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Microsoft Businesses Cloud Google The Almighty Buck

Microsoft To Offer Local Version of Azure Cloud Service (reuters.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the when-in-Rome dept.
Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new service that allows customers to use its cloud technology on their own servers, part of the company's efforts to refocus its product line to compete more effectively with rivals Amazon and Google. From a report: "One of the key differentiations we have with Azure versus our two biggest competitors in the cloud platform space is our ability to support true hybrid solutions," Judson Althoff, Microsoft's executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, told Reuters. Microsoft is hoping to carve a niche among customers who cannot or do not want to have to move all their computing operations to the massive shared data centers that are collectively known as the cloud. Azure Stack could serve companies in highly regulated industries or in parts of the world where using the cloud is not yet feasible, Althoff said.
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Microsoft To Offer Local Version of Azure Cloud Service More

Microsoft To Offer Local Version of Azure Cloud Service

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  • Brings a whole new meaning to "Invasion of privacy"!

  • I can haz my own cloud (Score:4, Funny)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:08PM (#54780019)

    I shall keep it in a jar and call it betty

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      We have a guy like that here--hides everything for job security. The coffee maker is also a server. When bleep happens, we use names much more colorful than "Betty".

  • Local cloud (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:11PM (#54780037)

    Also known as a regular server.

    • to compete with amazon and google, lol. more like trying to find a way to worm out of hosting azure so they can shut it down.

    • It's not a just a regular server. It's a server which won't run unless you constantly pay Microsoft!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Also known as a regular server.

      But it has synergized separation of cloud docker containers so you can de-synchronize when your docker containers need decontained hypervisors re-docked and revirtualized. And, you can blockchain your deep-learning for an ambient UX experience.

      In other words, it's buzzwordified so they can charge more.

  • My local cloud: (Score:3, Funny)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:21PM (#54780121)
    Right click folder.
    Click "share".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Right click folder. Click "share".

      I accidentally clicked "share" on my Android and got NO feedback about what just happened. As far as I know, there's now a public Google site with all my phone shit on it.

      Google has already been "leaky" with anything I did on or near Google. My call-answer avatar is a gargoyle that I once used as an icon but never approved as an avatar. Not a good look for job hunting. When I explain it, they say, "We'll, we only hire people who can figure out Google Sharing." I guess I des

  • ...except it will weigh forty pounds, require a 220V 3-phase feed, and cost $4900 per year.

  • Makes Sense, Really (Score:4, Interesting)

    by EndlessNameless ( 673105 ) on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:26PM (#54780163)

    Azure offers a lot of features that are not available in Windows clustering. It can appeal to enterprises that want highly available services without dependency on internet or hosted storage.

    On Microsoft's side, this product is just repackaging and selling code that is 99% the same as what they run internally, so it has a lot of potential and relatively little cost.

    Between this and VMware supporting Linux containers natively, mid-tier and smaller enterprises are getting a lot of new options thrown at them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      The only problem is that Hyper-V is really bad at sharing memory among VMs. You'd be wasting money compared to VMware, honestly.

      • Funny I found the opposite. Vmware doesn't use shared memory under Windows hosts

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kriston ( 7886 )

          Yes, VMware does use shared memory on Windows hosts.

          in VMware, the VM balloon driver tells all its "guest" VMs that it has all its allocated memory available even when it isn't (when it is shared).

          Hyper-V, though, tells its "guest" VMs that the true amount of memory is exactly what is available right now. This means that Linux VMs on Hyper-V invoke the out-of-memory-killer since these so-called "8 GB" VMs are actually getting "1 GB" on an over-subscribed host.

  • There is just other people's computers. What this does is make it easier to move your data between your computers and the other people's computers. Seems like a good move by Microsoft.

  • Vuja De (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday July 10, 2017 @01:31PM (#54780197) Journal

    1981: "It's a PC, it's like a mainframe on your desktop."

    1995: "It's an Application Server, it's like a PC on a mainframe."

    2011: "Cloud: it's like an Application Server on a mainframe."

    2017: "Local Cloud: it's like a mainframe on your Application Server."

    2025: "It's a Metatizer, it's like an X on a Y, where YOU define what an X and Y is. Good luck figuring it out; we can't. Oh, and thanks for the check!"

    • why pay for managed azure hosting monthly when you can pay for unmanaged azure licensing yearly and spend too much money with dell to keep up every year.
    • Haaa .. nice ...

