Rational Survivability

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:

Don’t underestimate Microsoft and the potential disruption Azure will deliver.*

You might not get Microsoft’s strategy for Azure. Heck, much of Microsoft may not get Microsoft’s strategy for Azure, but one thing is for sure: Azure will be THE platform for products, solutions and services across all mediums from Redmond moving forward. Ray Ozzie said it best at PDC:

The vision of Azure, said Ozzie, is “three screens and a cloud,” meaning internet-based data and software that plays equally well on PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.

I think the underlying message here is that while we often think of Cloud from the perspective of interacting with “data,” we should not overlook how mobility, voice and video factor into the equation…

According to Ozzie, Azure will become production live on January 1st and “six data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia will come online.” (I wonder when Amazon will announce APAC support…)

Azure will be disruptive, especially for Windows-heavy development shops and the notion of secure data access/integration between public/private clouds is not lost on them, either:

Microsoft also announced another of its city-based code names. Sydney is a security mechanism that lets businesses exchange data between their servers and the Azure cloud. Entering testing next year, Sydney should allow a local application to talk to a cloud application. It will help businesses that want to run most of an application in Microsoft’s data center, but that want to keep some sensitive parts running on their own servers.

It will be interesting to see how “Sydney” manifests itself as compared to AWS’s Virtual Private Cloud.

Competitors know the Azure is no joke, either, which is why we see a certain IaaS provider adding .NET framework support as well as Cloud Brokers (bridges) such as RightScale announcing support for Azure. Heck, even GoGrid demo’d “interoperability” with Azure. Many others are announcing support, including the Federal Government via Vivek Kundra who joined Ozzie to announce that the 2009 Pathfinder Innovation Challenge will be hosted on Azure.

Stir in the fact that Microsoft is also extending its ecosystem of supported development frameworks and languages, at PDC Matt Mullenwegg from WordPress (Automattic to be specific) is developing on Azure. This shows how Azure will support things like PHP, MySQL as well as .NET (now called AppFabric Access Control.)

Should be fun.

Hey, I wonder (*wink*) if Microsoft will be interested in participating in the A6 Working Group to provide transparency and visibility that some of their IaaS/PaaS competitors (*cough* Amazon *cough*) who are clawing their way up the stack do not…

/Hoff

*To be fair a year ago when Azure was announced, I don’t think any of us got Azure and I simply ignored it for the most part. Not the case any longer; it makes a ton of sense if they can execute.

Sitting in an impressive room at the Google campus in Mountain View last month, I asked the collective group of brainpower a slightly rhetorical question:

How much longer do you feel pure-play Infrastructure-As-A-Service will be a relevant service model within the spectrum of cloud services?

I couched the question with previous “incomplete thoughts*” relating to the move “up-stack” by IaaS providers — providing value-added, at-cost services to both differentiate and soften the market for what I call the “PaaSification” of the consumer.  I also highlighted the move “down-stack” by SaaS vendors building out platforms to support a broader ecosystem and value proposition.

In the long term, I think ultimately the trichotomy of the SPI model will dissolve thanks to commoditization and the need for providers to differentiate — even at mass scale.  We’ll ultimately just talk about service delivery and the platform(s) used to deliver them.  Infrastructure will enable these services, of course, but that’s not where the money will come from.

Just look at the approach of providers such as Amazon, Terremark and Savvis and how they are already clawing their way up the PaaS stack, adding more features and functions that either equalize public cloud capabilities with those of the enterprise or even differentiate from it.  Look at Microsoft’s Azure.  How about Heroku, Engine Yard, Joyent?  How about VMware and Springsource?  All platform plays. Develop, click, deploy.

As I mention in my Cloudifornication presentation, I think that from a security perspective, PaaS offers the potential of eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities in the application development lifecycle by enforcing sanitary programmatic practices across the derivate works built upon them.  I look forward also to APIs and standards that allow for consistency across providers. I think PaaS has the greatest potential to deliver this.

There are clearly trade-offs here, but as we start to move toward the two key differentiators (at least for public clouds) — management and security — I think the value of PaaS will really start to shine.

Probably just another bout of obviousness, but if I were placing bets, this is where I’d sink my nickels.

You?

/Hoff

* The most relevant “incomplete thought” is the one titled “Incomplete Thought: Virtual Machines Are the Problem, Not the Solution…” in which I kicked around the notion that virtualization-enabled IaaS and the VM containers they enable are simply an ugly solution to an uglier problem…