Rackspace and MS Take Further Steps to Battle Amazon in the Cloud
July 14, 2009
Filed Under: in Cloud Collision, Infrastructure 2.0, News
Author: Nate D'Amico
Welcome back.
Today brings a couple of very meaningful announcements in the cloud computing space.
First we have Rackspace who has announced the release of their Cloud Servers API. This is the latest in moves from the hosting giant to better compete with Amazon and their AWS offerings. Rackspace started with acquiring the necessary pieces in Slicehost and Jungle Disk to augment their own Mosso storage offering. Branding all of their pieces under the Rackspace Cloud moniker they could then set their sites on a competitive offering.
The API release will allow developers the same freedoms they enjoy with AWS to programmatically control their computing consumption in Cloud Servers, Cloud Files and Slicehost offerings. A big debate among techies around the topic of cloud computing is API standards that need to be adopted. In a interview on the Rackspace Cloud blog architect Erik Carlin says the intention is to open source their API and work towards standards:
We intend to open source the API specification as well so you can distribute, modify, or reuse the API freely. We tried to open it up as much as we can, recognizing that our specific design and the things we need to do are unique. If there was an existing API standard that we could have embraced I think we would have done it
Second in the news today is Microsoft announcing the initial pricing and terms of their Azure service. As Azure readies for primetime later this year the release of pricing and an SLA is no doubt making all of those MS partners buzzing with excitement. Competitive pricing on compute cycles at the $0.12/hr mark and $0.15/GB of storage. For the SLA the supported uptimes are 99.95% for computing resources and 99.9% for storage.
Microsoft will no doubt gain mass adoption in 2010 with Azure. As the adoption curve for medium and large enterprises starts to hockey stick over the next couple of years all of those Microsoft shops and consultants out there will jump on the chance for a rev of consulting work to move existing services to the cloud as well as creating new ones. Lets not also forget that Windows is supported by all major cloud providers.., minus App Engine of course.
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Did anyone else expect Azure to be a much more virtualized, IDE centric approach with a much different pricing structure? I mean MS has 6B$ in R&D, for them to release a DB size limit in this project, while very honest and transparent, also makes it seem like they just repackaged existing software instead of making it a real research project.
I hope they step it up significantly. Right now it seems they are just going after existing business customers instead of targeting novel/new web developers.
[...] Rackspace and MS Take Further Steps to Battle Amazon in the Cloud …Microsoft will no doubt gain mass adoption in 2010 with Azure. As the adoption curve for medium and large enterprises starts to hockey stick over the next couple of years all of those Microsoft shops and consultants out there will jump … [...]