Well, Microsoft has been busy while we were all enjoying the holidays!
For those who aren’t in the know about Windows Azure, that’s the name that Microsoft has given to its nascent Cloud platform. Right now, the only publicly available components are SQL Azure and Azure Storage, which host SQL databases and cloud-based data storage, respectively.
Over the last couple of weeks, however, Redmond has announced that the upcoming Azure VM Role will support many other applications that can run in a Windows 2008 R2 Virtual Machine – which was expected – and also Linux Virtual Machines. This last bit was quite unexpected to many, but a welcome holiday gift from Microsoft.
Azure is going head to head with major cloud service providers like Amazon (AWS, EC2, etc.) and RackSpace; so offering Linux capabilities is a welcome move. Without Linux support, Azure was risking becoming a niche platform that would only be useful for basic Windows operations and Microsoft SQL databases.
Azure VM will be based on the Windows Hyper-V technology platform, extending that platform into the cloud. Today, Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server are slowly gaining ground in the corporate datacenter, but have not fared well against the major players like VMware. Since most cloud rollouts will be net-new implementations, Microsoft has a much better chance of becoming a large fish in a small pond by rolling out a solid Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) platform with the Azure VM initiative, joining the Application as a Service and Database as a Service platforms already in Azure.
Now, there’s no official release date for the Azure VM Role, but it is in beta as I write this, so it does look like it will be launching at some point this year. How much of an impact Microsoft makes in the Cloud world is still to be seen. But, with the addition of multiple OS support, Azure just took one giant leap toward becoming a major player in the cloud space.