Posts tagged Azure
Microsoft and Salesforce Kiss and Make Up
Aug 5th
SAN FRANCISCO – Software manufacturing leading corporation Microsoft has revealed it has reached a deal to resolve a patent duel with Salesforce.com – a cloud computing firm.
Each had brought a lawsuit in the US court accusing the other to have violated its patented technology.
Under the terms and conditions of the agreement, both companies will have the rights to use each others technology. It was also decided that Salesforce.com will pay compensation to Microsoft, though the amount to be paid was not revealed.
“We are pleased to reach this agreement with Salesforce.com to put an end to the litigation between our two companies,” said Horacio Gutierrez – Microsoft corporate Vice President.
“Today’s agreement is an example of how companies can compete vigorously in the marketplace while respecting each other’s intellectual property rights.”
The legal duel arose as Microsoft is finding it hard to accustom itself with latest trends of programs being shared as services in the internet cloud instead of being purchased, installed, and maintained on individual computers.
Microsoft manufactured its trend defining software such as Office, outlook, and Windows, whereas San Francisco-based Salesforce has rapidly become popular and prospering name in cloud computing.
Microsoft has introduced Windows Azure cloud Platform providing wide range of live services offered through web.
Salesforce filed a litigation in June against Microsoft for violating its patent rights, apparently as retaliation for similar lawsuit that the US technology giant filed against Salesforce in May.
Various Sources
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Will cloud computing economics add up for Microsoft?
Jul 30th
By Larry Dignan at ZDnet
Microsoft at its financial analyst meeting made the case for being a cloud computing leader and argued that its economic prospects will improve as information technology shifts to an on-demand model.
The big question: Do you buy the argument that cloud computing will accelerate Microsoft’s earnings and revenue growth? Let’s face it: Every software vendor is talking cloud computing, but the economic theory is that it’s better to cannibalize your own business than allow some rival to do it. Few established software vendors have argued that the cloud will gussy up their financial metrics.
Microsoft CFO Peter Klein, however, made the case that cloud computing is going to be big business, improve the company’s gross margins, cut costs and bring in more customers. And, as noted by Altimeter partner Ray Wang, Klein did a decent job putting cloud computing in financial terms. It’s too early to put any hard data around Microsoft’s nascent Azure efforts, but Klein said that the software giant could grab a bigger piece of the enterprise IT pie. After all, the historical dividing lines between vendors—software, hardware, networking and storage—are melting away.
So how’s Microsoft going to harness the cloud for financial gain? Klein had a few big themes to ponder:
The cloud opens up a broader IT spending pie. In cloud computing, software, hardware and services blend together. You don’t buy servers. You buy capacity. Klein said:
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Pitting Cloud against Cloud
Jul 15th
Tools that benchmark performance promise to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of competing cloud providers.
New software developed to measure the performance of different cloud computing platforms could make it easier for prospective users to figure out which of these increasingly popular services is right for them.
Right now, developers have little means of comparing cloud providers, which lease access to computing power based in vast and distant data centers. Until actually migrating their software to a cloud service, they can’t know exactly how fast that service will perform calculations, retrieve data, or respond to sudden spikes in demand. But Duke University computer scientist Xiaowei Yang and her colleague Ang Li are trying to make the cloud market more like the car market, where, as Yang says, “you can compare specifications like engine size or top speed.”
Working with Srikanth Kandula and Ming Zhang of Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, Yang and Li have developed a suite of benchmarking tools that make it possible to compare the performance of different cloud platforms without moving applications between them. These tools use algorithms to measure the speed of computation, and shuttle data around to test the speed at which new copies of an application are created, the speed at which data can be stored and retrieved, the speed at which it can be shuttled between applications inside the same cloud, and the responsiveness of a cloud to network requests from distant places. The researchers used the software to test the services offered by six providers: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, GoGrid, RackSpace and CloudSites. Results of those tests were combined with the providers’ pricing models to allow for quick comparisons.
