Slides from Chch .NET code camp cloud services talk

I very much enjoyed giving a talk at the 2008 Christchurch .NET Code Camp on Saturday, although some in the audience may have noticed that I hadn't timed the slides beforehand! (ended up squashing half the talk into the last 5 minutes - oops). Anyway, the event was excellently organised by Matt Smith, Andy (Scrasé ☺), Chris Fairbairn and the rest of the team - thanks I really enjoyed the event. Unfortunately I had to run off immediately and look after 10 six year olds at my daughter's birthday party - but I'm still alive! ;-)

I've attached the slides here in PDF format - please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of the topics I discussed.

Microsoft announce "Azure" services platform at PDC - no hard pricing yet

Microsoft's big Cloud announcement finally came out yesterday at PDC: the "Windows Azure" services platform:

"The Azure™ Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together."

More info at What is the Azure Services Platform?

Also, take a look at the section on Pricing and Licensing: no hard pricing is available yet as this announcement is just for the CTP - planning to go into production in H2 2009.

Given the pricing competition from Amazon EC2 and other players on a spending spree like Rackspace this is going to get pretty darwinian pretty quickly. However, this is good for everybody (except perhaps Microsoft $hareholder$ who were expecting monopoly revenues forever!) - there are far fewer opportunities for vendor platform lock-in in the frictionless cloud: Microsoft can reinvent their revenue model around the stuff which delivers the most *real* value - which will be .NET from now on - but I don't think we'll be seeing >90% market share any time soon. ;-)

"The Azure™ Services Platform business model is aligned around four basic principles. These are:

* Consumption-based model
* Pricing attractive with the market
* Market expansion opportunity for Microsoft partners
* Easy access through the Web, or through existing channels and programs"

Consumption is based upon:

" * Compute time, measured in machine hours
* Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure data center), measured in GB
* Storage, measured in GB
* Transactions, measured as application requests such as Gets and Puts"

If you dive a bit deeper into the FAQs, you can see the production schedule:

" * Availability Timeframe – H2 2009
o Acquire directly through the Microsoft Online Customer Portal
o Acquire though ISVs (independent software vendors): purchase an ISV application which utilizes the Azure Services Platform, and pay the ISV through their own licensing and pricing model"

Intergen's Chris Auld is blogging the PDC - see his take on the Azure announcements here.

Amazon announcements: General Availability (99.95%) and Windows on EC2. Windows cost benchmarked at 25-40% over Linux to provision!

Amazon have done it - they have committed to "General Availability" (GA) with a service level agreement of 99.95% within a "Region". If availability falls below this level, customers will receive service credits. Read more information at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla

In a simultaneous announcement Amazon have announced that Windows and SQL Server images are now available on EC2 - pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows 2003 Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour (see below). Amazon are also supporting SQL Server Express and Standard editions on EC2. The only restriction is that all instances must be in the same availability zone - read details at: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/.

Pricing comparisons are below - so now there's a benchmark: Windows costs between 25-40% over Linux to provision!

Instances

Standard Instances	Linux/UNIX	Windows
Small (Default)	$0.10 per hour	$0.125 per hour
Large	$0.40 per hour	$0.50 per hour
Extra Large	$0.80 per hour	$1.00 per hour

High CPU Instances	Linux/UNIX	Windows
Medium	$0.20 per hour	$0.30 per hour
Extra Large	$0.80 per hour	$1.20 per hour

Microsoft Cloud Announcements

2 "Microsoft" "Cloud" press releases made it out simultaneously today.

First, Steve Ballmer pre-announced the launch of "Windows Cloud" operating system (which isn't Midori):

Secondly Amazon announced EC2 with Windows:

Both press releases predictably make no mention of pricing and licensing models - Microsoft's share price would tank if they did... ;-)

Microsoft's big Cloud launch at PDC 2008

Went to a good talk yesterday by Nigel Parker (slides here) of Microsoft New Zealand on Cloud Computing, IE8 and Silverlight. The talk was general scene setting for the Cloud computing paradigm, showcasing of MS's latest demos of gadgets like Photosynth, Live maps and Mesh, and generally painting Microsoft's future vision of Cloud computing (=Microsoft, Google, (Amazon?) and, er, no-one else can afford to play on their scale!?!).

Key announcement is that after the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld teaser ads (Youtube: here and here ), Microsoft are finally launching their Cloud services platform into the wild at PDC in a month's time. See the post on Gianpaulo's blog for full details of the Cloud Services Symposium they are holding on day 4, and some sneak preview slides of architectural guidance for Cloud Services Architecture.

Good stuff - about time from Microsoft, too.

An alternative Microsoft-based Cloud Services Architecture

Just had a read of my friend Matt Smith's blog post from a couple of weeks ago, which covers very similar ground to my last post on the cloud services I've started using. Matt is a Microsoft fanboy - he even once proposed SharePoint as a viable alternative to a girlfriend in a presentation - these things come back to haunt you, you know! ;-) - and so is pretty keen on MS' Mesh services (must take a closer look at these) - I'm mostly using Google at the moment. Compare and contrast at http://blog.mattsmith.co.nz/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=40.