Azure Prepped for Private Clouds: Next Round
Azure is a pretty cool cloud development and application serving platform. I have only two concerns: It's pretty new, which may mean immature, but a bigger deal is that Azure is designed for apps that run on external clouds -- namely Microsoft datacenters. Maybe this is because the first rev of a product shouldn't be expected to do too much. Or maybe Redmond is trying to sell its own cloud services.
Either way, Microsoft has heard the pleas of customers, and now says, albeit vaguely, that the next rev will let IT build their own clouds, something that competitors such as VMware already offer.
Internal clouds may not always seem important to vendors, but they are a requirement for many in IT. You see, not all of you trust data to a datacenter you've never seen and don't control. Oh, and what if the cloud vendors start tacking on charges and raising rates like my MasterCard provider? One more reason not to trust the cloud.
Posted by Doug Barney on November 30, 2009