Microsoft To Offer Local Version of Azure Cloud Service (reuters.com)

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new service that allows customers to use its cloud technology on their own servers, part of the company's efforts to refocus its product line to compete more effectively with rivals Amazon and Google. From a report: "One of the key differentiations we have with Azure versus our two biggest competitors in the cloud platform space is our ability to support true hybrid solutions," Judson Althoff, Microsoft's executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, told Reuters. Microsoft is hoping to carve a niche among customers who cannot or do not want to have to move all their computing operations to the massive shared data centers that are collectively known as the cloud. Azure Stack could serve companies in highly regulated industries or in parts of the world where using the cloud is not yet feasible, Althoff said.

Comments

Re:The year of Linux on the desktop

[cayenne8]

At this point Linux servers are mostly for small blogs and criminal organizations.

Hmm..I dunno what rock you live under, but most any server room I've worked in for the past few decades, is about 99% Linux...with only the token windows server in the mix here and there.

That was mostly Federal systems....

Re:What exactly makes a private cloud different fr

[Nkwe]

A real cloud solution is much more then just running a single virtual machine in someone else's data center. With a real cloud solution you specify to your cloud provider the workload you want to run along with your performance and availability requirements. The cloud provider then provisions and manages whatever hardware is necessary to meet your requirements. Assuming that you have asked for (and paid for) redundancy, hardware failures are transparent to you as failing hardware is automatically detected and replaced for you. If you need more (or less performance) you can adjust your declared requirements and the cloud provider will either swap out your existing (potentially virtual) machines for larger or smaller ones (or add / remove machines from your pool); they will do this without you having to redeploy your workload, in some cases you can do this with no downtime.

Azure (and other cloud providers) don't just offer pure virtual machines, they also offer virtual components that you can use to build applications with. Components include storage (relational, non-relational tables, basic blob), communication (queues, message routing, load balancing), compute component hosting, web content component hosting, authentication services, etc. By developing a cloud based application, you can worry about your logic and architecture, and not have to worry about deploying and maintaining basic infrastructure services.

What exactly is a "private cloud" if not a server? What am I missing?

A private cloud (a real private cloud, not just a single server offering file storage over the Internet) is a set of management tools that takes a pool of hardware and offers it up as logical computing components that can be leveraged by application developers with the goal of being able to develop your applications against a generic model and leaving the hardware and resource allocation and maintenance to the cloud management software (which is typically operated by people other than your development staff.)