or storage.

For the past year I have dropped in Supermicro 2U Twin2 with a VMware Essentials Plus kit systems and three years of business-class ADSL for $20,000 to customer locations. Bump that up to $30,000 if I want Windows Server instances on the three active nodes.

This gives me three nodes (with one cold spare) that each have 128GB of RAM, eight cores total usable storage in the 12TB range. Assuming no memory overcommit is used, that is about 100 of those "3.5GB of RAM" virtual machines in one of my standard clusters.

Azure pricing over three years would have cost $321,408 for 100 Linux instances or $482,112 for 100 instances of Windows, again not factoring in storage or bandwidth.

Clearly, I need to charge a great deal more to manage and maintain a small business cluster. Those prices are enough to dedicate a sysadmin to that one wee cluster for the entire three-year stretch, at the local labour rates.

We are not even touching on the fact that most businesses I work with will run that cluster for 10 years before a refresh.

Prejudiced, moi?

My own experience makes me biased when I examine all these technologies. I am not talking here about the baggage that comes from decades of dealing with various vendors or beating one technology or other into shape.

By bias I am talking about the limits on how I can even conceive of computing. Workloads, data flows, authentication systems – my conceptualisation of these is coloured by the client-server model I grew up with.

I still think, cost and otherwise operate on infrastructure units that are based on my experience. I think in virtual machines, not workloads. I spec more RAM than absolutely needed, I assign more storage to things "just in case" and I don't refresh everything every three years.

If I take a completely different approach to costing – the aforementioned per-workload model – then the workloads that I am actually running on those clusters, as opposed to the workloads I have provisioned, more or less come out even on cost.

Getting there requires not doing everything as a virtual machine that I then manage. If I start to do most things as web workloads, databases and so forth, supplementing with virtual machines only where they don't have an appropriate pre-canned offering, then the costs go way down.

Start adding up the numbers and Microsoft is charging about 10 per cent more for the labour than I do to deploy and maintain the same workloads. Considering that it will most likely make a better job of it, with resources an order of magnitude more than I could ever dream of bringing to bear, that is a scarily acceptable mark up.

What I perceive to be the atomic elements of computing infrastructure changes how I view simple things like pricing. Inevitably, it also influences how I view the design of these workloads and how I engineer their interactions.

And the winner is ...

Given the explosive growth of cloud computing, my reluctance is obviously not shared by all. It is clear that so many people feel this way that Amazon, Google and all the rest of the public-only cloud providers are not guaranteed victory.

Microsoft's Azure public cloud is there for those who wish to adopt it. For those who don't, there are the service provider and on-premises offerings.

This is Microsoft's Cloud OS strategy. It is backed by good technology and it stands an honest chance of winning in a newly competitive IT environment.

What will you choose? ®