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Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

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Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#41

Post by cies »

mobiplayer wrote: post #29
cies wrote: post #11

Dear MS. Thanks for going open source with dotNet. We will use it on our Linuxes and BSDs, with gratitude and joy. But when it comes to your intention of bringing your non-open-source'ed software to our data centers: we were actually almost finished taking them out, and feel much better that way.

Dude, if there's one thing in abundance in a DC is non-open-source software. Can't imagine many DCs without one of these: Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint, VMWare, Microsoft, Dell/HP on ILO/DRAC, F5 or Brocade; you effing name it. Your network, your SAN, all your effing data, everything! goes through some non-open-source'ed software stack. Oh yes, and let's not forget about all your NIC drivers for starters.

I was attacking MSs non-open-source data center software, and of the brands you just name I also avoid some.

Some proprietary software vendors are not _that_ bad.

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#42

Post by danudey »

Sanddancer wrote: post #26
h43k3r wrote: post #5

Can anybody explain me in layman terms what this means? I understand that Azure is Microsoft's Cloud Platform that provides services through which you can deploy your application on cloud. Does this mean that you can run Azure on your own datacenter like Microsoft is doing currently?

Yes. I have a housemate who is doing a rather interesting project with Azure at his workplace. Can't give any more real solid details than that, but Azure is essentially more open than AWS in the terms of giving the source of the special sauce it provides.

Every implementation needs a differentiating factor. AWS is its flexibility and ridiculous amount of built-in functionality - message queues, databases, DNS, storage, map reduce, etc. Azure moving from one-click deploy to the cloud to one-click deploy to your own cloud is amazing. It's the primary appeal of OpenStack for me.

The real question will be what will this take? If I have to put Windows Server 20xx on my hardware to run the fabric, I'm out.

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#43

Post by danudey »

cies wrote: post #41
mobiplayer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, if there's one thing in abundance in a DC is non-open-source software. Can't imagine many DCs without one of these: Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint, VMWare, Microsoft, Dell/HP on ILO/DRAC, F5 or Brocade; you effing name it. Your network, your SAN, all your effing data, everything! goes through some non-open-source'ed software stack. Oh yes, and let's not forget about all your NIC drivers for starters.

I was attacking MSs non-open-source data center software, and of the brands you just name I also avoid some. Some proprietary software vendors are not _that_ bad.

I think Microsoft has realized that their 'our way or the highway' approach only works for as long as the highway doesn't offer anything you need.

The fact that Azure can be used solely to deploy Linux VMs, for example, is appealing, and I've heard a lot of good things about it from iOS/Android developers who've used it.

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#44

Post by WorldWideWayne »

devicenull wrote: post #30
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of Linux users do you think have the capability or the desire to spend their time tracing calls through various libraries and kernel source? When I run into a problem on my Linux machine, I typically have to do a lot of searching. More searching than I must do with Windows, because while there is generally only one Windows (at least relative to Linux), there are hundreds of Linuxes, distros and versio…

Who said anything about average linux users? We're talking about a product designed to be run on multiple servers, in a datacenter. At that level, you're generally talking about professionals.

I thought the average linux user was a professional user. So, I guess I'd like to know if you think that most pros actually take the time to start digging into unknown code versus just looking things up?

(edit: clarification)

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#45

Post by kgilpin »

frostmatthew wrote: post #38
mc32 wrote: post #9

These kinds of developments can't make VMware happy. I have not understood why VMware never made a big iaas play when it had the chance to compete before others became established and established mindshare. I only guess they didn't want to compete against themselves, which is understandable but shortsighted.

> I only guess they didn't want to compete against themselves, which is understandable but shortsighted I work on vCloud Air (VMware's IaaS offering) and this is just a guess (since I wasn't here at the time) but I imagine it wasn't about "competing against themselves." It's easy to sit here in 2015 and say getting into IaaS early should have been obvious but that's ignoring the reality of what IT departments were sa…

Personally I believe that the best insights don't come from customers. As Jobs said, "Customers don't know what they want"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/10/17/five-danger...

