Kip Kniskern over at the LiveSide blog spotted a Microsoft job advert that appears to give some insight into a cloud computing platform under development at Redmond that could compete with Google's just released App Engine or Amazon's suite of web services. The utility computing platform, codenamed "Red Dog" according to the job ad, is under development at Microsoft's Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) team and aims to see a version one release within the "coming year." What little info is provided by the job posting is rather obscure, but there are a few juicy tidbits to be had.
According to the ad, the platform is "an efficient, virtualized" environment that is "fully automated" and has a "set of highly scalable storage services." Which translated, likely means a utility computing platform that handles scaling and server management for you and on which you only pay for the storage you need. That means it would be comparable to something like App Engine or Mosso (our coverage).
Some wondered after Google's App Engine announcement Monday evening when Microsoft would offer a competing cloud computing platform. The biggest tip off from the job advertisement that Red Dog is it, is that the CIS team wants the platform to "lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications." Microsoft will supposedly roll out a first version of Red Dog to "external customers" (defined later as "ISV customers who are ... early adopters") this year.
As Kniskern points out, not much is known about Red Dog at this point, but indications seem to point to some sort of platform as a service offering from Microsoft dropping within the next year.
Note: No, that's not a real Red Dog logo. It's just Clifford The Big Red Dog with a tiny Windows Live logo dangling from his collar...
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a black horse to be?
Posted by: 113.com | April 9, 2008 10:09 AMOoh I'm liking the "dog tag" :P. Whether Red Dog is a platform for a Google App Engine competitor, or a more ISV oriented offering with another dev facing offering (mjf refers to something called "Zurich") coming along as well, it looks pretty certain that MS is set to get into this space, and in a big way.
thanks for the link, we're watching this platform of services thing pretty closely.
Posted by: Kip | April 9, 2008 11:16 AMI always loved C# and ASP.net. It would be nice to see a .net based answer to app engine.
Posted by: Matthew Smith | April 9, 2008 11:47 AMWhy is your site telling me it wants to run SQL Server on MY machine?
Posted by: kayvaan | April 9, 2008 12:09 PM"Invent the name first, implement later" is a well known Microsoft kung-fu. Maybe they are thinking something that the world will be ready for only in 2015. Something too big that it falls off in the middle of the journey.
Posted by: Akhmad Fathonih | April 9, 2008 6:26 PMwhat they are doing no new thing Google develop a new thing all other compnies try to copy from there
Posted by: Ajay | April 9, 2008 8:35 PMor same case with Google also
we have the same service but different interoperability problems and different vendors using different formats for each of their service
can their be only one service for this.
I like this healthy competition.
Posted by: Kishor | April 10, 2008 4:45 PM