What Windows Azure is doing in the past year

Since the release of the beta version of Azure from Microsoft two years ago, the azure cloud operating environment has not changed much in some ways. But in other ways-such as functional, organizational and marketing-Azure has changed dramatically, especially in the last 12 months.

Microsoft started the Windows Azure Project when it was called "Red Dog", but only a small team of 150 people. Today, however, the Azure team has reached more than 1200 people and has recently joined several prestigious new members, such as technical Mark Russinovich. Over the past six months, the Azure team and the Windows Server team have properly merged their people and resources into a complete development group. During this period, the Azure Regiment launched a commercial Microsoft Cloud environment, adding new features like Content-delivery-network, Geo-location and single sign-on; For customers who want to run Azure in their own private data centers, the Azure team has launched the Azure in a box appliances program.

Azure will develop further in the months ahead. Microsoft is preparing a new feature that allows customers to add virtual rules to their azure environment and a feature (code name "Sydney") that allows users to easily connect their past devices with the "cloud" infrastructure. The biggest change is actually in marketing, but Microsoft has positioned azure not only as a service for developers, but as a service for corporate customers of all sizes.

Amitabh Srivastava, senior vice president of Microsoft's server and cloud Joint division, has been leading the Windows Azure team from the start. Srivastava said that Windows Azure was basically the same as his team when it was first built. In the kernel, it consists of the same set of modules: computing, storage, and a fabric Controller (providing management and virtualization capabilities). Microsoft's recent "Wedding Cake" architecture looks almost the same as the team originally made for Red Dog.

The amount of work that Microsoft has done on Azure over the past year has been focused behind the scenes. The team regularly updates the Azure platform every week (sometimes even daily), and Azure has no "big releases" by design. The Azure team is designed around the "scene" rather than the functionality. Some scenarios-such as the upcoming VM roles-may take up to a year or more to integrate them, while others-such as a minor user interface modification-may take much less time and publish more quickly.

However, all these small changes are added together and can not be belittled. Roger Jennings is a cloud expert, blogger and author of the Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform, who, at my repeated requests, made another version of Azure's "cake" diagram. Jennings includes not only the core platform, but also many additional components for Azure. Many new components--and some of the new tidbits of batch and lifecycle management on Azure--I've heard--will show up at the upcoming Microsoft Professional Developer conference in late October.

Across the cloud-on-premises divide

Srivastava said: "In the past year, our puppy (Red Dog) has grown up, but our philosophy from the outset is to provide services to the enterprise." Our goal is to provide it to developers from the first day, but we also know that business is where the money is. ”

The idea of "Azure for the Enterprise" may have been around, but Microsoft officials have been tight-lipped (and/or vague) about how to provide azure to businesses. Until July 2010, when the team released Windows Azure Appliance, Microsoft's private cloud strategy became less obscure. Srivastava said: "We said we would provide [Azure] technology to our partners, but we didn't say how to provide it, we just said it wouldn't be a bunch of bits on a CD." ”

For Windows Azure Appliance, integrating all the required modules is the task of the company's vice president, Bill Laing and his team. Laing is the vice president of the company that reorganized the previous Windows Server Department. He has been a srivasta colleague since the 1990s, when they worked together at Digital Equipment Corp.

Since the original Red Dog team was initially composed primarily of members of the Windows Server team, I heard that the development/engineering consolidation of the server and cloud departments was relatively smooth. (Microsoft even built a bridge across the 520 highway between the Windows Server Team's office and the Windows Azure Team's office building to facilitate collaboration between the two teams). "It Pros ' view is" how can I use it, "Laing said," and Azure was a developer platform. " But as we start to talk, customers and partners want to know if they can use Azure in their own data centers. ”

If Azure is a developer platform, then it will be an enterprise platform in the second phase, and what is the third phase? Laing says it's probably scalable. Once Microsoft provides Windows Azure appliance for its first partners (Dell, Fujitsu, has and ebay), each of those organizations will run an azure cloud with a different value-added service. Laing added: "Microsoft will also use additional services and features to fill this platform, and Windows Azure is now doing something similar to Windows Server and its various roles."

Srivastava said: "Azure can run in 600 data centers, not 6 data centers." But in all of these places, they all run the same underlying stack. "This private cloud is more ingenious than shipping a bunch of servers, and running Windows Azure is based on the" service model "concept, which is part of Azure from the start. (Friends who like Microsoft's history should remember Microsoft's original "Dynamic Datacenter initiative"; Windows Azure is a manifestation of many of these ideas)

Laing says the idea behind the service model is that Azure should be able to provide customers and partners with the ability to automate configuration, deployment, and overall management. It should be able to calculate how many Web front-end and how many back-ends it takes to run an application or service, and automatically implement all of this. This is the progress of App-server virtualization and system Management, which will be put into use in the near future. "Managing the infrastructure has overwhelmed IT professionals," Laing said. Microsoft believes Azure can make it easier. The