      Tablizer [slashdot.org]:

      - quote -

      1981: "It's a PC, it's like a mainframe on your desktop."
      1995: "It's an Application Server, it's like a PC on a mainframe."
      2011: "Cloud: it's like an Application Server on a mainframe."
      2017: "Local Cloud: it's like a mainframe on your Application Server."
      2025: "It's a Metatizer, it's like an X on a Y, where YOU define what an X and Y is. Good luck figuring it out; we can't. Oh, and thanks for the check!"

      - unquote -

    • 2025: "It's a Metatizer, it's like an X on a Y, where YOU define what an X and Y is. Good luck figuring it out; we can't. Oh, and thanks for the check!"

      You're aware you've just created a category of products called Metatizer, right? The name is incredibly catchy.

  • This makes no sense... (Score:3)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Monday July 10, 2017 @02:34PM (#54780527) Journal

    To the best of my admittedly limited understanding of the matter, Azure is a cloud storage service that you pay for as you use.... this makes sense when you are using somebody else's resources (Microsoft's), but are we supposed to pay Microsoft now to use our own servers instead?

    Then again, maybe it does make sense... but strikes me as so self-evidently pointless as to defy any sense of reason why Microsoft would expect people to pay for it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      To the best of my admittedly limited understanding of the matter, Azure is a cloud storage service that you pay for as you use.... this makes sense when you are using somebody else's resources (Microsoft's), but are we supposed to pay Microsoft now to use our own servers instead?

      Then again, maybe it does make sense... but strikes me as so self-evidently pointless as to defy any sense of reason why Microsoft would expect people to pay for it.

      Azure is a cloud service - storage, compute, etc. With this, they c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by enjar ( 249223 )
      This actually makes a fair amount of sense for what we do, for a few use cases:
      • For cloud to on-prem: You have something that has started small on Azure but has now grown to the point that your Azure bill is so large that it makes sense to just put it on a local server. You can migrate it to a local server and not have to change any code over. This is assuming that running Azure in-house is significantly less expensive than running it on Azure itself.
      • You have a pile of data that you don't want to move to A
    • There are a lot of industries (banks, insurance, betting etc.) who have to keep control of their data. Some of them can move to the cloud, but don't trust the security enough. Then where I live hosting on American servers is SLOW - to the point that we all play on EU or UK servers when playing online games (where we can). I know there is probably an Azure cluster in the EU etc. but the point remains, network speed could be another reason to host your own cloud on your own network backbone. You get all t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        I agree that there are good reasons to host your own cloud, but why would Microsoft expect people to pay for it? To use a metaphor, it seems that instead of selling fish to people and profiting from that, MS is now giving people their own license to freely fish as much as they want or at least have the ability to do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      Azure is a cloud storage service

      That's about 2% of what Azure is. I'd just say start with Wikipedia, I can't summarize it any better than they do.

  • Local cloud servers are just...servers, right? I mean, how is this any different from what Microsoft (software-wise) has done since they launched NT? I don't get it. Obviously people can run their own servers. Are they just talking about some kind of management software on top of people's own hardware? Or are they actually providing the hardware as well? People would still be pretty crazy to risk putting their data on Microsoft products like this. I don't understand how they are even still in busines

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I'd guess this is some kind of a management layer that enables portability for Hyper-V workloads between Azure and on-site Hyper-V at a minimum, but maybe it's also some collection of VMs that will also run other Azure services and allows them to migrate to Azure, too.

      I think this is probably a pretty decent idea, personal feelings about Microsoft software not withstanding. I think a lot of people are looking for easy portability of Windows VMs and Microsoft software services between on-premise and cloud.

  • We called it On-Premises-as-a-Service, or OPaaS.

    I shih tsu you not.

  • This has been around for some time, although more like a - run AWS locally - and it works pretty well.

    https://github.com/eucalyptus [github.com]

    It's sad that this hasn't taken off more, it's pretty nice to be able to jump back and forth between a private/local bunch of vms and then throw them out on AWS if the need arises. Note that it doesn't have 100% of the AWS functionality but works for my smaller projects.

  • I work for a company that is in the heavily-regulated medical industry. 3 years ago we would have jumped on the idea of "local cloud" but now it might be too late.

    3 years ago Microsoft offered to replace many of our servers (physical and VMWare) with Azure and the company basically said "No way, we can't have FDA regulated PHI and corporate secrets in the cloud." Fast forward to today, where the company is moving to all Azure. Our corporate Outlook servers are now Outlook 365, our local "FTP" site has be

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