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Microsoft Makes It Harder To Avoid Azure
itwbennett writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a handful of hybrid cloud services that make it easy for businesses to start using Azure in a small way. What struck blogger Nancy Gohring about the announcement was 'how deeply Microsoft is integrating Azure into other products,' with the intention of moving long-time customers onto Azure in ways that are hardly perceptible to them."
Everyone leasing time to run their applications and access their data. Like it or not, welcome back to the mainframe age folks, just with more shine and color.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Seriously, I don't use any Microsoft products so I have no idea what Azure is supposed to be. A small description or at the very least a link to Wikipedia should have been at the beginning of your text, itwbennett.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Well yeah... They are calling server 2012 r2, the Cloud OS, : http://blogs.technet.com/b/in_the_cloud/archive/2013/10/18/today-is-the-ga-for-the-cloud-os.aspx
Because it prints money, geddit?
Who in their right mind would throw down that kind of recurring cash for Azure?
Modern hardware is insanely capable, reliable and cheap. Our Internet pipes are as cheap and fat as ever... This leaves me to scratch my head on justification for this.
You still need "IT" people to manage clients and access environment even if servers are hosted elsewhere. We have four racks of Windows and Linux systems running for years with only minimal maintenance. If you don't buy complete crap shit just runs.
If people see value in this so be it good for them... Just hope there are options to "export" accounts back "on premise" once your source of limitless funding dries up.
http://letmebingthatforyou.com/?q=azure
1) Do not use Microsoft products
2) Rinse and repeat
Don't tell me it's unavoidable because that's bullshit. There is always a choice, you are just too comfortable and/or inflexible to use an alternative.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
But then you would be locked to something else.
Shame on them for making a good product and trying to push it to their users.
Automatic backups with client side encryption? Oh I bet that crypt algorithm is something they can break! It just has to be, Microsoft is pure evil, after all.
Windows servers come with Active Directory enabled? Ohh this Active Directory thingy is a terrible thing! I bet they are pushing it into their clients just to get them dependant on this old time Microsoft only service, I bet ya.
There is no lock-in in Linux. You have the source. You are free to spend millions of dollars migrating your systems and managing your broken desktops later on. Don't complain.
The are using Azure to provide cloud backup (and Azure active directory syncing) and Single Sign-In Services. It's not so much making Azure hard to avoid but actually providing useful utility near seamlessly in Azure.
But then you would be locked to something else.
not if you use open standards.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Hearing Microsoft's own technicians being honest and saying it perhaps isn't out of the "beta" stage yet tells a lot of it.
The cloud is the most hyped word that IT has ever come endured. It is nothing more than the old concept of the mainframe to centralize resources to a given location. People replaced that with thin clients and again it was nothing more than a way to centralize resources to a given location. Now we have the cloud and we are centralizing resources to a given location.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like duck it must be a duck. Azure and other cloud variants are nothing more than attempts to move everyone to the cloud (and encourage outsourcing of services). However the cloud doesn't even mean a third party provider anymore. You can get a cloud provider to put their cloud services in your own facilities (Amazon and Microsoft Azure both support doing this). It's really nothing more than the old architecture diagram model for saying "the network" that got hijacked by marketing departments.
All your doing with the cloud is putting resources in a given location. It might be your location, Amazon's, Rack Spaces or any other providers. That's it, there's nothing magical about it. Therefore all Azure is doing is making it easy to put resources in another location. This is something that IT professionals have been doing for over 40 years, changing the name make it special.
But then you would be locked to something else.
not if you use open standards.
That's the theory. In practice few open standards compliant product comply in a meaningful way, and there are a lot of open standards that make no sense. It's still better than nothing by a wide margin, but "use open standards" is no silver bullet.
Who in their right mind would throw down that kind of recurring cash for Azure?
Modern hardware is insanely capable, reliable and cheap.
