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

Posted by msmash on from the more-flexibility dept.

Microsoft on Monday said it will soon make it possible for government clients to run its cloud technology on their own servers as part of a concerted effort to make Azure more appealing to local and federal agencies. From a report: The pairing of Azure Stack, Microsoft's localized cloud product, and Azure Government, the government-tailored version of Microsoft's cloud, comes as competition against Amazon.com Inc for major clients in the public sector ramps up. The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure's head of global infrastructure.

28 comments

  1. A locally hosted cloud solution? by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    All the expense of hosting it locally, with the vendor lock in of a cloud solution!

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:A locally hosted cloud solution? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Don't worry. Soon, I'm sure in the future Office365 hosted Exchange will be managed as it always is, for an extra expense. Offered with a Microsoft technical "hands off" where local IT is responsible for managing it remotely. It's like having MS Exchange all over again, but in the cloud, including being responsible for breaking it with updates and whatnot. Nice! But that's ok, they can fix it for you....for a big a$$ fee

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    2. Re:A locally hosted cloud solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      If you are government, and run RHEL boxes and have ANY SAY SO in the cloud decision, RUN AWAY screaming from MS Azure!!

      I know of a project that somehow got dragged into Azure and found that the technology is immature, and they DO NOT work and play with with Red Hat Linux.

      Hell, you'd not expect them to, since they are MS.

      Be warned, the government side they are offering is even LESS mature and offers less than the commercial side of Azure does.

      If you want to do anything remotely more advanced that click and use their prebuilt VMs, OS and database servers, you will find you have headaches with MS Azure.

    3. Re:A locally hosted cloud solution? by Kenneth+Stephen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is being misunderstood, because the traditional purchasing model is not the way they government wants to purchase software any more - at least within the DOD. DISA - the IT arm of the Dept. of Defense, has bought into the cloud movement wholesale. One of the benefits that the cloud brings to them is that software - once sold as SaaS, becomes opex, instead of capex. This means that when they put out requirements for software, they will ask for the entire SaaS stack - down to the compute, storage, and networking, to be provided as part of the bid. The only caveat is that quite often, all of this has to run on DOD premises, or DOD accredited premises. Both Amazon, and IBM have the ability to run a private cloud on premise, and could respond to RFPs like this. Microsoft was missing out on multi-million dollar bids because they didn't have a private cloud offering till now.

      Given that the DOD _wants_ a local hosted solution, there is nothing net new about the expense of it being hosted locally. With a cloud / SaaS model though, the DOD can now walk away from a vendor if they chose to, at will. So, the hosting cost will be baked into the price of the service, but the depreciation will be owned by the Cloud Provider. The DOD wins because it can be nimble ("oh - you want to add 5000 more users as users of service X? No problem, we just provision more users in the system. It will be ready in two days"), scaleable ("Oh there is a war breaking out? No problem, our cloud platform can scale up and meet the additional load"), and modern (because the software will have to be maintained _by the vendor_ in an evergreen state). And the SaaS / Cloud provider wins because they get $$$$ from the government.

      --

      There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.

    4. Re:A locally hosted cloud solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      TL;DR: More tax dollars down the drain via proprietary lock-in, aka corporate welfare.

    5. Re: A locally hosted cloud solution? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      More like "refuse to read; lazy talking point"

  2. Outrageous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So businesses and private parties can't get this special Government version? Too many back-doors closed, wouldn't want that.

    Let them eat cake indeed

    1. Re:Outrageous by EndlessNameless · · Score: 1

      The government demands that its loads be run on separate servers from public customers. (This is somewhat well-founded in light of Rowhammer and more recent attacks.)

      The government also has rather comprehensive accreditation requirements for any information system that wants to connect to a government network.

      From those two requirements, the need for a separate government product is born. This has nothing to do with backdoors and everything to do with ritualistic IT security practices. Most of the bureaucrats understand nothing that they accredit, but the rules are generally based on real risks. So here we are.

      It's really that simple.

      --

      ---
      According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  3. Azure is HPC in the cloud. by forkfail · · Score: 1

    And now, HPC will be local Azure.

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    Check your premises.
  4. Call it waht you want... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...but it's still the good ol' terminal/server model from the '70s. And this is good because it's a consolidation of what works well.

    1. Re:Call it waht you want... by bondsbw · · Score: 1

      Comparing cloud architecture with "terminal/server" is missing the whole point.

      A modern multi-GPU gaming PC and a Turing machine can both compute stuff, but I don't say they're the same thing.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  5. Why Microsoft Azure Stack is destined to fail by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/opinion/Why-Microsoft-Azure-Stack-is-destined-to-fail

  6. Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers

    Yeah ... um ... that's what we call a fucking data center.

    Sorry, but once you realize you need your stuff on premises, it's no longer "the cloud".

    What are you paying MS for in this scenario? Is this in addition to your own IT people who will have to set it up and run it anyway?

    Some idiot of a CTO is going to be braying about how he saved the company money by going to a self hosted cloud, and that CTO needs a punch in the head.

    1. Re:Huh? by bondsbw · · Score: 1

      VMware started on private servers and recently expanded to offer public cloud services in which you can manage everything with the same tools. You can migrate easily between private and public clouds and manage scaling and redundancy from one location.

      This is somewhat the same, in reverse.

      The market is there. You just might not be the target audience.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
  7. How about a cloud version of this? by DaveM753 · · Score: 1

    So... MS is going to offer their "cloud" services placed locally on your servers. I wonder how far they can stretch this?

