On SD Times, David Worthington writes Ozzie, Muglia
and the Microsoft cloud.
LOS ANGELES – Porting an on-premise application to the cloud is not as easy as
flipping a switch, according to Microsoft's Bob Muglia. But the company will
work with developers to help them adopt successful cloud development patterns.
SD Times sat down with Muglia, vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools
Business unit, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, at the
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. Topics ranged from how Microsoft
can make cloud application development easier, to how it will leverage the
cloud for development and testing in Visual Studio, and whether Silverlight was
part of the open Web.
When asked how Microsoft would help its customers understand how to comply with
regulations and data privacy laws that could prohibit moving data to the cloud,
Ozzie emphasized that Microsoft has experience working in different countries
throughout the world, and that it could parley those experiences to guide its
customers.
Microsoft had to modify Windows Messenger features in different countries at
the behest of regulators, but it still managed to ship its software, Muglia
added.
Additionally, Microsoft has data centers located throughout the world to give
customers that are located in countries with restrictive regulations the
ability to use Windows Azure within their borders, Muglia said.
Ozzie said that he expected that laws will become less restrictive over time,
because governments themselves have an interest in using cloud computing.
Encryption is a model of how laws were adapted to changing technology, he
added. “It’s as if they don’t know that encryption exists,” he quipped.
When asked about how Azure fits into development and testing, Muglia confirmed
that Microsoft intends to integrate Azure into Visual Studio for provisioning
test environments.
Microsoft will provide preconfigured virtual machines for Windows and;
more customization (such as changing system configurations) will be added over
time, he said.
That integration could represent another click up in level of
"coopetition" with Hewlett-Packard, said Forrester principal analyst
Jeffrey Hammond.
Lastly, Muglia and Ozzie were insistent that Silverlight was part of the open
Web. They pointed to Mono Moonlight as an example of that, and they noted that
Microsoft has licensed associated intellectual property, including Windows
Media codecs, to open-source developers.
Mono project lead Miguel de Icaza said that he wanted Microsoft to go a step
further by contributing technology to ECMA International. Muglia responded by
saying that Microsoft was trying to balance standards with its ability to
rapidly innovate the Silverlight platform.
Ozzie also gave a nuanced explanation about how Silverlight is meant to help
developers leverage existing application and tool investments on the Web, and
it was complementary to (and not meant to suppress) HTML 5. The draft
specification of HTML 5 includes a framework for building Web applications.
In a follow-up conversation regarding the cloud, Jamin Spitzer, director of
platform strategy for Microsoft, said that “Developers need to have a realistic
sense of what changes and what stays the same by moving to an instance-based
IaaS cloud.” Microsoft announced an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offering
for Azure at PDC.
The “true promise” of cloud computing is fully realized through transforming
applications for the cloud, he added, saying that developers needed to identify
the core set of functional capabilities required for specific application
scenarios, and then choose the right deployment location to best satisfy those
capabilities, whether that is on premises or on the computing. Some workloads
should stay on premises if moving to the cloud does not justify future cost
savings, or if data needs to remain behind the firewall, he admitted.
cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible
data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications
are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform
usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more.
Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of
Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services
Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and
storing data in the cloud.
cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often
virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a
new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right
infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution,
cloud computing allows people to share
resources to solve new problems. cloud computing users can avoid capital
expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a
provider only for what they use.
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