The results are among the first attempts to compare the performance of several clouds platforms, says Yang. “We found that it’s very hard to find a provider that is best in all metrics,” she says. “Some are twice as fast for just 10 percent extra cost, which is a very good deal, but at the same time their storage service is actually very slow and has a lot of latency variation.” Another provider showed good computation speeds but was less quick at spawning new instances of an application–something that might be necessary for a service that experiences peaks in demand, as a video site does when some of its content goes viral. “It seems like in today’s market it is hard to pick a provider that is good at everything,” says Yang.
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Microsoft wants its partners ‘All in’ with the cloud
Jul 9th
By Mary Jo Foley
Starting July 12, Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference kicks off in Washington, DC. The company’s loudest messaging at the four-day event will be that Microsoft partners need to be “All In” with the cloud, just like Redmond itself.
Microsoft will be highlighting many of its partners that have managed to transition their businesses so as to be more cloud-centric. But company officials also will attempt to convince the rest of the nearly 10,000 expected attendees that it’s time for them to be leading with cloud services like Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), the forthcoming Windows InTune systems management software/service and the Azure cloud platform.
(I’m especially interested in how Microsoft plans to get partners involved in selling Azure. So far, the Softies have published a number of case studies highlighting developers who’ve built new applications on Azure, but I’ve heard/seen very little about how Microsoft’s reseller community is supposed to get invovled/paid for pushing Azure to the masses.)
Getting partners on board with Microsoft’s cloud push is critical for the Redmondians, as Microsoft relies heavily on integrators, resellers, independent software vendors and OEMs to act as its primary salesforce. While the Microsoft brass warned the company’s partners a few years ago that Microsoft was planning to get into selling hosted services (and they needed to “move up the stack” and get out of the way or risk being run down), Microsoft partners still have a lot of questions about the cloud and their place in it.
Continue Reading The Article at: ZDnet
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Red Hat launches rival to Windows Azure
Jun 29th
Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, a complete package for running hybrid clouds, includes software and services
Red Hat has launched a comprehensive package, called Red Hat Cloud Foundations, that will allow organizations to run applications in both public clouds and their own private clouds.
With this release, Red Hat is one of only two companies that offer a complete package for running a hybrid cloud, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s cloud business unit. The other company is Microsoft, with its Azure platform.
The announcement was one of a number of cloud-related announcements that the company made during its Red Hat Summit last week in Boston. The company also has added new partners to its Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program. It has released version 2.2 of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, and has integrated Cisco’s Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology within the RHEV package.
The first edition of the Red Hat Cloud Foundations package includes a set of Red Hat programs, a reference architecture, and a number of consulting services and training classes. The Red Hat programs include Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Network Satellite, RHEV, JBoss and the company’s messaging software.
Continue… Full Source: InfoWorld
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10 things: Using Amazon Web Services in the enterprise
Jun 28th
Amazon Web Services recently held a powwow for potential enterprise customers and a bevy of details emerged ranging from contracts to security to procedures to ensure employees don’t procure a cloud servers en masse for giggles.
Here’s a reporter’s notebook from Amazon Web Services’ enterprise powwow and 10 things you may not have known:
- AWS customers mentioned that there were frequently three cloud platforms they evaluated leading up to a move to the cloud. Those players included AWS, Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure. Marc Dispensa, chief enterprise architect at MediaBrands World Wide, offered a few details about his bakeoff. Microsoft’s Azure was an easy fit for MediaBrands’ developers, but had limited SQL storage. Rackspace had a grid option, but APIs were limited and its on-demand server business was less than a year old. AWS won the deal based on features and experience with other similar customers. Here’s Dispensa’s comparison slide:
- Watch your budget when you move to AWS. A handful of AWS customers said that cloud computing is less expensive, but can be too easy to use and blow your budget. Simply put, any developer with a credit card can get provision a machine. If too many people use AWS you have cloud sprawl quickly and blow your computing budget. “It’s too easy and that can hurt your cost controls,” said Dispensa. “It’s cheaper, but can get unwieldy.” Dispensa said he put in a process where managers have to approve a developer’s request to use an AWS server and there are financial thresholds. That process is why it takes 15 minutes for an AWS server instead of 2 seconds. Pfizer’s Michael Miller, senior director of research, high performance computing, had a similar beef. “Allocate money upfront and then run the meter to avoid big surprises,” said Miller. “There are challenges when doing AWS at scale for a large number of users. Pay as you go is nice, but a debit model would even be better so it’s not so easy to spend more than you have.”