More to the point, who would bet that kind of cash, and their corporate health and/or reputation, on Microsoft? Case in point, the 7 hour outage on the London Stock Exchange, blamed on Microsoft's Tradelect electronic trading platform. Microsoft was trying to ramp the system up to 10,000 messages/second at that point, a pitifully small number compared to contemporary platforms based on Linux. Not only was Microsoft unable to achieve even remotely respectable performance, they were unable to design and implement a system that could resist catastrophic failure, or when it did fail, bring it back up in less than a day. One can reasonably ask, did Microsoft ever test the failure modes of this system, even once? And what does this say about the efficacy of the .NET + MSQL database platform this was built on?
As a direct result of this incident, LSE decided to replace the Microsoft system with a Linux-based platform developed in Sri-Lanka, presumably by competent engineers not harrassed by the likes of Steve Ballmer.
What are the chances of the Tradelect fiasco playing out again on Microsoft's cloud platform? I would say, virtually 100%. Everybody who wants the equivalent of having their business model towed back to shore after suffering the Microsoft effect, please raise your hand and repeat: please, can I have some more of that!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
As they say, if you're not leading you're following. By doing these kinds of tie-ins, MSFT is trying to position themselves as innovative but Azure, while good isn't on par with other Cloud services that cost less and deliver more. What'll be really sad is when customers realize that MSFT will start locking them out of using other Cloud solutions because they "cause problems with Windows Server" or "We don't support the use of product x on an untested Cloud solution." That is the way this usually pans out and eventually if you want to use MSFT Server products with "Cloud" that will mean Azure. Usually after that the anti-trust hawks start suing, so I have 2015 in the pool when Amazon, Rackspace and a couple of other Cloud providers sue MSFT for anti-competitive practices.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
1) Do not use Microsoft products 2) Rinse and repeat. Don't tell me it's unavoidable because that's bullshit. There is always a choice, you are just too comfortable and/or inflexible to use an alternative.
These days Microsoft is the "alternative" and Linux is the incumbent. A vast majority of large data centers run on Linux. Microsoft is the outsider trying to break in, but without any compelling story beyond pure spin and with a chronically horrible brand reputation. I sense that a few diehard Microsoft-addled PHBs will go the Azure way nonetheless, and hilarity will ensue for everyone except the victims.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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You can run Linux on Azure.
This space for rent.
1) Do not use Microsoft products 2) Rinse and repeat. Don't tell me it's unavoidable because that's bullshit. There is always a choice, you are just too comfortable and/or inflexible to use an alternative.
These days Microsoft is the "alternative" and Linux is the incumbent. A vast majority of large data centers run on Linux. Microsoft is the outsider trying to break in, but without any compelling story beyond pure spin and with a chronically horrible brand reputation. I sense that a few diehard Microsoft-addled PHBs will go the Azure way nonetheless, and hilarity will ensue for everyone except the victims.
Operating systems run on data centers, not vice versa.
You can run Linux on Azure.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/tutorials/virtual-machine-from-gallery/
Stop the lame FUD, it only makes you look stupid and uninformed.
This space for rent.
I can confirm that I am now much more difficult to avoid.
Fixed the headline for you. Come on into my cloud said the spider to the fly.............
Oh sorry, just confused the cloud with the web....
Last i checked Apple actually uses azure for some of its cloud offering. It's been that way since 2011.. or maybe longer..
The cloud is good if you have to spin up servers to horizontally scale if you have a user load spike on (frequent) occasion. Rather than have a bunch of servers really doing nothing most of the time you can have a one or a small number most of the time which is relatively cheap, and then spin up 100 or whatever when needed then shut them down again. You only pay for them when they are running.
However you do need to look at it critically, like all things. If for example, you only ever spin up at most say five servers, and the cost of the one or two you always have running eventually exceeds the cost of owning and operating five boxes, then you might as well just run them yourself. However if the price of renting them (errrrrrr running them) on the cloud is cheaper or more convenient (which can be worth something monetarily), then run them there.
