infoTECH Feature

June 16, 2015

PaaS No More: Azure Embraces Cloud Foundry

By TMCnet Special Guest
Noah Gamer, Senior Manager of Search Marketing at Trend Micro

At the end of May, Microsoft (News - Alert) announced a coming public preview of Cloud Foundry, an open-source PaaS that runs on an Azure deployment. Ironically, Azure began as a platform for developing applications and running them in the cloud. The Cloud Foundry preview shows just how far Azure has come in the past seven years and how it has changed from its early PaaS days.

What Is Cloud Foundry?

VMware originally licensed Cloud Foundry under an Apache 2.0 license in 2011. It enabled developers to code in multiple languages without worrying about whether the infrastructure beneath supported their programming languages of choice. Microsoft’s selling point is that its familiar Azure dashboard, which already looks like the Microsoft applications businesses know and love, will make Cloud Foundry deployments simpler than ever before.

Users create an environment on Azure and then use BOSH commands to deploy Cloud Foundry. The Azure cloud provider interface (CPI) gives Cloud Foundry users the ability to extend private cloud data to Azure for running their applications. Microsoft will also release Azure Stack later this year, which makes not just the Azure dashboard but also Azure infrastructure components available for internal datacenter deployments.

Microsoft and Hybrid Cloud

In 2008, Microsoft released Windows Azure as a PaaS. It released SDKs for PHP, Java, and Ruby in 2009, and opened itself to applications running on Linux, signaling that although Azure originates from Windows Server, it welcomed open source application development.

Infrastructure was an afterthought, something designed to serve applications developed in Azure. That outlook changed in 2012, when Microsoft added a complete IaaS element that enabled developers to migrate existing Linux and Windows Server applications into Azure VMs.

Today, Azure is growing at a much faster rate than AWS, although AWS still dominates market share. Although Azure has just 12 percent of public cloud market share, Microsoft’s cloud services, including Office 365, grew nearly 150 year-over-year between 2013 and 2014. During the same period, Amazon’s “other” revenue, which includes AWS, grew just 39 percent.

The Hybrid Cloud Edge

One of the biggest reasons behind Azure’s growth is its vision for hybrid cloud. For years, AWS refused to develop tools for hybrid clouds because it argued that private cloud made no sense. It didn’t for AWS’s primary customers, which include startups and Web-only businesses, but enterprises could afford private cloud experimentation, which are Microsoft’s bread and butter.

Microsoft markets Azure to enterprises that still use Windows Server, Exchange, and other Microsoft services for their own internal datacenters. Azure gives them an easy way to pull in public cloud resources to supplement private clouds when they need to scale for demand, and they never have to worry about interoperability. Since everything comes from Microsoft, IT gets headache-free integration, and they have fewer hassles when dealing with Azure security than they would in dealing with cross-platform security. When Azure Stack becomes widely available for enterprises, Microsoft will reap large and lucrative hybrid cloud benefits from its enterprise customers.

It’s Not All Blue Skies for Azure

Image via Shutterstock

AWS is still the industry behemoth when it comes to public cloud services. According to Gartner (News - Alert), AWS has more public cloud infrastructure than its next 14 competitors combined, including Azure, Google Cloud, and Rackspace (News - Alert).

Also, Azure has much higher failure rates than both AWS and Google Cloud. In 2014, AWS had 10 outages that lasted between 19 seconds and nine minutes; Google (News - Alert) Cloud had 60 outages ranging from 10 seconds to 37 minutes; and Azure had over 100 outages, some of which were at least 12 hours long.

For companies that are heavily invested in Microsoft, Azure might make the best public cloud solution in terms of ease of integration and use. It’s a good idea, however, for enterprises to consider having a backup public cloud provider in case of outages. Until Microsoft offers a better network of multi-region datacenters for Azure, failing over from Azure to AWS or Google Cloud could prevent embarrassing downtime issues.

Back on Top

Microsoft hardly seems like the company that dominated tech conversations in the 1990s, but Azure could be Microsoft’s ticket back into the public conversation. Competitors like Apple (News - Alert) and Google tend to look shinier and more cutting-edge than Microsoft. With a hybrid cloud vision that caters to enterprises, however, Microsoft’s mountains of cold, hard cash won’t depend on the love of tech enthusiasts.     

About the Author: Noah Gamer directs the global Internet Marketing optimization and product web reputation strategy as the Senior Manager of Search Marketing at Trend Micro. He specializes in web product strategy development, competitive analysis, targeted content ranking methods and site optimization while influencing online identity and brand for product marketing, public relations, investor relations, technical support and corporate marketing initiatives.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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