Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an event in San Francisco said something which came as a surprise for all the listeners at the event. He said, “Microsoft loves Linux”. Its the same operating system, which was once described as a “cancer” by Steve Ballmer, Nadella’s predecessor, the same is now being appreciated at least when it is about Redmond’s Azure cloud platform.
The company noted that almost 20 per cent of VMs on Azure uses the open source operating system. During the event Microsoft also highlighted about how much Azure has grown so far. Microsoft is not the first company to be involved in cloud computing scene, however after the tons of investments and developments, it can be trusted as to be a credible platform. They even introduced the new features and partnerships at the event.
Microsoft has given three-pronged arguments for proving itself to be the only company which can do the cloud right. The first prong it stated was the size. With the massive investment for the “hyper-scale” deployments, the two Australian regions have come on to the line, taking Azure up to 19 in total. The count is twice as per the Amazon’s AWS platform and thrice as many as Google. Each region deploys over 600,000 servers, making the total to be beyond 11 million.
Microsoft announced a new series of virtual machine types which gives not only the scale out, for what the cloud is known for but also the scale up. Azure involves a new premium storage facility which allows almost 32 TB of storage per virtual machine with sustaining capability of more than 50,000 IOPS and sub-1 ms read latency.
The second prong stated by them was “enterprise grade”, according to which Azure offers lot of Linux distributions with enterprise support. if anyone wants to run Oracle or Java apps on Azure which are supported by Oracle and perhaps are the only non-Oracle cloud option that thOracle supports. If anyone uses Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, all of which are supported.
The company had announced the partnership with Hadoop vendor Cloudera and even allowed the customers to develop map-reduce systems on Azure machines. The Cloudera involves integration with Office 365 which further enables PowerBI and Excel users to directly extract the data from Cloudera deployment.
The third prong was the hybridity. Microsoft has a tradition set to deliver server software to the corporate datacenter. The company’s cloud offerings can now be used in a mix-and-match way with on-premises systems; on-premises servers can fail over to Azure instances, also local machines can authenticate against Azure Active Directory and so on.
The combination of hardware and software offers “Azure in a box”. The system will involve all the servers, networking infrastructure, and software, thereby allowing companies to develop their own Azure-like clouds, hosted on-premises.