There are also some other reasons you might want to use the cloud instead of your servers. For example, in the case of Amazon S3, or Azure Blob Storage, etc. sometimes it is the delivery time of static content (like images or other files) that might be what you are gaining. Running things on your own server you might not have the response times you want, creating too much latency for your customers. By response time I mean the length of time your servers can locate the image on disk, marshal it into whatever stream/protocol it needs to be in, and serve over the internet to some client on the other side of the world. Services like S3 are highly optimized for serving static content like that (from my understanding from when they were first building it, often storing it optimized to go directly on the wire... kind of like pre-marshalling the files), and additionally you can associate the static content (stored on S3 or blob storage) with a content deliver network that will cache your content on servers around the globe to further improve performance.
There are a lot of good reasons for using the cloud. And there are a lot of bad reasons. If you use the cloud, make sure you are using the good ones. :)
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
They keep people from leaving but also from entering. Microsoft is bundling so much of its technology that I'm very close to giving it up altogether. A lot of other people feel that way, though unfortunately most opt for Macs. Point being, this might actually cost them more than it gains.
And it's also handy that all your data is not directly handed to the NSA, but you keep it "in house".
You see - the NSA also is involved in idustrial spionage, just to benefit all USA company's. Why anyone would trust their data to a "cloud" runned by Microsoft (that has admitted handing over data) is baffeling me. Company's storing anything valual in that "azure" are litterly asking for unfair competition...
A vast majority of large data centers run Linux as their infrastructure, and run Linux as the host OS on the data center servers. There, is that clear enough even for a Microsoft troll?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Apart from on leap years, or when they don't renew the SSL certificates, or what were the other global Azure outages from? It appears that the "top talent" is pure marketingspeak which does not correspond to reality. You've been conned and need to look beyond the glossy advertising to the product itself. They don't yet match up to the local datacentres that may have been doing this for years because they have not yet "built the expertise" in an area that they are new at.
Azure makes it easier to avoid Microsoft. Use Linux and to insure data is safe, never trust the cloud.
What a useful, unbiased, and in no way over-generalizing answer. I'm glad you took time to post on Slashdot.
You can run Linux on Azure.
Stop the lame FUD, it only makes you look stupid and uninformed.
you should read TFA yourself before slighting someone. it states that azure is being deeply integrated into microsoft products that dont run on azure itself (e.g. automatic backup). these are features that only work with Azure. now let's say your business becomes dependent on one of these features. you are now locked-in.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That doesn't make any sense. How is it lock-in when it's trivial to switch to another backup solution? How is switching away from Azure Backup more difficult than switching from a 3rd party back up service? TFA talks about how signing up for Azure Backup makes it easier to use other services. DUH. It's like having a Gmail account makes it easy to upload video to Youtube. Doesn't mean that you're getting locked into Gmail.
This space for rent.
http://semiaccurate.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-admits-image-net-consumer-negative/
Because they've realized the 'Microsoft' name has such negative connotations in the consumer market, that they don't want CxO's shooting it down based on its name, and one that wasn't directly tied to their Windows environment, since its where they want you to run your Linux VMs "In The Cloud":
"...we knew that we needed to ensure that Windows is the best platform to run Linux workloads as well as open source components. ..."
http://blogs.technet.com/b/in_the_cloud/archive/2013/07/24/what-s-new-in-2012-r2-enabling-open-source-software.aspx
I'm running a Microsoft mouse on Mint.
That doesn't make any sense. How is it lock-in when it's trivial to switch to another backup solution? How is switching away from Azure Backup more difficult than switching from a 3rd party back up service? TFA talks about how signing up for Azure Backup makes it easier to use other services. DUH. It's like having a Gmail account makes it easy to upload video to Youtube. Doesn't mean that you're getting locked into Gmail.
*facepalm*
RTFA already.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You are just reinforcing my point about "local datacentres that may have been doing this for years" versus trendy new and fragile cloud stuff that the above poster described as "the top talent in the world".
Reading comprehension failure - where in my post am I attempting to prove the backdoor? The big clue should be the line "Fear of spooks aside" - maybe I should have put it in bold for the slow who seem to be looking for hidden meanings that are not there.