Microsoft is set to move its Windows Azure Cloud platform to a production environment stage. On January 1, for the first time, Windows Azure will switch to a production service for paying customers. Now it's time to think about where next for Microsoft's Cloud Computing ambitions?
“These really are the early days,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. “There is so much potential if we bring our ideas forth, and do rapid innovation on this platform. It's early days for Cloud Computing, and also early days for the seamless cross-device trend, media experiences that we dream about when we think about three screens and a Cloud.
“But we at Microsoft think that these areas have huge potential moving forward, and we've been investing in them for years now, because by enabling these new Cloud scenarios, and by using software and services to drive leverage and coherence across all our offerings, we'll have done the right thing for customers and the right thing for [developers].”
It's been a long time coming, so what is Azure in reality? “Windows Azure was designed from the outset to holistically manage extremely large pools of computation, storage and networking, all as a single, dynamic, seamless whole, as a service,” explained Ozzie. “It's a Cloud operating system designed for the future, but made familiar for today Windows Azure at its core is Windows.
“It's Windows Server. You should think of it as a vast, homogeneous array of Windows Server hardware and virtualized Windows Server instances, and all these servers are under the control of a sophisticated, highly parallel management system called the Azure Fabric Controller, which you can kind of think of as an extension of System Center's management capabilities in the enterprise. With Windows Azure, Windows Server, and System Center, there's one coherent model of managing this infrastructure as a service across Microsoft's public Cloud to private Cloud to Clouds of our partners who host.”
While Ozzie admitted he would never say 'mission accomplished', the January tipping point does mean that it's time to think about where to next for Azure. To that end, Ozzie introduced Dallas. “Dallas, which is built completely on Windows Azure and SQL Azure, is an open catalogue and marketplace for data, both public data and commercial data,” he said. “Dallas makes the whole world of data better than the sum of its parts by creating a uniform discovery mechanism for data, a uniform binding and access mechanism for data, a uniform way of exposing trial datasets for developers, a uniform licensing model so that data from multiple providers can be easily joined and recombined. By delivering data as a service, our aspirations are that Dallas might catalyse a whole new wave of remixing and experimentation by developers, an opportunity for innovation that's uniquely unlocked by the Cloud.”
Lessons from the public sector
Microsoft has done well out of the various public sector and federal government computing strategies over the years and clearly has no intention of letting them slip away to other Cloud vendors. It will do no harm that Ozzie introduced the US government CIO Vivek Kundra, the man responsible for driving the US Government's move to open data and the Cloud.
“In the public sector, when the government decides to democratize data, innovation happens” said Kundra. “We've got two specific examples as you think about what happened when the National Institutes of Health decided to release data, and encouraged innovation to happen at a global level with the discovery of breakthroughs in medicine. In the same way, the Department of Defense, when they've decided to release data around satellite information, there's an explosion of innovation that happened in the GPS industry to the point where now anyone can go to the local car rental store, and actually for $10 get a GPS device that can navigate any city in the country.”
Kundra talked about the deployment of data.gov in May, the purpose of which is to The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. “We started with only 47 data sets,” noted Kundra. “.Today, we've got over 100,000 data sets on every aspect of government operations, from toxic release level data, that's the Environmental Protection Agency, to data around average flight times from the Federal Aviation Administration. And what we're noticing is innovation is happening across the board through people like you, who are developing applications for finding interesting ways of intercepting various data sets.”
He illustrated his point with a career finder application, where anybody can go online and quickly browse by interest on their mobile device. “Part of what we want to be able to do is encourage greater innovation and applications to be created rapidly,” he added. “This application was created in a matter of days. It didn't take hundreds of millions of dollars, and it didn't take years to develop. In the same way, what we want to be able to do is shift the focus within the Federal Government to the broad focus of CIOs. If you look at what happened just in the last 10 years, we went from 498 data centres in the Federal Government to over 1,200 data centres. And what we need to be able to do is make sure that the CIOs are focusing on service delivery, developing services that have an impact on the American people.”
Kundra ended with a rallying cry to the Microsoft developer community. “I want to encourage all of you, as you look at innovative approaches of developing applications, that you turn to data about jobs, and that you're able to create applications for the good of the republic, applications from every aspect of government, jobs, healthcare, education, energy” he said. “Using the Cloud Computing platform there's an interesting intersection here where for the first time now we have the ability to lift up and really focus on service delivery rather than continually investing billions of dollars on building infrastructure.”
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