People working in IT data centers didn't work with cloud much, so they didn't understand the advantages. It's very dangerous to do product design in an echo chamber.

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#46

Post by rbanffy »

jameshart wrote: post #37

Microsoft always referred to Azure, from the beginning, as a new operating system - it was, after all, originally branded as "Windows Azure". This actually feels like it delivers on that promise - a datacenter operating system. This has the definite advantage of limiting fear of being 'locked in' in deploying into Microsoft's Azure cloud - you can always run your application on your own Azure fabric. So does this als…

> This has the definite advantage of limiting fear of being 'locked in' in deploying into Microsoft's Azure cloud - you can always run your application on your own Azure fabric.

This lock-in is no different than the fear of being locked in into Amazon's AWS, Google's or Rackspace's services (even App Engine has open-source source-compatible equivalents out there). With the right tools (and there are open-source ones), you can deploy your applications to machines (real, virtual, containers) mostly anywhere.

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#47

Post by mc32 »

frostmatthew wrote: post #38
mc32 wrote: post #9

These kinds of developments can't make VMware happy. I have not understood why VMware never made a big iaas play when it had the chance to compete before others became established and established mindshare. I only guess they didn't want to compete against themselves, which is understandable but shortsighted.

> I only guess they didn't want to compete against themselves, which is understandable but shortsighted I work on vCloud Air (VMware's IaaS offering) and this is just a guess (since I wasn't here at the time) but I imagine it wasn't about "competing against themselves." It's easy to sit here in 2015 and say getting into IaaS early should have been obvious but that's ignoring the reality of what IT departments were sa…

I understand hindsight is 20/20, but they should have been testing this alternative service, at least internally, with the other divisions, to see how well they could compete, if this thing caught on they could be somewhat ready. It's not that they need to predict the market, they should try for contingencies, what if that iaas does take off? Let's not get caught flat-footed.

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#48

Post by frostmatthew »

kgilpin wrote: post #45
frostmatthew wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I only guess they didn't want to compete against themselves, which is understandable but shortsighted I work on vCloud Air (VMware's IaaS offering) and this is just a guess (since I wasn't here at the time) but I imagine it wasn't about "competing against themselves." It's easy to sit here in 2015 and say getting into IaaS early should have been obvious but that's ignoring the reality of what IT departments were sa…

Personally I believe that the best insights don't come from customers. As Jobs said, "Customers don't know what they want" http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2011/10/17/five-danger... People working in IT data centers didn't work with cloud much, so they didn't understand the advantages. It's very dangerous to do product design in an echo chamber.

> As Jobs said, "Customers don't know what they want"

I see (and somewhat agree with) your point, but you're quoting/linking an article titled "Five Dangerous Lessons to Learn From Steve Jobs" that states just before the first bullet "here are some of the worst lessons to learn from Steve Jobs"

A better quote may be PG's "Make something people want"[1] - and if ~90% of the people you sell to are saying they want on-prem I'm not sure how (without clairvoyance or hubris) you can say for sure "nah, they're all wrong."

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are much larger than VMware and can afford to put a lot more resources behind things that may never bear fruit - VMW had $1.8B in revenue in 2008[2], MSFT had $60B[3].

[1] http://paulgraham.com/good.html

[2] http://ir.vmware.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-09-38030...

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/Investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Tre...

Re: Microsoft Announces Azure Stack

#49

Post by kordless »

sunananth_MSFT wrote: post #21
h43k3r wrote: post #5

Can anybody explain me in layman terms what this means? I understand that Azure is Microsoft's Cloud Platform that provides services through which you can deploy your application on cloud. Does this mean that you can run Azure on your own datacenter like Microsoft is doing currently?

I'm a product manager with Microsoft. With the Azure Stack, you can deploy your applications on your on-premises (private) cloud, just like you would do in Azure - you're essentially retargeting the app. Our ultimate goal is to empower maximum application agility. To enable the same deployment experience, Microsoft is bringing the same Azure portal, user experience framework, and underlying IaaS/PaaS APIs and service…

The cloud is the new OS. SaaS becomes MSaaS.
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