http://news.techworld.com/data-centre/3228389/windows-azure-versus-amazon-ec2/

Windows Azure versus Amazon EC2

Microsoft cloud official says infrastructure and platform cloud lines will blur

By Jon Brodkin | Network World US | Published: 10:36 GMT, 28 June 10

Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud tackle two very different cloud computing technology problems today, but are destined to emulate each other over time, Microsoft cloud official Tim O’Brien says.

Whereas Windows Azure is a platform-as-a-service cloud, giving developers the tools they need to build and deploy web applications, Amazon EC2 is primarily an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud, offering on-demand access to customisable virtual machine instances.

Azure simplifies the building of web applications in a way that Amazon does not, but Amazon’s cloud-based virtual machines have the benefit of working with multiple programming models, O’Brien says, predicting that over time Microsoft will move more into infrastructure-as-a-service and Amazon will cross over into platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

O’Brien, senior director of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, discussed his take on the cloud market in an interview with Network World, as well as a public presentation at the recent Cloud Leadership Forum, hosted by IDC and IDG Enterprise.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” O’Brien said in the interview. “The reason people like infrastructure-as-a-service is because it’s programming model agnostic. The bare metal VM doesn’t care what language you wrote the application in, it doesn’t matter what tools you use and what run times you’ve targeted. If it runs on Windows or Linux, give it a virtual machine and it will run just fine. The problem is it’s a lot of extra work. You’re responsible for that virtual machine the same way you’re responsible for a server sitting under your desk. You’re responsible for turning it on. You’re responsible for turning it off. You’re responsible for applying a patch or an update. If Red Hat applies a Linux patch, and you have a Linux VM running on Amazon, you have to apply that patch yourself. They won’t do that for you.”

But there are shortcomings in the platform-as-a-service model as well, O’Brien acknowledges. The biggest problem with PaaS may be difficulty migrating existing applications from the internal data centre to the cloud.

“Platform-as-a-service has a different set of trade-offs,” O’Brien says. “All of that stuff is completely abstracted away, it’s a friction-free development, you basically code up an application, you hit deploy and it’ll go run on the platform that’s supplied by those run times. So in our case its PHP, C Sharp, in the case of Google App Engine it’s Python and Java.” While building new applications is easy, and removes the need for owning internal hardware and software, other than a Web browser, “part of the challenge there is it’s not necessarily optimal for migrating existing applications.”

Microsoft has already announced that “at some point [in the next 12 months] we will be offering the ability to provision a bare-metal VM, and run your application on that,” O’Brien says. While Amazon provides a variety of Windows and Linux virtual machine images through EC2, the company’s Web Services business offers a variety of other tools that might be useful to developers, including databases, storage services and load balancing.

O’Brien predicts that just as Microsoft moves into IaaS, Amazon will build a PaaS offering that more closely resembles Azure than anything Amazon offers today. Amazon’s public relations department could not be reached for comment Friday.

“It’s not a matter of one is better than the other; they accomplish different things,” O’Brien says. “But I think what you’ll see happen in the marketplace is a convergence of those two, where infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Amazon will move up the stack toward platform-as-a-service. You’ll also see PaaS providers like Microsoft provide some of that infrastructure-like capability, just so we can handle those migration scenarios much easier, and the lines will get blurred.”

In his speech at the Cloud Leadership Forum, O’Brien said public cloud services are generally not providing as much customization as customers want, but the cloud model is gaining popularity both among users who want to sidestep their companies’ IT departments, and from small businesses that want to get out of the IT business.

Many small businesses “don’t want to be in the IT business,” O’Brien said. “Private cloud is not in their vocabulary. They want to run their businesses on PCs and mobile phones and get out of the IT business entirely.”

Private clouds simply don’t offer the same economies of scale as public clouds do, he said, claiming that per-server TCO in a 100,000-server data centre is less than half the per-server TCO in a 1,000-server data centre.

Microsoft’s goal in the cloud is to offer customers the same functionality they would expect if they install the software themselves, he said. “If you can write an app for Windows Server you should be able to write an app for Windows Azure,” O’Brien said.

