by Ciprian Jichici
9. November 2010 11:43
In today’s keynote at Tech’Ed Europe 2010 Microsoft went (finally) public with its strategy regarding private clouds. And it did it in style, showing an impressive demo about the future of private IaaS (or private cloud as we all know it). Seen from 10,000 feet, Microsoft’s move is pretty simple: take the experience you have running Windows Azure as a public service for almost two years now (CTP and beta period included), package it into an appliance, and make it available to anyone who needs (and affords it).
Only when you enter into the details you really how impressive this stuff is. I’m more like a hardcore architect and developer rather than being an IT (read infrastructure) specialist. Being an RD, I’m also pretty hard to impress with a demo. Despite all of this, today’s demo concerning the management of a private cloud took me to the WOW state. Believe me, I’m not exaggerating at all. The capability of defining hardware allocation policies, application deployment policies, and management policies is a very powerful one. And the fact that the demo showed hot to do all of this in a graphical designer says it all. As one of my RD colleagues noted during the keynote, looks like the business user will be able to manage infrastructure 
For all IT specialists out there, stay cool, he’s joking Your job is as safe as ever albeit it will change in many interesting ways in the years to follow (that’s a story for another post though).
It’s true, the technology will probably need at least one year to start getting mainstream. Still, it’s a game changer and I believe it will have a major impact on the industry. PDC 2010 convinced me that Microsoft is in the driving seat when it comes to PaaS. Tech’Ed Europe 2010 proved to me that it is in the same driving seat when it comes to IaaS too.
If you’re not in Berlin right now, I’m strongly encouraging you to keep an eye on all the announcements. I’ll follow up on this story with details, so stay tuned…
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