The rumor du jour is that Microsoft is just two weeks away from launching a competitor to Amazon's massively popular EC2 service. This seems like big news, until you consider that Microsoft already offers a competitor to Amazon EC2.
According to Derrick Harris of GigaOm, Microsoft is building an "infrastructure-as-a-service" cloud that provides access to raw virtual servers, and it plans to launch this new service on June 7 at an event in San Francisco. The story provides few details, but it does say that the new service will offer virtual servers running Linux as well as Windows.
But Azure already offers raw virtual servers, much like Amazon does on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). And Azure has offered these virtual servers for nearly a year and a half. It's just that right now they only run Windows.
The news, then, appears to be that Microsoft's Azure cloud will finally offer Linux -- though Microsoft may paint this as an entirely new service.
In any event, the move is telling -- especially when you consider the introduction of Linux. In recent years, in an effort to attract the new breed of developer who grew up on Linux and other open source tools, Microsoft has slowly warmed to such tools, shedding its well-earned reputation as the enemy of open source, and Azure is at the forefront of this transformation.
That new breed of developer is flocking to Amazon. And Microsoft wants them on Azure, a service that Microsoft has apparently pumped enormous amounts of money into over the past several years.
The news out of GigaOm is confusing, though, because Microsoft has always billed Azure as a "platform cloud." Unlike an “infrastructure cloud” such as Amazon EC2, a platform cloud lets developers build and host applications without worrying about virtual servers and other raw computing resources. It juggles your infrastructure needs behind the scenes -- at least in theory. But long ago, Microsoft started offering raw resources as well, turning Azure into something that operated as both platform cloud and infrastructure cloud.
This distinction is subtle. And the terminology is annoying. But that's the way it is. Microsoft been dolling up its platform cloud in infrastructure clothing and now the world is starting to catch on.
"The original point of Azure was that you were not supposed as a developer to log in to each individual machine and fiddle around with it. The platform stuff that had build on top was supposed to take care of all that -- all the management of the application. But since Azure launched, Microsoft has moved 'down the stack' also, so that you have access to the virtual machines. You can configure these machines as you want," says Michael Friis, who runs a cloud startup called AppHarbor that -- in a way -- straddles the line between Azure and Amazon EC2.
"In that respect, they moved from doing their own platform, down to what Amazon is doing."
Microsoft has long told us that it added raw virtual server because customers were asking for them. But at the same time, the company always downplayed this part of Azure, preferring to paint it as a platform cloud -- i.e. something different from Amazon.
The trouble is that selling a platform cloud is an uphill battle. Developers have flocked to Amazon -- EC2 now runs as much as one percent of the entire internet -- and this has happened in part because they could do just about whatever they wanted with those virtual servers. A platform cloud is easier to use -- at least in theory -- but it's also more restrictive, and this can scare off some developers. Google has seen the same thing with its platform cloud, Google App Engine.
So Azure is changing. It's offering virtual servers -- and Linux too. Rumors have long indicated that Linux machines were on the way. And this makes sense. Developers also use Amazon because it runs Linux. That's what they're familiar with. "When it comes right down to it, many developers don't want to run this stuff on Windows," says Friis.
Clearly, Microsoft realizes this. And it's trying to catch up.
