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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.
Yeah, okay. Keep telling yourself that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I shall keep it in a jar and call it betty
Also known as a regular server.
I'm pretty sure it should be called MicroBur$t.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Right click folder.
Click "share".
I don't respond to AC's.
Azure offers a lot of features that are not available in Windows clustering. It can appeal to enterprises that want highly available services without dependency on internet or hosted storage.
On Microsoft's side, this product is just repackaging and selling code that is 99% the same as what they run internally, so it has a lot of potential and relatively little cost.
Between this and VMware supporting Linux containers natively, mid-tier and smaller enterprises are getting a lot of new options thrown at them.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
1981: "It's a PC, it's like a mainframe on your desktop."
1995: "It's an Application Server, it's like a PC on a mainframe."
2011: "Cloud: it's like an Application Server on a mainframe."
2017: "Local Cloud: it's like a mainframe on your Application Server."
2025: "It's a Metatizer, it's like an X on a Y, where YOU define what an X and Y is. Good luck figuring it out; we can't. Oh, and thanks for the check!"
Table-ized A.I.
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....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The shills never die, at least not while their untraceable bitcoin payments keep flowing.
On-demand scalability of local resources. You have 100x servers running a collection of VMs that can scale up and down across these servers as demands change for each application. One particular module starts to get hit hard, that app can spawn more instances across your local cluster, and possibly also downscale lesser used apps to give it more resources.
This is essentially what Docker or VMWare is, but for the Microsoft world.
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.)
A hard drive?
Only if you do it right wich is something very very few places actually do. Making something scale still takes good design.
No sir I dont like it.
To the best of my admittedly limited understanding of the matter, Azure is a cloud storage service that you pay for as you use.... this makes sense when you are using somebody else's resources (Microsoft's), but are we supposed to pay Microsoft now to use our own servers instead?
Then again, maybe it does make sense... but strikes me as so self-evidently pointless as to defy any sense of reason why Microsoft would expect people to pay for it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'd guess this is some kind of a management layer that enables portability for Hyper-V workloads between Azure and on-site Hyper-V at a minimum, but maybe it's also some collection of VMs that will also run other Azure services and allows them to migrate to Azure, too.
I think this is probably a pretty decent idea, personal feelings about Microsoft software not withstanding. I think a lot of people are looking for easy portability of Windows VMs and Microsoft software services between on-premise and cloud.
Where do you want your data to go today?
We called it On-Premises-as-a-Service, or OPaaS.
I shih tsu you not.
Kriston
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
This private Azure technology been around for 4 years. MS deprecated their Web Farm Framework in favor of it.
This has been around for some time, although more like a - run AWS locally - and it works pretty well.
https://github.com/eucalyptus
It's sad that this hasn't taken off more, it's pretty nice to be able to jump back and forth between a private/local bunch of vms and then throw them out on AWS if the need arises. Note that it doesn't have 100% of the AWS functionality but works for my smaller projects.
Well blem my ADD and english beeing my second languae, tbh my spelling anfd grammar is equlay shit in my first language
with only the token windows server in the mix here and there.
That sounds difficult! Did you ever try TCP/IP?
I work for a company that is in the heavily-regulated medical industry. 3 years ago we would have jumped on the idea of "local cloud" but now it might be too late.
3 years ago Microsoft offered to replace many of our servers (physical and VMWare) with Azure and the company basically said "No way, we can't have FDA regulated PHI and corporate secrets in the cloud." Fast forward to today, where the company is moving to all Azure. Our corporate Outlook servers are now Outlook 365, our local "FTP" site has been replaced with OneDrive. Yearly upgrades of Office are now replaced with Office 365.
Corporate America is slashing IT departments because they overcharged and underdelivered. They charged a fortune for basic email servers and could barely get Microsoft Office installed and working. Azure just made more corporate sense - gut the IT staff and move to the cloud. The theoretical security concerns melted away in the face of saving money and getting better service.
Where it might still make sense is for companies selling informatics software to other companies in regulated fields. You could offer your software in the cloud, or tell the company they can install their own local Azure and run the software on that. We wanted that 3 years ago and instead basically made our own.
Youzure