- The linchpin of Amazon’s reliability case revolves around “availability zones. When you get an AWS computing resource it’s assigned by region. Regions include U.S. (east and west), EU (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Singapore). These regions include at least three availability zones—a data center hub roughly speaking. AWS is architected so two availability zones can fail concurrently and data is still protected. Amazon’s aim is to eliminate any single point of failure, because IT fails all the time. AWS recommends that customers spread their assets around multiple availability zones in a region.
- Phased implementations make more sense. Amazon customers across the board said they shied away from big bang projects when moving to AWS. Jennifer Boden, director of IT at Amazon, is moving the company’s internal systems—financial, email and calendar, HR applications and knowledge management tools—to AWS, but the projects are phased. “Take a phased approach, make it easy and have no big bang projects,” said Boden. Continue Reading
Article Credit to Larry Dignan at ZDnet
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Amazon experts launch private-cloud start-up – Nimbula
Jun 24th
Two men who led one element of Amazon’s successful cloud-computing services have launched their own a start-up called Nimbula focusing on a private version of the technology.
Cloud computing takes several forms, but Amazon Web Services generally delivers building blocks available over the Internet that developers can use to construct their own higher-level services. Nimbula, in contrast, focuses more on a “private cloud” approach geared for companies building their own computing services based on a similar but in-house approach.
The start-up came out of stealth mode Wednesday, announcing its Nimbula Director product for managing private cloud infrastructure. It’s not all about private clouds though: One thing Director can control is when to draw on public cloud services as well when peak computing loads demand.
Nimbula’s co-founders, Chief Executive Chris Pinkham and Vice President of Products Willem van Biljon, both worked on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud; Pinkham led the group that developed it, and van Biljon led its product development.
The pair attracted $5.75 million in first-round funding from Sequoia Capital and VMware, an EMC subsidiary specializing in virtualization.
Six international customers are beta-testing Nimbula, and the start-up plans to launch its product in the second half of the year. Nimbula was founded in early 2009, the company said.
Cloud computing is all the rage, with infrastructure-level services such as those from Amazon and Rackspace, programmable services such as Google’s App Engine, and more finished products such as Google Docs and Zoho’s online productivity tools.
One major obstacle for the philosophy is the reluctance of corporate computing administrators to yield control over their own equipment, though. Private cloud, while lacking the scale of public clouds, can be an answer for those who like cloud-computing philosophies of large-scale, shared resources but don’t want to take the full plunge.
But cloud computing companies face competition from those who already have a big business in computing infrastructure: those who sell operating systems for a living. Microsoft’s Azure project makes Windows Server into a cloud computing service.
And Linux leader Red Hat on Wednesday announced Red Hat Cloud Foundations, an “easy on-ramp to cloud computing” intended to let customers more easily build their own cloud-computing designs. The first such foundation is focused on private clouds.
Full source and credit to: CNET
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End-To-End Performance Study of Cloud Services
Jun 3rd
Here is a good study found at: High Scalability
Cloud computing promises a number of advantages for the deployment of data-intensive applications. Most prominently, these include reducing cost with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and (virtually) unlimited throughput by adding servers if the workload increases. At the Systems Group, ETH Zurich, we did an extensive end-to-end performance study to compare the major cloud offerings regarding their ability to fulfill these promises and their implied cost.
