Cloud - Web and Service Cloud

Microsoft launched the Azure cloud based platform at the PDC today.  Microsoft has launched many file storage services that were their cloud offerings to date in Mesh, Foldershare, Groove and more.  Azure is what appears to be a real cloud platform to compete with Amazon and Google rather than just storage hosting.

Build new applications in the cloud - or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications. You choose what’s right for you.

It appears so far that it is pretty Microsoft centric for tool support.  Of course the software and servers will be Windows.  This week and last, Microsoft platforms have made their way into the cloud platforms at Amazon and now Microsoft.  Google also recently announced the support of Java.  Another set of aquisitions at Rackspace in the buying of Slicehost and JungleDisk also seem to show the space heating up and the companies all believing in the cloud platform emergence and evolution that seems to be happening.

AppEngine is getting an update to it’s next available language besides Python (my particular favorite) in Java.  Apparently the top candidates were C++, Java and C# support for AppEngine but Java has been added due to the overwhelming library and developer support.

Microsoft also has been playing with entering the cloud with Mesh and now with “Strata”.  This would be a cloud for .NET developers.

There are already cloud providers for .NET mainly in Mosso’s offerings of any language being cloud enabled. But one from Microsoft will probably draw all the .NET developers to it like most Microsoft offerings.

Also, Amazon EC2 recently announced support for MS SQL Server and Windows servers.  So really any platform can also be used in Amazon EC2 in Amazon Machine Images. This took longer to happen due to the licensing per processor and server that most Microsoft software has.

This won’t be changing things much for me in the near term but having more platforms available in the cloud and on cloud systems is the natural progression.  At some point a platform might have advantages in cheaper processing but for now Python with AppEngine is still the best bet.

Today Mosso, a cloud provider that runs off of Rackspace and supports lots of languages, launched CloudFS to compete with Amazon S3.

CloudFS is new, untested but a bit cheaper than Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This is where mainly ‘buckets’ of data of any content type can be stored and retrieved by a unique key across all resources. This is useful for image, content and media hosting and charges by the GB usually less than .15 cents per GB.

About CloudFS