Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I noted with interest that Microsoft have announced some details of the Azure platform appliance, a way of running the components of their Azure cloud service in your own data centre.

It reads from the article that this will be based around a container/pod type architectural unit of many servers, rather than a single hardware appliance;

“We call it an appliance because it is a turn-key cloud solution on highly standardized, preconfigured hardware. Think of it as hundreds of servers in pre-configured racks of networking, storage, and server hardware that are based on Microsoft-specified reference architecture.”

I mentioned this concept back in 2008, licensing out appliances of cloud IPR goodness (now known as PaaS/SaaS) to run on-site (see comments of my post here) is a great way to build confidence and gain market penetration for the cloud-sceptic organisation. Or just to help those people that can’t move their data and services into the public cloud to leverage highly scalable PaaS technologies.

Interesting times, will we see Amazon and Google start to offer EC2/AWS and AppEngine pods that you can run on-premise?

Of course, you can do this sort of thing at an IaaS level now with VMware and their vCloud partners  – VMware are moving up the stack with their PaaS (Springsource) and SaaS (Zimbra) acquisitions and a hybrid of on and off-premise would be easily achievable for them.