After having listened to Tim Fischer et al, the summary of this conference manifested in my mind like this:
Microsoft still hasn’t decided how to pronounce Azure. Which makes kind of sense since GB and US pronunciations seem to differ quite a bit.
Some other topics were of interest, too 😉 I’d like to give a brief summary here because the conference served as a trigger for me to revisit the latest evolution in Microsoft’s cloud computing.
Different VM Sizes
Azure now lets you choose how much power your hosting instances are sporting. There are four different sizes available:
| Name | Price / hour | CPU | RAM | Instance Storage |
| Small | $0.12 | 1 x 1.6 GHz | 1.75 GB | 250 GB |
| Medium | $0.24 | 2 x 1.6 GHz | 3.5 GB | 500 GB |
| Large | $0.48 | 4 x 1.6 GHz | 7 GB | 1,000 GB |
| X Large | $0.96 | 8 x 1.6 GHz | 14 GB | 2,000 GB |
Pricing and features is almost equal to Amazon Web Service Standard Instances. For details, see their different types and pricing.
Upcoming Features
There will be blobs that can be mounted as NTFS drives called XDrives. As Ray Ozzie said:
Perhaps most significantly is in a new storage type that we call XDrive. Azure XDrives are Azure storage blobs that are mountable as regular NTFS volumes, a drive mapped, cached, durable volume, accessible by mapping an Azure page blob into an NTFS VHD.
He also announced that the Azure portfolio will have a feature that is really more an IaaS feature than a PaaS feature:
As we move forward and think about ways we can simplify being able to take the investments that you’ve made in the Windows Server environment and move them into Windows Azure, one of the things that we’re doing is allowing you to create your own image. We will do this next year. This is another feature that’ll come in 2010. We’ll allow you to create your own image, which has all of the software configured exactly the way you want it.
As far as I know, this feature is called “Virtual Machine Role” but no one knows. Maybe even Microsoft doesn’t know. And if the do know, they won’t pronounce it. Hell no.
I also heard that in 2010 Worker Roles can be addressed directly from the web without having to route traffic through Web Roles. Didn’t quite understand why there are 2 different roles, then.
Blobs
Blobs are really getting useful. I already knew they had the ability to be public or private, but these two new features were news to me:
- By specifying HTTP Cache-Control policy for each blob, Azure Blob Storage can be used as Content Delivery Network
- Snapshots of blobs can be taken to create read-only backups
Pricing Options
As we were told, there will be different pricing options. One of these options is useful for systems that already have a certain level of consumption and want a better pricing strategy for that compared with the very flexible but relatively costly “Pay as you grow” strategy. The first is more like Amazon AWS reserved instances.
And BizSpark Members will get Azure Hosting and SQL Azure for free for 8 months (don’t know details yet).
Misc
- There will be new data centers in Amsterdam und Dublin at the beginning of the year
- C++, Java, PHP, Ruby and MySQL are now also supported on Azure. Windows Azure Interoperability Site is a good place to start.
- There are even tools for Eclipse IDE
Summary
Compared to Amazon, I like the idea of PaaS (Azure being the first choice for a .NET developer like me). When I want give one of my ideas a try and build a web application, I surely don’t want to care about all this tedious infrastructure stuff like firewall, backups, load balancing, security updates etc.
It’s interesting to see that Microsoft is announcing a move more towards IaaS that early. This seems to be driven by early customer feedback. There must be a need for more flexible environments and they don’t want to lose those people to Amazon.
I really dig some of the new features. Good job so far, keep it coming. Looking forward to the EU datacenters.
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More links:
Developing with your head in the clouds 