Microsoft Should Break The Public Cloud Wall.

Like all industry terms the definitions of what constitutes a cloud service have become somewhat loose as every vendor puts their own particular spin on it. Whilst many cloud products share a baseline of particular features (I.E. high automation, abstraction from underlying hardware, availability as far as your credit card will go) what’s available after that point becomes rather fluid which leads to the PR department making some claims that don’t necessairly line up with reality, or at least what I believe the terms actually mean. For Microsoft’s cloud offering in Azure this became quite clear during the opening keynotes of TechEd 2012 and the subsequent sessions I attended made it clear that the current industry definitions need some work in order to ensure that there’s no confusion around what the capabilities of each of these cloud services actually are.

If this opening paragraph is sound familiar then I’m flattered, you read one of my LifeHacker posts, but there was something I didn’t dive into in that post that I want to explore here.

It’s clear that there’s actually 3 different clouds in Microsoft’s arsenal: the private cloud that’s a combination of System Centre Configuration Manager and Windows Server, the what I’m calling Hosted Private Cloud (referred to as Public by Microsoft) which is basically the same as the previous definition except its running on Microsoft’s hardware and lastly Windows Azure which is the true public cloud. All of these have their own set of pros and cons and I still stand by my statements that the dominant cloud structure in the future will be some kind of hybrid version of all of these but right now the reality is that not a single provider manages to bridge all these gaps, and this is where Microsoft could step in.

The future might be looking more and more cloudy by the day however there’s still a major feature gap between what’s available in Windows Azure when compared to the traditional Microsoft offerings. I can understand that some features might not be entirely feasible at a small scale (indeed many will ask what the point of having something like Azure Table Storage working on a single server would achieve, but hear me out) but Microsoft could make major inroads to Azure adoption by making many of the features installable in Windows Server 2012. They don’t have to come all at once, indeed many of the features in Azure become available in a piecemeal fashion, but there are some key features that I believe could provide tremendous value for the enterprise and ease them into adoption of Microsoft’s public cloud offerings.

SQL Azure Federations for instance could provide database sharding to standalone MSSQL servers giving a much easier route to scaling out SQL than the current clustering solution. Sure there would probably need to be some level of complexity added in for it to function in smaller environments but the principles behind it could easily translate down into the enterprise level. If Microsoft was feeling particularly smart they could even bundle in the option to scale records out onto SQL Azure databases, giving enterprises that coveted cloud burst capability that everyone talks about but no one seems to be able to do.

In fact I believe that pretty much every service provided by Azure, from Table storage all the way down to the CDN interface, could be made available as a feature on Windows Server 2012. They wouldn’t be exact replicas of their cloudified brethren but you could offer API consistency between private and public clouds. This I feel is the ultimate cloud service as it would allow companies to start out with cheap on premise infrastructure (or more likely leverage current investments) and then build out from there. Peaky demands cloud then be easily scaled out to the public cloud and, if the cost is low enough, the whole service could simply transition there.

These features aren’t something that will readily port overnight but if Microsoft truly is serious about bringing cloud capabilities to the masses (and not just hosted virtual machine solutions) then they’ll have to seriously look at providing them. Heck just taking some of the ideals and integrating them into their enterprise products would be a step in the right direction, one that I feel would win them almost universal praise from their consumers.