2010 is the year of Microsoft Azure
Posted by DH on 11th December 2009
I found a couple of posts that gives some new information about Microsoft plans with the Azure platform.
Project Sydney will create secure ‘virtual network overlay’ for cloud computing
With Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform set to go live on New Year’s Day, the company is looking ahead to later in 2010 when it will unveil a new security structure for multi-tenant cloud environments as well as private cloud software based on the same technology used to build Azure. Hasan Alkhatib, the Azure senior architect, described the Microsoft security project code-named “Sydney” Thursday at an Xconomy forum on cloud computing held at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center in Cambridge, Mass. In addition to embedding greater security into the public cloud, Alkhatib said Microsoft is planning to help customers build private cloud networks within their own data centers, using the same software Azure is based on. “Every customer says ‘where can we get a private cloud?’” Alkhatib said. “We’re building them. Within a short period of time private clouds will be available with the same technology we’ve used to build Windows Azure.” However, Alkhatib said he thinks private clouds lack most of the benefits of public clouds, and focused most of his talk on the Azure services that will be offered publicly over the Web. Project Sydney, unveiled last month at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, addresses security in virtualized, multi-tenant environments in which customers are typically sharing data center resources. Sydney will provide isolation between customers’ cloud resources with network virtualization, and provide secure connections between an enterprise’s internal data center equipment and what it uses in the cloud, Alkhatib said. Sydney will aggregate “any arbitrary set of endpoints,” including servers and client machines inside the enterprise and resources in a public cloud service like Azure, and create what Alkhatib called a “virtual network overlay” which is secured with IPsec and which can only be accessed by those authorized to do so. “All these elements appear to each other as if they have a dedicated, private network,” Alkhatib said. Regulatory compliance in cloud computing is still a major challenge, however. Alkhatib said the IT industry must lobby agencies to accept new security guidelines that are based on logical, rather than physical structures. Microsoft hasn’t announced a release date for Sydney but is committed to delivering at least a beta version in 2010, Alkhatib said. The private cloud product based on Azure may also come out in 2010, he said. Microsoft today is running Azure out of data centers in Chicago and Texas, and will add four more data centers in January in Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong, Alkhabit said.
Is Microsoft is developing its own cloud storage O/S??
Comment from the source: Microsoft’s Azure storage offering suggests it is developing its own cloud storage operating system.
Azure was developed in a Windows Azure Group which was separate from the Windows and Servers Group. The two organisations have now been combined into a new Servers and Cloud Division (SCD) unit, headed up by a senior VP, Amitabh Srivastava. SCD itself is part of Bob Muglia’s Servers and Tools Business unit. The Azure cloud service, based on Microsoft’s own data centres, is dependent on virtualised server instances, child partitions in Hyper-V-speak, using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Users will access these in a public cloud across the Internet and set up virtual server applications. These applications will access storage that provides three kinds of data store: Blobs, tables and queues. Blobs – binary large objects – are data and metadata in up to 50GB lumps. A Blob could be formatted as a single NTFS volume VHD (Virtual Hard Disk). For more fine-grained storage needs tables hold a simple hierarchy of entities with properties. These are not relational database tables, nor are they accessed by SQL. The idea is to provide for massive scale out across multiple storage boxes, with a table capable of storing several billions of entities constituting terabytes of data. Queues hold Azure infrastructure requests from one Azure application instance to request a service from another or send a message to another. These instances, Hyper-V child partitions, are of two types: web role instances and worker role instances. THe web role instance communicates with users outside the cloud via incoming HTTP or HTTPS requests. Worker role instances are like Windows services or batch jobs.
There is more information on the Azure infrastructure here (pdf) and here (pdf) and here.
Sources:
Tags: Azure, Private Cloud, Public Cloud
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