    2 years from now:
    Admin: "Hmmmm.... I wish there was a way I could put my local Azure Cloud Server out on the internet."
    Microsoft: "Ahhhh! Microsoft hears you, good sir! We now offer (for a low, low monthly fee) Microsoft Clouded Local Azure Cloud Server Add-On!!

    5 years from now:
    Admin: "Hmmmmm.... I wish I could put my Microsoft Clouded Local Azure Cloud Add-On onto my own, local servers.
    Micosoft: "Ahhhh! We now offer (for an additional low, low monthly fee) Microsoft Localized Clouded Local Azure Cloud Add-On Server Service!!

    1. Re:How about a cloud version of this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      10 years from now:

      Admin: "Hmmmm... I wish I could put my Microsoft Clouded Local Azure Cloud Add-On onto my own, local zune."
      Microsoft: "Whats a zune? We do re-sale Amazon Ec2 (Enhanced with MCLACAO)"

  8. All cores (min 16 per box) must be licensed in you by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    All cores (min 16 per box) must be licensed in your DC even you have an small need for windows servers.

  9. Too much cynicism here by kriston · · Score: 1

    Wow, there's too much cynicism here for a valid concept.

    Have you ever tried to set up OpenStack or CloudStack?

    I'm managed bare metal, cloud, and on-premises cloud installations. Why wouldn't you want to be able to manage a data center from one spot?

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    Kriston

    1. Re:Too much cynicism here by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      You can manage a data center from one spot, but it isn't a cloud service. The key element to cloud services cost savings is that Computing power is shared across multiple customers. So your peak business hours processing that you need is taken away from an online store that has much of its traffic after hours, or with businesses in different time zones. Unless your are hosting a global business with thousands of apps with varying peak usage times. You local cloud system will be under utilized, because it will be built for peak usage, however there will be long periods of times, where it is under utilized.

      Thus far more expensive.

      If you need to manage your data center from one spot, they are tools for that too. You don't need a cloud system.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:Too much cynicism here by ChatHuant · · Score: 1

      You local cloud system will be under utilized, because it will be built for peak usage, however there will be long periods of times, where it is under utilized.

      That happens only if you go with a naive implementation of your system.
       
      The big advantage of running Azure Stack locally is that your applications can, with a bit of care, run on either your local machines or in the Azure cloud. This gives you a lot of flexibility. You can expand to the cloud if you have unexpected (or even planned) peaks in usage, or fail over to the cloud on catastrophic failures in your local data center. If you need to run occasional tasks that require special hardware (large amounts of memory, support for GPU, etc), you may be able to spin up a specialized machine in the cloud, and avoid purchasing hardware dedicated to this usage - and that remains underutilized the rest of the time.
       
      If you design your apps properly you can then size your data center closer to average load, as opposed to peak usage, and get extra resiliency to boot.

    3. Re:Too much cynicism here by jellomizer · · Score: 1

      So explain how to design your apps properly without starting a flame war.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  10. special Government version adobe CC offline by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    they get the offline environment ver.

  11. Sounds like Eucalyptus by bobm · · Score: 1

    HP was backing Eucalyptus which worked pretty well for having transparent local or cloud hosting.

    It would basically front-end AWS or local hosting and actually worked pretty well when I was testing with it. Alas it was always a bit behind of AWS so the idiots I work for didn't like the fact that we could use the latest greatest AWS feature in production.

  12. Wait a minute, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In other words, MS is to allow some clients to run their own servers again... Ok so let me get this straight. Microsoft will now allow you to rent your own data from yourselves/them which is running on your own/their servers.. wait a minute, what?!?

  13. maybe the local one will have console access by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    maybe the local one will have console access as in KEYBOARD / MOUSE AND VGA out. like vmware / qeum or libvirt.

  14. Just for the Americans by BrookSmith · · Score: 1

    Just for the Americans, there are something like 180 Countries out there, must Governments will not deploy any services in a cloud, as the cloud services are hosted off shore and that Nation will lose sovereignty of its data and any ability to exert legislative control, or any control over access, service security, continuity etc . This initiative will allow Governments which do not have access to cloud services the opportunity to form cloud based services in their sovereign territories. How does Government IT work in those countries, pretty much the same as every where if you can't buy it from one of the major IT companies MS, Oracle IBM etc, its probably not the solution for them.

  15. The primitives are useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's clear value in the AWS, GCP, Azure products/ primitives and pricing structure that aren't present in other offerings. Don't understand why people are poopooing or calling it wasteful. If anything it's a sane way to roadmap away from support their ancient infrastructures indefinitely.

  16. history rant - Governments with Cloud Services by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I love the fact that Governments with Cloud services localized will become reality.. again, glitch..

    now can state to state conversation happen? probably via blockchain lite... yes, i just coined it . doh! coined that...glitch...

    so. give governments their own mainframe again -- sounds familiar from the 1960s and 1970s and then give them freedom to connect, sounds like a darpa level connectivity idea.. and then have them do some ecommerce.. sound like an al gore concept she/he coined.. doh.. again..

    could we please go back to pen and paper... and stamps.. pony express... prophet revelation...

    hopefully, we will have the benefit of something more (fill in the blank) --- I will use these words --- interesting, chaotic, haphazard, about time...

    i really hope we enjoy what is left of the Internet after a few escapades are about to unfold..