IBM announced new offering in Cloud http://www.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/hadoop/

The comments from CNet:

• IBM chooses Hadoop to analyze big data
• IBM BigSheets to preserve fleeting Web data

tags: linux bi opensource hadoop cloud big apache infosphere data biginsights

I placed a lot of effort on Cloud Computing engagement and had tours around the country. Piling my mileage

First off of everthing, I demo my compiz 3D desktop enabled Ubuntu 9.04 to show off how we live in a pure open source environment without having to touch any of Microsoft.

Get back to our topic. Last week, I visited one of largest mobile device / equipment manufacturer to discuss how a Cloud Computing could transform customer’s IT. We spent an hour to talk about Return of Investment (ROI). To list what are supposed in consideration of an ROI

• Hardware
• Image Instance – build, migration, administration
• Software – non-free operating system and hypervisor. If Xen, or KVM being used on LAMP, the cost is close to zero. And all software to build a Cloud environment with licensing and maintenance.
• Labor – build and operate a Cloud environment
• Provisioning Process – time taken to complete provision

Input the above consideration comes out in 3 charts as the following (the data is under a certain assumption and might vary in different environment) :

• Comparison of without- cloud and with- cloud

• Categorized

• Cost in Transformation

The information reflects a scope of ROI to be analyzed and doesn’t have to mean this is a mandatory.

I discussed the subject with one of colleagues who is a Cloud Computing architect. I’m logging what my comment here

=-=-

To continue our previous talk is a huge discussion. I’d recommend you could start to get involved in http://twitter.com and follow

http://twitter.com/mashable
http://twitter.com/j3ffyang -> me
http://twitter.com/OpenIBM -> I own this too as of being admin for IBM Open Source Global community

When you hit any of above, you can see the bytes come from http://aws.amazon.com actually, which is an IaaS with no doubt. Twitter is a kind of social collaboration network -> an application running over Amazon Web Services (AWS). Twitter doesn’t own any hardware resources. Whenever Twitter needs computing capability, it goes to AWS and AWS fulfills its request… on demand. Even though Twitter sometimes out of service due to its overload.

@ IaaS, AWS not only gives power of hardware (CPU, memory, disk and network…), but also provides plugin / API to connect Twitter with Hadoop… and Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Simple Database (SDB).

You shouldn’t be surprised @ Twitter’s power to gather thousand of thousand developers around it, if keeping our eyes open. (Some reasons of the motivation of social collaboration in term of Web2.0). See these:

http://tweetwheel.com
http://ftags.com
http://tweetvalue.com/
http://www.tweetizen.com/
http://twittersnooze.com/
http://mrtweet.net/home/j3ffyang
http://tweettrail.com/search/hadoop
…
…

This list is almost endless. They’re all independent of twitter.com. The above are all SaaS, plugable into Twitter.com where provides API -> http://apiwiki.twitter.com/ and http://twitter.com/downloads – @ PaaS

This is an ecosystem.

Collaboration cross firewall: I started to get involved in a Cloud project and had to travel to Shanghai every week in past one month. While out of my office during trip, or boarding @ airport, or sitting in cab, I’m out of the company firewall! That means I can’t access BlogCentral. My brain must “stop” in front of firewall. If I want to keep it thinking, I’d switch to public Web2.0 places.
Ease of combination: Have you used Ping.fm ? Or you may ask what Ping.fm is? In short, it’s a hub of collaboration and a practice of innovation. Let’s see a scenario: In a cab, I see a scene. I capture a photo by using my Nokia E71 smartphone (iPhone works too). After shooting, a small icon of mail prompts. Click mail icon, I’m in mail mode with the capture picture as an attachment. I pick an email address from contact list. Such email address is like vfr45t@ping.fm that was randomly assigned by Ping.fm . Whatever message sent to such account will automatically be updated into my accounts @ Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, MySpace, Blogger, Identi.ca, WordPress, Flickr, FriendFeed, Mashable, etc, you name it… All these could be finished within one minute. (Security is another topic though. I’d very carefully post the data in this very web2.0 way.)
Performance: WordPress is good. Working on company’s BlogCentral is a challenge. I lean to write @ twitter.com as I’m lazy and don’t have to write much

Building a private open source’d Cloud Computing environment isn’t that difficult as you think. Get the code from http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu and it took me about 3~ 4 days @ my spare time to complete the installation and configuration. This environment shares code with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which means your Amazon Machine Image (AMI) can run on top of this.

Look @ some screenshots