Developments in the Azure and Windows Server 8 pairing

The shroud of secrecy has been lifted surrounding Windows Server 8 and Azure. What lies behind it is greater symmetry between the cloud computing and virtualized HA infrastructures, improved storage and an Azure toolkit that promises to help enterprises easily develop an Azure service and deploy it to end users.

This means DevOps teams will need to gain expertise with Window 8's new features to obtain maximum return on investment with public cloud computing as well as with private and hybrid clouds.

Windows 8 ultimately will provide the underpinnings of the Windows Azure platform with the intent to democratize high availability (HA) clusters to push the "scale-up envelope" with features previously reserved for high-performance computing Windows Server 2008 R2 versions.

Windows 8 will include new alternative disk storage architectures called Storage Pools and Spaces, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft's servers and tools business, said here in his BUILD conference keynote. Storage Pools aggregate commodity disk drives into isolated JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) units and attaches them to Windows for simplified management. Storage Spaces do the same for virtual machines.

Microsoft sharpens Windows Server 8, Azure cloud story

If IT managers in Windows shops had any doubts about Windows Server 8 and Azure serving as fundamental building blocks for their company’s cloud strategy, they don’t have any now.

From dawn to dusk at the BUILD conference here this week, Microsoft executives pounded home the message that Server 8 and Azure will have a hand-in-glove relationship that will anchor most of the company’s enterprise platforms and applications.

They also consistently pushed the cloud platform as a scalable, highly available option for application developers and IT shops, emphasizing the company is also building features into the server product that are informed by its experience engineering and managing the hosting service.

Securing virtual machines in the cloud

Choosing protection for a virtual infrastructure is a lot like buying an antivirus product for the Mac OS: most people would wonder why you bothered. Nonetheless, as more IT shops migrate their servers to virtual machines and cloud-based environments, it is only a matter of time before protecting these resources becomes considerably more important.

However, you can't just install your firewall or antivirus software on a cloud-based virtual machine (VM). Physical firewalls aren't designed to inspect and filter the vast amount of traffic originating from a hypervisor running 10 virtualized servers. Because VMs can start, stop and move from hypervisor to hypervisor at the click of a button, whatever protection you've chosen has to handle these activities with ease. Plus, as the number of VMs increases in the data center, it becomes harder to account for, manage and protect them. And if unauthorized people gain access to the hypervisor, they can take advantage of the lack of controls and modify all the VMs housed there.

As enterprises move toward virtualizing more of their servers and data center infrastructure, they need specialized protective technologies that match this environment. Luckily, there are numerous vendors who have stepped up to this challenge, although the level of protection is still nowhere close to the depth and breadth that is available for physical server protective products.

Three questions to ask when considering Microsoft Azure

Cloud computing is, for some, a means of escaping from the clutches of traditional computer and software vendors. Most enterprises realize that the value of cloud will depend on how well services integrate with their own IT commitments and investments.

Because Microsoft is so much a part of internal IT, Microsoft's cloud approach is especially important to users. Many will find it compelling; others may decide it's impossible to adopt. Which camp are you in?

The foundation of Microsoft Azure's value proposition is the notion that users must design their enterprise IT infrastructure for peak load and high reliability operation, although both of these requirements waste a lot of budget dollars. The Azure solution is to draw on cloud computing to fill processing needs that exceed the long-time average. It also backs up application resources to achieve the necessary levels of availability, if normal data center elements can't provide those levels.

This means that Azure, unlike most cloud architectures, has to be based on elastic workload sharing between the enterprise and the cloud. They accomplish this by adopting many service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts, including workflow management (the Azure Service Bus).

Why is cloud computing so hard to understand?

Why is cloud computing so hard to understand? It would be an equally fair question to ask why today’s Information Technology is so hard to understand. The answer would be because it covers the entire range of business requirements, from back-office enterprise systems to various ways such systems can be implemented. Cloud computing covers an equal breadth of both technology and, equally important, business requirements. Therefore, many different definitions are acceptable and fall within the overall topic.

But why use the term "cloud computing" at all? It originates from the work to develop easy-to-use consumer IT (Web 2.0) and its differences from existing difficult-to-use enterprise IT systems.

A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change content, in contrast to non-interactive Web 1.0 sites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information. Although the term Web 2.0 suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to new technology but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web.