The focus of the work is on transaction processing (i.e., read and update work-loads), rather than analytics workloads. We used the TPC-W, a standardized benchmark simulating a Web-shop, as the baseline for our comparison. The TPC-W defines that users are simulated through emulated browsers (EB) and issue page requests, called web-interactions (WI), against the system. As a major modification to the benchmark, we constantly increase the load from 1 to 9000 simultaneous users to measure the scalability and cost variance of the system. Figure 1 shows an overview of the different combinations of services we tested in the benchmark.
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| Figure 1: Systems Under Test |
The main results are shown in Figure 2 and Table 1 – 2 and are surprising in several ways. Most importantly, it seems that all major vendors have adopted a different architecture for their cloud services (e.g., master-slave replication, partitioning, distributed control and various combinations of it). As a result, the cost and performance of the services vary significantly depending on the workload. A detailed description of the architectures is provided in the paper. Furthermore, only two architectures, the one implemented on top of Amazon S3 and MS Azure using SQL Azure as the database, were able to scale and sustain our maximum workload of 9000 EBs, resulting in over 1200 Web-interactions per second (WIPS). MySQL installed on EC2 and Amazon RDS are able to sustain a maximum load of approximate 3500 EBs. MySQL Replication performed similar to MySQL standalone with EBS, so we left it off the picture. Figure 1 shows that the WIPS of Amazon’s SimpleDB grow up to about 3000 EBs and more than 200 WIPS. In fact, SimpleDB was already overloaded at about 1000 EBs and 128 WIPS in our experiments. At this point, all write requests to hot spots failed. Google AppEngine already dropped out at 500 emulated browsers with 49 WIPS. This is mainly due to Google’s transaction model not being built for such high write workloads. When implementing the benchmark, our policy was to always use the highest offered consistency guarantees, which come closest to the TPC-W requirements. Thus, in the case of AppEngine, we used the offered transaction model inside an entity group. However, it turned out, that this is a big slow-down for the whole performance. We are now in the process of re-running the experiment without transaction guarantees and curios about the new performance results.
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| Figure 2: Comparison of Architectures [WIPS] |
Table 1 shows the total cost per web-interaction in milli dollar for the alternative approaches and a varying load (EBs). Google AE is cheapest for low workloads (below 100 EBs) whereas Azure is cheapest for medium to large workloads (more than 100 EBs). The three MySQL variants (MySQL, MySQL/R, and RDS) have (almost) the same cost as Azure for medium workloads (EB=100 and EB=3000), but they are not able to sustain large workloads.
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| Table 1: Cost per WI [m$], Vary EB |
The success of Google AE for small loads has two reasons. First, Google AE is the only variant that has no fixed costs. There is only a negligible monthly fee to store the database. Second, at the time these experiments were carried out, Google gave a quota of six CPU hours per day for free. That is, applications which are below or slightly above this daily quota are particularly cheap.
Azure and the MySQL variants win for medium and large workloads because all these approaches can amortize their fixed cost for these workloads. Azure SQL server has a fixed cost per month of USD 100 for a database of up to 10 GB, independent of the number of requests that need to be processed by the database. For MySQL and MySQL/R, EC2 instances must be rented in order to keep the database online. Likewise, RDS involves an hourly fixed fee so that the cost per WIPS decreases in a load situation. It should be noted that network traffic is cheaper with Google than with both Amazon and Microsoft.
Table 2 shows the total cost per day for the alternative approaches and a varying load (EBs). (A “-” indicates that the variant was not able to sustain the load.) These results confirm the observations made previously: Google wins for small workloads; Azure wins for medium and large workloads. All the other variants are somewhere in between. The three MySQL variants come close to Azure in the range of workloads that they sustain. Azure and the three MySQL variants roughly share the same architectural principles (replication with master copy architectures). SimpleDB is an outlier in this experiment. With the current pricing scheme, SimpleDB is an exceptionally expensive service. For a large number of EBs, the high cost of SimpleDB is particularly annoying because users must pay even though SimpleDB drops many requests and is not able to sustain the workload.
