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.

Data property rights: a banking analogy

Further on from previous comments on data portability, I read an interesting post on GigaOM from a while back from Nitin Borwankar: Data Property Rights, Not Portability. Nitin makes some really clear points regarding the rules which *should* govern your data which is placed in a third party's system (ie YouTube, Facebook), if you took a classic "property" analogy:

1. Data Accessibility
2. Data Visibility
3. Data Removal
4. Data Ownership

(...read the full post for details).

This makes me think of traditional business models surrounding being a trustee for other people's property: the classic model is banking. With a bank, I place my money in their trust, and am free to withdraw the money according to the agreement I have with them (ie savings / chequeing / fixed term investment account types). Conversely, while they have my money they are free to invest that money for their own profit (again, within certain limits - for example maybe I would specify that arms and tobacco investments are off-limits).

In the same way, for a piece of data or content that I own, I can choose which "trustee" I place my data with and can "withdraw" (ie to another service provider) my data according to the terms of my service agreement. Meanwhile, that trustee is free to try and make profits from my content by driving advertising, social mapping or other revenue from it.

Sounds fair enough to me.

Couple of afterthoughts, however:
- Banking is regulated: the internet will potentially need a regulator to achieve the "liquidity" of content outlined above.
- If these content ownership rules become embedded in internet culture over the next few years, and Facebook, YouTube and all the rest are just trusted, temporary custodians of their customer's content: what implications does that have for internet company valuations?

13,000 days down - nearly half way there?

Poignant message from my iGoogle home page today:

(I think I've configured my life expectancy at around 80 years old, give or take - ever the pessimist...). Now, what can I do in 16,221 days?

Cloud services enterprise architecture part 2

We've developed the EA further from my last post - adding an output service of software development consulting, and adding the following input services:


Messaging services:
-IM
-SMS
-Tweets (down with the kids!)

Work management services:
- Task management
- Workflow
- Timesheets

Mind mapping services:
- Mind mapping

Business continuity services:
- Backup

Legal services
- Legal advice

Software development services:
- Application platform
- Database platform
- IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
- Test management
- Architecture
- Requirements

Here's the latest picture: now to find the right providers for each of these services!