Amazon won't break into sweat about Google's cloud. Yet When Google took the wrapper off its Amazon-like Compute Engine service last week, investors in rival cloud companies – including Amazon – panicked. Shares in Amazon and the OpenStack-backer Rackspace fell as investors feared Mountainview would translate its dominance of internet search and ads to cloud hosting. There's …
"Microsoft claimed 8.5 trillion objects in rival Windows Azure cloud"
Judging by the contents of my windows servers system drives and the numbers of redundant files contained therein, I can believe that Azure contains the same ratio of bloated objects. Now if the measure were of useful content, it would appear MS are wasting PB's of storage space.
On Azure, Virtual Machine disks are stored as VHDs in blob storage, so would only count as one object regardless of how many files were contained within the file system of the VHD itself.
If the 8.5 trillion includes each row in a storage table, I can see how they could get up to that number. If you counted everything I have in blob, queue, and table storage, I would be easily in to the millions and I am a very small time user of Azure. I suspect we're comparing Apples with Oranges here...
I cannot be the first to think of this, but surely a website should exist where you enter your project parameters ( how much data , how long etc..) and it gives you the pricing for cloud providers or local storage...
I would be interested in seeing the comparisons as the market evolves...
P.
"Meanwhile, Microsoft claimed 8.5 trillion objects in rival Windows Azure cloud in June, but such claims are worth taking with a pinch of salt. They came out after Amazon's statistic and Windows Azure is several years younger than AWS."
You (the author) may not believe Microsoft, and the figures may indeed be spurious, but your dismissal of them based purely on the apparent assumption that were they true they would be too good seems both unwarranted and groundless in the absence of contrary information.
I've used Windows Azure for .Net projects, PHP sites and recently started testing it with Node servers and I'm actually quite impressed.
They have the usual VM style cloud, but they also have the "Web Sites" option which is the one I use. It sets up quickly, scales easily, allows custom domains, is pretty cost effective and fast, and I can deploy straight from Visual Studio or Git.
I'm a developer not a business as such, but I have to say the ease of use compared to AWS (which I have used on and off for several years [S3 and EC2]) is a breath of fresh air.
I also don't trust Google not to deprecate something or introduce a breaking change - for all their faults, Microsoft (mostly) understands business and long-term support like Google never has.
Amazon will, and should, only concern itself with Microsoft. In a real sense, Google and Amazon are on the same side of this fight; they're both attempting to lever into a market that is directly and inexorably linked to core enterprise technologies - and that's Microsoft's domain.
As the market continues to dabble with these XaaS (IaaS, PaaS, really) services, I continue to wonder when Microsoft (and, honestly, VMWare) will open their hypervisor enough to dynamically link with customer internal technology environments. What I want to see is the ability to seamlessly migrate a server from my "private cloud" to a hosted cloud and back using VMotion or Live Migration.
Imagine managing available resources, not just allocation, through SCVMM or vCenter: add more pCPUs, vCPUs, vMem/pMem, etc., all within a single integrated console. Once OpEx and CapEx crosses, if it ever does, transition from one to the other with nearly no impact on the consumers within or accessing your organization. That's the power VMare or Microsoft could have, a power that Google and Amazon can only provide via potentially expensive and difficult APIs.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting Microsoft is "right" or "best" - I'm suggesting that it's a matter of positioning, and Microsoft is much better positioned long term than Amazon or Google (or both combined).
Do a search on "Azure Hybrid Cloud". Existing tech and one that MS is using as a primary selling point to customers. I believe VMWare may be heading in that direction but right now Microsoft is in a category of one in being able to seemlessly integrate your on-prem and cloudy bits. Paris, in recognition of her "integration" skills.
Unfortuantely, a lot of what Microsoft advertises is not quite up to the standards of reality.
That said, they are on-pitch and on-track. That's precisely where they are going, and is their ace in the hole in the cloud space. Amazon and Google's challenge is to crack into an existing enterprise market before Microsoft slams the door shut. Microsoft's challenge is what it always has been: match their capabilities to their marketing, hopefully before they alienate too many customers.
"The S3 storage service component of EC2"
S3 is not a storage component of EC2 at all. It's a storage service in it's own right, and not a component of anything but AWS as a whole. You don't need to use either EC2 or S3 with the other; you can, but you don't have to.
As a developer who uses AWS pretty much everyday, I find it super easy to use. It's a console for crying out loud! You point, you click. If you want to get fancy, use the API. It's not hard so I don't get where all the comments about "something x being easier to use than something y".
It's also funny to see Microsoft being touted as the savior of something, rather than the scourge, by so many El Reg readers. It's like the Family Guy episode when Brian confronts Rush Limbaugh and because the Democrats are in power, converts to being a Republican:
Five Years ago...
"Microsoft is number one! We hate Microsoft!"
Now..
"Microsoft aren't number one! We love Microsoft!"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
