June 2012 Archives

Servers in the cloud: becoming a no-brainer

June 29, 2012 4:58 PM

Tim Anderson

Cloud computing, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): nothing new about that. Yet the month of June saw two momentous announcements.

azure-portal[1].png

The first was from Microsoft, which announced the addition of IaaS to its Azure platform, along with a new management portal that may prove equally significant, for reasons I will give in a moment.

The second was from Google, at its IO 2012 conference, when it announced Google Compute Engine (GCE), which lets you launch Linux virtual machines (VMs) on Google's platform.

How is this significant, when you could already do the same on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2, or on other providers such as RackSpace?

In the case of Google's service, it does look like familiar territory if you have used EC2. There is a REST-based API and you work with images and instances. The API is based on HTTP and JSON, and Google is also supplying a bunch of client libraries, including .NET, Go, GWT, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, Python and Ruby.

Google may be a new player in the IaaS market but you would also think that managing this stuff will come naturally to a company which has built its own search and cloud services on a massively scaleable cloud. Google also has a good track record in terms of reliability, when you look at its existing Google Apps services. It is not perfect; but then neither are others such as Amazon or Salesforce.com, both of which have occasional service interruptions.

In fact, one of the advantages of major new entrants into the market is the possibility of building fail-safe solutions across several cloud vendors, making it less likely that cloud downtime will cause severe loss of business.

What about Windows Azure? This one has made a big impression on me, partly because (unlike GCE) I have been able to try it out, as well as speaking to Microsoft Corporate VP Scott Guthrie about the new features.

He told me how, soon after he moved to work on Azure in 2011, his team sat down and tried using the service, encountering numerous problems ranging from sign-up difficulties to problems finding documentation.

Since then Microsoft has released not only a wide range of new features, including durable VMs alongside the existing stateless VMs, but also a new administration portal that is a pleasure to use.

Does that matter, when what really counts is the cloud technology, its performance and reliability?

I think it does. A good user experience changes behaviour. It is now so easy to log in and create a VM on Azure, that I will be using this myself when I need to spin up a server to test some software. Click Virtual Machine - From Gallery - pick an operating system - type a name and password, select a machine size, and it is done. A few minutes later you can log in with remote desktop and get working.

With a bit of effort, you can even connect Azure to your internal network.

If it is easy to get started, users are more likely to try it out and, all going well, start using the service in anger. My expectation is that Azure will see a lot more activity as a result.

It has taken too long, but Microsoft is now a real contender in cloud infrastructure.

With Google also coming into play, you may wonder if Amazon will finally feel some heat. I actually doubt that. It is a growing market, and Amazon is the leader by far.

It seems to me that it is more the other, smaller cloud hosters who should worry, as well as those in the on-premise server market. Increasingly, you will not only be testing your new solutions in the cloud, but deploying them there as well.

Will Surface rock the living room?

June 22, 2012 10:57 AM

Danny Bradbury

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Microsoft's Surface tablet is a little late to the party, and it has some serious challenges ahead of it. But there is one area where it could succeed, in spades.

The company rolled out its device this month in a hurriedly-arranged press conference that suggested it knows it can't wait any longer. It has already lost too much ground in the tablet wars. Apple's share of the tablet market with the iPad will reach 62.5% this year, according to IDC.

Apple does one thing very well: it ships one product and one operating system in any given category. Microsoft gave us two (Windows RT and Windows 8), running on different processors (ARM and Intel) with different capabilities (the RT version only runs Metro-style apps). The rationale here is that one is for the consumer market, and one is for business users, but this already fragmented its offerings in a market where it needs to make its proposition as clear as possible if it is to stand any chance of catching up.

And we've seen Microsoft try to play catchup before, with less than favourable results. It launched the Zune as a competitor to the iPod. This never sold outside North America, and effectively faded from view. We've also seen it try to lead the market, and fail there as well. Its original tablet operating system, launched in 2002, was supported by various PC vendors, but never really caught on.

Add to this the fact that the company is competing with its own hardware partners, and it's easy to see the Surface failing. Microsoft will only sell the unit online, presumably to avoid the wrath of hardware partners who are competing with each other in retail outlets. This will make an already confusing product less visibile still.

The Surface's demo SNAFU, in which the machine fell over and stopped breathing, didn't help either. Jobs would never had let that happen.

But there is one place where the consumer version, at least, could succeed: the living room. Microsoft already has over a third of the worldwide gaming console market, and in the autumn it will launch Smartglass, which is a software service designed to run on a phone, tablet, or PC. Smartglass acts as a companion to your XBox, providing additional information about whatever you're doing on the screen. Watching movies streamed through your XBox could throw up plotlines and character profiles, for example, while it could display strategy charts or player stats when watching the footy. And when playing games, your Smartglass device might display maps, or character inventory information.

This is all rather attractive, and the consumer Surface device could fit in very well as a Smartglass companion, if and when Microsoft enables it for that. Perhaps not coincidentally, Microsoft rolled out the first Smartglass SDK for XBox developers just a couple of days after the Surface demo.

Your Surface could then serve more information about your screen life when you're away, perhaps sending updated football information, or keeping you abreast of what's happening in a multiplayer game world when you're off doing something more healthy, like taking a walk.

On the other hand, Smartglass is said to be available for other devices, too - including iOS and Android - and of course there will be other Windows tablets to consider. So Surface is far from the only show in town.

Surface has a lot to prove in the tablet space, and Apple is extremely aggressive about fighting rearguard actions against tablet and smartphone vendors (hence the lawsuits trying to stop HTC and Samsung from selling their mobile devices). But integrated well, Smartglass could turn it into an attractive proposition for XBox-savvy consumers.

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