I attended an online briefing given by Azure marketing man Prashant Ketkar. He said that Microsoft is planning to migrate its own internal systems to Azure, \u201ccausing re-architecture of apps,\u201d and spoke of the high efficiency of the platform. There are thousands of servers being managed by very few people he said \u2013 if you visit a Microsoft datacenter, \u201cyou will be struck by the absence of people.\u201d Some of the efficiency is thanks to what he called a \u201ccontainerised model\u201d, where a large number of servers is delivered in a unit with all the power, networking and cooling systems already in place. \u201cJust add water, electricity and bandwidth,\u201d, he said, making it sound a bit like an instant meal from the supermarket.<\/p>\n
But how is Azure doing? I asked for an indication of how many apps were deployed on Azure, and statistics for data traffic and storage. \u201cFor privacy and security reasons we don\u2019t disclose the number of apps that are running on the platform,\u201d he said, though I find that rationale hard to understand. He did add that there are more than 10,000 subscribers and said it is \u201cgrowing pretty rapidly,\u201d which is marketing speak for \u201cwe\u2019re not saying.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was intrigued though by what Ketkar said about the kinds of apps that are being deployed on Azure. \u201cNo enterprise is talking about taking a tier one mission critical application and moving it to the cloud,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we see is a lot of marketing campaigns, we see a lot of spiky workloads moving to the cloud. As the market start to get more and more comfortable, we will see the adoption patterns change.\u201d<\/p>\n
I also asked whether Microsoft has any auto-scaling features along the lines of Amazon\u2019s Elastic Beanstalk<\/a> planned. Apparently it does. After acknowledging that there is no such feature currently in the platform, though third-party solutions are available, he said that \u201cwe are working on truly addressing the dynamic scaling issues \u2013 that is engineering work that is in progress currently.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I attended an online briefing given by Azure marketing man Prashant Ketkar. He said that Microsoft is planning to migrate its own internal systems to Azure, \u201ccausing re-architecture of apps,\u201d and spoke of the high efficiency of the platform. There are thousands of servers being managed by very few people he said \u2013 if you … Continue reading How is Windows Azure doing? Few mission critical apps says Microsoft<\/span>