Choosing Between Azure and VMM Private Clouds
I’ve spent the past day reviewing all that’s floating around the Interwebs on the Azure announcements from the WPC this week. There are definitely a lot of nice nuggets to digest and stuff that’s going to take a while to process. Most of the Azure talk at WPC has been, as expected, about how partners can benefit from and build solutions on top of Azure. That’s a compelling message and one I think Microsoft got 100% correct. Now if only they’d franchise Azure we’d really be cookin’ ;). But what about enterprise customers using Azure? Since enterprise virtualization is the overwhelming topic here on The Virtual DC, I’m going to focus on that rather than the partner angle.One thing that struck me straight away today was a comment from Bob Muglia in a CNET interview:
Businesses and hosters will want to offer their own clouds he said, and Microsoft will have tools for them, but Azure isn’t their answer. Instead, he said, Windows Server, System Center, and Virtual Machine Manager will get a lot better at operating in a cloud-based environment, while still offering customers lots more choice.”We will be taking our Virtual Machine Manager product and evolve it over time to much more straightforwardly allow customers to build their own private cloud,” Muglia said.”
I do like the idea of them embracing private clouds with VMM, a logical step when competing against VMware and vCloud, but then I pause. Will Azure ever compete against vCloud? vCloud is designed to allow enterprise customers to build a services-based application bundle in-house (ie running in a private cloud) and then push that entire application service bundle up to a service provider also running VMware and supporting vCloud (ie the public cloud). Build at home, push to the cloud. Makes sense. When people think private cloud, they think vCloud.But Azure is different than vCloud: it’s a service and development cloud, closer to Google Apps than vCloud. If Azure proper won’t support private clouds (and I’m making a huge leap of assumptions on definitions here, but I’m going with that data I have), either because MS has chosen not to or because private dev clouds don’t make much sense (yet), here’s my question: Will an enterprise looking at a branded Microsoft cloud solution have to choose between a private cloud vs. Azure? If the goal is to build everything in-house, then a private cloud on VMM makes sense. If the goal is to develop a MS service-based application for and running in the cloud, then Azure makes sense.But these are two distinctly different use cases, a binary decision based on what type of cloud I’m looking for. In other words if I write an app for Azure, do I need a private cloud running on VMM at all? Customers will choose to re-write their application for Azure and possibly choose to run their MS apps completely hosted in Azure – on one of the Azure services listed here – or they’ll build a private cloud in-house and run everything locally.I guess my hold up here is getting my brain around the Azure model when compared to vCloud. With vCloud, I get the idea of building my application in-house in a virtualized environment and then shipping that application – lock, stock, and barrel – off to my vCloud provider for remote hosting in the cloud. But Azure is different: if I start building an app from scratch to run on Azure I’m going to build it on Azure, in the cloud already. I won’t need to build it in-house first and ship it anywhere; it’s already there.Maybe I’m comparing apples to oranges here and I shouldn’t even be thinking about private clouds, yet there is a lot of talk about private clouds from Microsoft – even from Bob Muglia – so I have to somehow equate the two. They’re comparing and contrasting Azure with private clouds, creating a message that they’re the same type of cloud, yet one is for home and one is remote.Maybe the model will be to build some apps on Azure and run some apps in-house on my VMM private cloud, and then use the new interoperability between 2008 and Azure to let the apps running on Azure become extensions of my private cloud. Maybe my Sharepoint web tier is run in-house but my Sharepoint search and data tiers are run in Azure to keep storage and processing off my network and out of my private cloud.Does Microsoft have it right in keeping Azure and private clouds completely separate for enterprise customers because they are in fact two different beasts, yet saying they’ll work together? Or is Microsoft comparing the two because it’s not yet sure how customers will use and embrace Azure?
Technorati Tags: microsoft,azure,cloud,cloud computing,private cloud,vmm,virtual machine manager,virtualization
July 15th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
On the vCloud front, it is clear to see the model of developing in house and deploying to the service provider cloud. I understand the process etc.
What I also see on the Microsoft side is that regardless of their Azure platform (which I firmly beleive is a separate product area to the vCloud type offering), Microsoft have a toolset which enables the build of private, public, shared - or whatever definition you might like to use - cloud (System Center, Hyper-V, PowerShell etc). Therefore, what is stopping people from building their own clouds and then approaching 3rd parties (MS partners) to host the solution for them? This is in essence the same as the vCloud paradigm. Certainly, the company whom I am writing on behalf of understand this and are aiming to be a key enabler of these processes in the marketplace.
In summary - your article is an excellent commentary on the whys and wherefores of cloud based solutions and I feel that next step for the MS solutions simply requires MS partners to build packages which add the functionality for end users/businesses.
July 16th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I will chime in from a corporate MS shop point of view.
I love the idea of Azure, I have been developing with the beta and I think it has great potential. I also believe that cloud computing may be viable to corporations in the future. But not now.
Most corporate entities do not trust the cloud. Nor are they akin to embrace their financial, legal and other sensative data living outside their firewalls. Yet many corporations are keen on moving to a SaaS or SOA architecture. Azure would be a good match for these Mid-level corporations that want the governance, security and dependability of running their own internal clouds, while having the flexability and scalability that services provide.
I know that MS has nixed Azure for private cloud use, and I think they are managing themselves right out of the cloud market. They will never be able to compete on the public cloud level, they just can not match the pricing, uptime and support that other companies can provide. They should not foray into the data center market place.
Microsoft should have focused on virtual private clouds. Then as more and more corporations become “comfortable” with the cloud, they would be in a position to take on the hosting of all the applications written using Azure.
July 19th, 2009 at 5:22 am
[…] Murphy - Choosing between Azure and VMM Private CloudsI do like the idea of them embracing private clouds with VMM, a logical step when competing against […]
July 20th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
There’s three levels here:
1. Private clouds, enabled with hyper-V R2 & VMM, built on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises announced at WPC last week. DDT-E I think was slated for release early next year.
2. Public clouds, enabled with Hyper-V R2 & VMM, build on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Hosters already available.
3. Azure, providing the application hosting platform which addresses a different set of needs than private or public clouds.
Notice that 1 & 2 are built on the same platform so there is definitely a link between private & public clouds.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft NZ, but this is my opinion and not that of my employer.
August 4th, 2009 at 2:40 am
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