Azure’s round the corner

Windows Azure, the cloud operating system from Microsoft, will be ready to use from Jan 1st 2010. Azure comes late to the game where companies such as Amazon have already established themselves.

Microsoft’s Cloud OS will come with online marketplaces for applications and datasets that enable users to build their own applications. A solution that lets companies run part of their workload on their own servers and part on Azure, Project Sydney, will be going into beta in 2010. The existence of Project Sydney is yet another pointer to the fact that companies do not trust cloud computing with their crown jewels. Amazon’s VPC was the first offering to allow users to use a cloud provider’s services as part of their set-up. Integrated management of IT infrastructure across premise-based stuff and that which runs in the cloud is going to be critical.

What’s different about Microsoft’s take on cloud computing is that the company has taken an application-centric approach. It is actively working on an option for companies to move applications back into their data centers from the cloud. The technology preview of a platform called Windows Server AppFabric will arrive in 2010. Applications written for AppFabric will be able to run on Azure without any reworking and vice versa.

Also announced was the Office 2010 beta which also includes Office Web apps. Web apps is Microsoft’s answer, sort of, to Google Docs and Zoho’s online Office Suite. However, its usage appears to be a tad convoluted. You have to save a document created locally using Microsoft Office to Windows Live SkyDrive and then edit it online in Skydrive which is not going to endear the offering to users. Google Docs has a much more straightforward mechanism letting you create documents right in the cloud as does Zoho.

A couple of years back, Intel had displayed an 80-core chip as a proof of concept. Now it’s gearing up to show off yet another research chip, this one with fewer cores but it would be more functional and easier to program than its 80-core predecessor. Intel’s goal of lots of simpler cores that consume very little energy sounds a bit like Sun’s CoolThreads technology, which has been out on the market for several years now but one expects that it will be x86-based which would give it an advantage. If it isn’t then it’ll be a me-too product.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com