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Here's a companion piece to my earlier post (Battle of the Clouds), in which I predict the direction of Microsoft's server business. Hint: it's in the same direction as Amazon's server business.

Link:
The Next Big Thing at Microsoft, posted at SmallBizResource.com

Labels: Amazon, Microsoft, softdev, Web Standards

Eric Gales from Microsoft Canada spoke yesterday to the BCTIA and the IAMCP. During the Q&A, I asked him what the Microsoft answer would be to EC2. He coolly mentioned that they're building out huge server farms which aren't all meant for Hotmail users.

Let's flash back to the Vancouver PHP conference in February, where I asked Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr whether the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) could run Windows server instances.

Explanation of EC2

(You can skip to the next section if you already know what EC2 does)

You see, organizations need servers. Servers to serve up web pages, e-mail, video, you name it. The hard part is figuring out how many servers you require. In the old world, the safe bet has been to buy at least one server more than your expected peak capacity.

Think of a supermarket with 12 lanes at the checkout. Most times, only a few lanes are open. But the supermarket still has to own 12 cash registers, and maintain 12 conveyor belts and 12 inventory racks of chewing gum and gossip rags at each lane. If it's a high-traffic day and all of the lanes are backed up, the market doesn't have any options left but to keep things moving.

With "elastic" computing, it's much different. First, you figure out what kind of server you need, and then configure one of each. You save the "image" of each kind of server, and then just spawn instances as needed.

To continue the supermarket analogy, "elastic" checkout would mean that the market could add as many lanes as was necessary to get people through as quickly as possible, to meet whatever quality of service they wanted to meet. The market could have a separate lane for each customer. And then, after that person was finished, the lane would simply disappear.

On the Internet, this concept can be used to manage anything where the server is the bottleneck: serving up video, 3-D, data, you name it. With elasticity, small players can swing for the fences with new applications, with the knowledge that their ideas will scale globally using the cloud.

The Amazon/Microsoft Question

So back to my question: Can you put a Windows server on Amazon EC2? Sure, answered Jeff, and people have done it. However, the Microsoft server licenses weren't built for the cloud. When you buy a license for, say, Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, you can install it on any processor you like. And if you want to put it on a virtual processor in the cloud, that's fine too. But if you want to create an image of SBS2003 and spawn multiple instances at will, you're out of bounds.

OK, if you can't put Microsoft servers in the cloud, what can you put in the cloud? The answer: Linux servers. The default Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) is a Linux server, which you're welcome to modify or replace with your own Linux instance, using whatever distribution you please.

How long do you think Microsoft will let open-source stand as the default option for cloud computing?

Get ready for the battle of the clouds.

Disclosure: I'm a member of the IAMCP doing business with Microsoft partners and customers. I'm also an Amazon affiliate.

Labels: Amazon, linux, Microsoft, virtualization

Here are my latest dispatches for SmallBizResource:

• A blog post about online backup using Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk.
• My review of QuickBooks Online Edition.

Plus, check out the new section in New York Times about, you guessed it, small business! This has apparently become a lucrative little niche in the publishing world.

Labels: accounting, Amazon, small biz

Here's my SmallBizResource blog post based on a PHP Vancouver presentation by Jeff Barr about Amazon Web Services. Here's what Robert Scoble says about the idea.

Labels: Amazon, Web 2.0