Azure for Private and Public Clouds

Microsoft recently announced it would be taking its Azure public cloud computing platform private, a move this IT Jungle report suggests would appeal to many more masses than it would have gotten through a public-only cloud. According to the article, the only problem with the Azure cloud is that you have to run your code outside of your firewall and on Microsoft's own infrastructure. Not very many midrange and enterprise customers are going to go for that for security as well as for sanity and employment reasons.

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Microsoft is taking its Azure cloud computing platform private.

"In the case of Azure, the cloud has three components: compute service, storage services, and a fabric controller that pools hardware resources--in this instance, X64-based servers, their memory and disks, external disk storage, and networking to lash it all together. That controller does load balancing, fault tolerance clustering, disaster recovery, and data replication for workloads--the kinds of things people do today with a hodge-podge of different software. At the moment, Microsoft has implemented SQL database services, SharePoint collaboration services, AppFabric Internet services, and Dynamics CRM services atop the Azure public cloud, which runs in a data center in Quincy, Washington, as well as one in the suburb of Chicago. But you can also create your own .NET applications and throw them out onto Azure, too. Which is the whole point. The genius of this platform-as-a-service cloud is that it masks all the underlying complexity of having a modern, distributed, virtualized, metered, and flexible infrastructure stack. It is truly Windows for Dummies, and to the point that you don't know--and don't care--that it is Windows at all. Microsoft claims to have 10,000 companies running on Azure already."

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