Continue Reading at: High Scalability
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Does cloud computing need LAMP?
May 24th
Credit to James Urquhar at CNet
The LAMP stack is a collection of open-source technologies commonly integrated to create a platform capable of supporting a wide variety of Web applications. LAMP typically consists of Linux, Apache Tomcat, MySQL, and either the PHP, Python or Perl scripting languages. Famously used at some of the best known Web businesses (such as Wikipedia), LAMP has seen widespread adopting in corporate and government settings in the last several years.
My cohost on the occasional Overcast podcast, Geva Perry, recently wrote a blog post asking a simple but profound question: who will build the LAMP cloud? Who will create the first platform as a service (PaaS) offering, a complete programming environment that hides the operational challenges of running applications in the open-source stack while providing all the tools and compatibility LAMP offers today?
As I initially read the post, I thought “good question.” As Geva notes, there is a huge gap in the existing market–almost a bias towards Java and Ruby that ignores the value of LAMP:
Salesforce.com and VMware recently unveiled a Java-focused platform-as-a-service offering, VMForce.com. Meanwhile, Microsoft has Azure, a PaaS offering focused on the .Net stack, and startups Heroku and Engine Yard both deliver Ruby-on-Rails cloud platforms. But who’s going to offer a PaaS for LAMP?
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Why Cloud Computing Leaders Need to Demand Clean Power
Mar 30th
The launch of Apple’s (a AAPL) iPad this weekend represents a lot of firsts for the tech industry: a device with some of the most media attention of all time, and the start of an $8 billion tablet application market. But the iPad also represents one of a wave of media-consuming mobile devices that increasingly depends on “the cloud” — basically the Internet and data centers — to deliver hosted services and digital content, and will help contribute to a massive growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with so-called cloud-computing over the coming years.
According to a report published Tuesday from the environmental researchers at Greenpeace , the energy consumption and carbon emissions of cloud computing are already significantly higher than previously thought. Using data from The Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report, which came out in 2008 and relied on carbon emission projections from McKinsey, Greenpeace added in the energy consumption info for data centers reported by the Environmental Protection Agency. The result is that Greenpeace says that the energy consumption of cloud computing in 2007 was 622.6 billion kWh, which is 1.3 times larger than reported by the Smart 2020 report.
This new, larger estimate of energy consumption associated with cloud computing emphasizes just how big the problem will be as the sector grows over the coming years. Cloud computing is a trend that has just started (see our Structure 2010 conference) and business-focused cloud computing initiatives like Microsoft’s Azure platform have recently launched. Using the more aggressive cloud computing energy footprint, Greenpeace says that cloud computing will consume 1,963.74 billion kWh of energy by 2020.
All of this isn’t to say that cloud computing companies need to curb their growth. Rather, they need to focus on making data centers and servers more energy efficient and increasingly look to source more clean power. Greenpeace points to Facebook’s decision to build its first-ever data center in Prineville, Ore., which will primarily be powered by coal (GigaOM Pro, subscription required), as a major missed opportunity.
Instead, Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, and Apple should use their energy buying power to demand more access to economic clean power and to support policies that will help drive the proliferation of low-cost renewables. Greenpeace says:
The potential of ICT technologies and cloud computing to drive low-carbon economic growth underscore the importance of building cloud infrastructure in places powered by clean renewable energy. Companies like Facebook, Google, and other large players in the cloud computing market must advocate for policy change at the local, national and international levels to ensure that, as their appetite for energy increases, so does the supply of renewable energy.
We’ll be looking at the issues of energy consumption and the carbon footprint of information technology, data centers and servers at our Green:Net conference. Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl will be discussing some of the search engine’s industry-leading green data center work, and Greenpeace’s Casey Harrell, one of the authors of the report, will be discussing how the Internet leads to dematerialization, or replacing atoms with bits.
