Comments for Microsoft Azure Aims to Re-define the OS

Microsoft Azure Aims to Re-define the OS

2008-10-27T22:48:13Z

I'm at the Microsoft PDC in Los Angeles, where I was among a small group of bloggers and analysts who had a roundtable today with Microsoft executives Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), Bob Muglia (Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business) and Amitabh Srivastava (Corporate Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Services). The topic of conversation was Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing operating system announced earlier today. I also had a 1:1 briefing with Daz Wilkin, a program manager in Microsoft's platform strategy group. All of this to get to the bottom of what Microsoft Azure is and what it means for the Internet, consumers, and businesses.

]]> Windows Azure and Windows 7

Ever since the announcement this morning, I've been pondering what Microsoft Azure means to Microsoft's core business - a little desktop operating system called Windows. So I asked Ray Ozzie: given that Microsoft is positioning Azure as an OS for cloud computing, what then is the relationship between Azure and the core Windows (in particular the new version, Windows 7)?

Ozzie's role at Microsoft is to be their lead architect of software systems, and so understandably he launched into a very conceptual answer to my question. He explained that both operating systems will develop alongside each other and that there will be a "bi-directional innovation transfer" between the two. He was pretty clear though that Azure is not designed to replace the desktop OS any time soon, although he said later in the interview that eventually people "will commonly think of this cloud thing as being just another computer". So in a sense what Microsoft is trying to do with Azure is re-define what an OS is, for the cloud computing age.

Azure is clearly Microsoft's response to a computing world going ever more deeper into the cloud (a.k.a. the Internet). Ozzie said that Windows Azure will be their backend of the cloud and the frontend will be a "multi-device world".

As explained in a white paper (docx file) on the Azure website, "Windows Azure runs on a large number of machines, all located in Microsoft data centers and accessible via the Internet."

Cannibalizing Desktop Windows?

It's difficult to fathom at this point if or how Azure will cannibalize Microsoft's core OS business.

I asked Ray Ozzie what will be the licensing implications - for example will enterprises be able to buy just an Azure licence and not [desktop] Windows? Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business, swooped in to answer that. He replied that enterprises will be able to mix and match - cloud and "on premise" (an apparently new term we've heard a lot today at PDC).

Muglia said that there will be a range of different licensing, just as currently there are lots of different licensing options for Windows Vista - versions for enterprises, students, and so on. There may even, hinted Muglia, be advertising-based licensing models for Azure.

Azure and Amazon

Earlier in the day I'd asked Daz Wilkin, of Microsoft's platform group, how Microsoft Azure compares to Amazon's cloud offerings. Wilkin stated that Amazon's system can be thought of as an "empty vessal", because developers basically pour all their software and effort into Amazon's system. Microsoft Azure on the other hand, according to Wilkin, is a "compute fabric" - the developer can focus on building the business logic and then scaling the platform to the demand. Azure takes away the "lower level complexities", according to Wilkin.

In the keynote today, Ray Ozzie was careful to heap praise on Amazon, saying that we all owe Amazon a debt of thanks for driving cloud computing forward. In the roundtable, Ozzie said that he hopes others do compete with Microsoft: "it'll be bad if we're the only ones doing this".

In our next post on Azure, we'll delve into the software implications of Microsoft Azure. For now, tell us how you think Azure relates to the desktop Windows OS? If you work in a corporation, let us know how you envision using these two different - yet intimately connected - operating systems.

Comment from steve davies on 2008-10-27

2008-10-27T23:11:27Z

After seeing Google's G1, I wonder how far away a Google desktop computer is.

I mean the G1 operating system could be tweaked as a desktop platform that is 100% focused on the cloud man.

If such a device were ever launched, one would have to wonder what kind of demand it would have. Such a device would be cheap, further undermining Microsoft.

I just can't see Microsoft winning the cloud computing battle. There is just way too much legacy to have to deal with to provide the open platform experience that users demand. Like Apple (who I love), I think both these platforms are yet to learn that cloud computing is operating system independant as all the activity takes place within a browser.

We'll know more tomorrow I guess.

Comment from Peter Coffee on 2008-10-27

2008-10-28T00:12:47Z

It seems odd that you have not previously encountered the phrase "on premise" to describe software that's locally installed on customer infrastructure. If I Google that phrase in combination with the name of the company salesforce.com, thereby assuring that I only get hits with some relevance to cloud computing, I get 94,800 results. This label has been around for quite some time.

Further, the distinction between unstructured compute capacity in the cloud and an enterprise application framework in the cloud is precisely the difference between systems like Amazon.com's and salesforce.com's Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) -- which is already in production use by customers who support, in some cases, tens of thousands of users with such applications. Ray Ozzie certainly has no need to worry that Microsoft will be "the only ones doing this": they're literally years too late to find themselves ever in that situation.

Comment from Jonathan Kupferman on 2008-10-27

2008-10-28T01:38:35Z

There seems to be a big misconception out there that Azure is in competition with Amazon EC2 when in reality they are more of a competitor to Google App Engine. Azure and GAE run on a different level and provide a different service then EC2, yet this distinction continues to be missed. Azure and GAE are Platform services whereas EC2 is infrastructure services. I just finished writing an article about it on here on my blog.

Same thing goes with Azure the OS. Yes it is a cloud OS, a OS for running in the cloud, not for running cloud applications. The OS was designed to run inside Microsoft data centers, not for the general population. Given that Microsoft has exact control of the hardware inside their data centers they can make tons of optimizations for the OS which will maximize its performance. I talked about it in a separate article about why a cloud OS is necessary

Comment from lukasz on 2008-10-28

2008-10-28T07:33:08Z

It seems that with the thing so called "cloud computing" is nothing else as next generation of mainframe computing - which is a great step backward - mabye to '70s

Comment from Ania on 2008-10-28

2008-10-28T08:07:13Z

When I read:

". . . In the roundtable, Ozzie said that he hopes others do compete with Microsoft: "it'll be bad if we're the only ones doing this". . . . "

I fell off my chair laughing. He IS the nerd at the high school dance who manages to fart a second after the music stops!

Comment from CGR on 2008-10-28

2008-10-28T09:00:52Z

I was reading the comments on this post and identified two main trends:
1) there still are people making frustration-based comments on every post related to Microsoft they lay theitr eyes on... (personally, I think of this as a lack of professionalism)
2) the discussion regarding whom Azure is competing with is showing that the whole cloud OS concept is still far from being understood.
Yes, Azure is designed as a cloud OS, but cloud applications can run on Azure. The question in this situation is how the process/workflow is going to be managed on off-promise multiplatform cloud applications.
Salesforce is not 1 to 1 comparable with Azure, since Salesforce platform is mostly an off-premise platform, while Azure is designed to combine a mix of off- and on-premise features. Salesforce also offers the possibility to integrate on-premise features, but the workflow remains always under Salesforce control, while Azue leaves you the freedom of doing it on-premise.
that doesen't mean that Azure is the next best thing since cliced bread - at least from what we know so far the openness does leave space for improvement, the security / privacy concepts are not cleared enough yet (at least to me), and mostly, I am still concerned about running the process / workflow - who manages it, how does it works in the cloud, how is it going to scale, etc.

Comment from Marcio Castilho on 2008-10-28

2008-10-28T11:38:50Z

I have setup a blog with the latest information about Azure and related technologies.

You can read more here at http://www.azurejournal.com