Cloud

Highlights:

Azure widening the "As-A-Service" spectrum
With the announcements made, Azure is surely expanding its presence from the likes of being a Pure PaaS platform into the largely infrastructure oriented IaaS space and competing with infrastructure based cloud platforms like AWS from Amazon; independent hosted service providers such as Rackspace, GoGrid or CSPs such as AT&T, Reliance, Bharti etc... Some important announcements by Microsoft made:

1. Windows Azure VM Role: This capability eases the migration of traditional Windows Server apps to Windows Azure by eliminating the need to make costly application changes and enables customers to quickly access their existing business data from the cloud.
   Microsoft has announced support for Windows Server 2008 R2 by end of the year and Windows Server 2003 expected later in 2011. In the first phase, since this capability can be leveraged only if the applications have been developed on Windows Server 2008 R2,  the relevance of the VM Role is significant in the case of "New Developments" or if the applications have been upgraded to run on Windows Server 2008 R2. Till the time Azure starts supporting older Windows Servers OS versions as well, legacy Windows Server based apps cannot be migrated AS-IS.  Nonetheless as a result of this capability, some of the scenarios which can be further realized on Azure are:
   
   a. Minimize lock-in
   It will help meet the needs of those Enterprises having a cautious outlook on cloud. Primarily address customer concerns on, "I want to build an app which can run seamlessly both on-premise as well as cloud." Also cloud bursting along with VPN support (discussed in the next point) on the Azure platform has become a notch easier. IT Professionals can leverage automated Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) capabilities to maximize the usage of this feature.
   
   b. Migration made easy
   With support being announced for Windows Server 2003 later in 2011, the choice of migrating legacy apps running today on the server platform with minimal changes would become a reality. More of non-mission critical, In-house legacy apps can be easily offloaded to the cloud providing more avenues of cost optimization for Enterprises. Also migration of "Shrink-wrapped" or existing ISV products developed on traditional architectural stereotypes to Azure becomes more convenient providing new business opportunities for customers to harvest by leveraging existing investments done.  This could lead to new lines of revenue earning channels being created.
2. Windows Azure Connect - enables a simple and easy-to-manage mechanism to set up IP-based network connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure resources.
   Today VPN (Virtual Private Network) capabilities are being provided on Amazon Web services (Virtual Private Cloud) and Google AppEngine (Secure Data Connector) natively or via third party products. Bringing this capability into Azure will help customers bring more of their existing apps into the cloud in a more secured manner by leveraging more of the enterprises legacy network infrastructure easily.
   a. Address data security concerns:
   With this feature being made available on Azure, it will allow customers to develop new or potentially offload legacy applications to the cloud while their data can continue to reside within the secured domains of the Enterprise. This would help alleviate security concerns that customers may have with the cloud especially in cases where data criticality is regulated.
   b. Offload more legacy workloads to the cloud:
   In some enterprise portfolios it has been found that legacy applications are tightly coupled with other heterogeneous systems as a result of which it becomes challenging to separate and make them run from separate domains or even on the cloud. Azure VPN eliminates some of these constraints and allows offloading parts of the app to the cloud.
   This leads to more enterprise IT workloads to be incorporated into the cloud adoption roadmap of the enterprise and thus more opportunities to explore.
3. Elevated Privileges, Full IIS support and Server Application Virtualization are some additional capabilities which will minimize the impact of moving traditional apps to Azure, as a result of which we can look at an increasing the scope of on-premise apps coming under the purview of the cloud.
4. Remote Desktop support will mean more control to developers and windows admin on their cloud hosted services. It will help reduce worries which customers have had with the earlier black-box style of PaaS offerings. This capability would provide IT professionals with the capability to monitor running instances and troubleshoot problems in an environment which they would have been more familiar with.

A word of caution though, although all these new features make offloading of traditional legacy apps on to cloud easier, it does not make those apps automatically optimal for the cloud and be able to instantly benefit from the cloud value proposition. At the least, due to the utility nature of the platform and based on the workload scenarios (this being a key criteria in the decision to migrate) one may benefit from better cost optimization opportunities. The same may not be the case for other known cloud value propositions such as QoS - scalability, reliability or time to market benefits offered by cloud. A detailed assessment of the applications offloaded has to be carried out to ascertain the suitability of migration. If proper due diligence is not carried out, one may end up hosting an app that performs rather poorly on the cloud than found on the traditional on-premise deployments.

Deepening Azure platform capabilities
Enhancing application and workloads with new services that can help build powerful cloud apps were announced. Being a late entrant on the cloud space, there were several announcements made on Azure enriching its PaaS platform and strengthening its positions vis-à-vis those of its competitors.

1. SQL  Azure reporting now allows applications to leverage the SQL Report building capabilities on the cloud. Enabling this capability arms the developers with the tools to start embedding reports and deliver rich data oriented apps to their end users.
2. Distributed caching is going to be a first class service offering on the cloud natively provided as a part of Windows Azure AppFabric. An essential building-block for building scalable cloud apps. Earlier the same could have been realized by developers having to code and configure open source software such as memcache.
3. Windows Azure Data Marketplace provides developers and information workers with access to premium third-party data, Web services, and self-service business intelligence and analytics, which they can use to build rich applications.
4. Improved Java support with the Java now becoming a first-class citizen on Azure, we can look at more non-.net applications move to Azure. Especially for cases where customer Java apps are running on the Windows environment.

Some of the areas which I would have loved to hear more on are:

1. After the big ticket announcement @ WPC 2010, surprisingly there were no new announcements on the Windows Azure appliance or any other offering for the Enterprise Private Cloud space. In the Enterprise space, Microsoft has a good line of offerings the likes of Hyper-V , System Center suite of products. However, how their Enterprise level offerings may fall in line with their cloud strategy is unknown.
2. Also there was no real evidence of any concrete steps taken at platform level to address security concerns around data such as those listed below:
   a. data breaches,
   b. loss of data,
   c. control data level encryption  at granular levels,
   d. Provide  recoverable data backup choices
   e. Isolation levels classified- such as different security measures for different application types or data
   f. Clarity in identifying attacks etc.

To summarize, all these are great announcements which makes the platform look more solid and attractive.  A lot of new capabilities are being introduced to not only help enterprises offload legacy apps to the cloud with minimal friction but also build "Born in the Cloud" kind of gen-next apps with cloud ready capabilities faster.  However, as these are still just announcements, we need to wait a little longer to actually delve deeper to read the fine print. I can't wait to try out some of these cool new features coming our way.