Azure's Late Infrastructure Start

One of the interesting announcements from last month's Microsoft Professional Development Conference was that Azure will soon include the ability for customers to run a virtual machine instance of Windows Server 2008. What took them so long?Up until this point, Azure has primarily been an platform-as-a-service (PAAS) offering. This new virtual machine role brings Microsoft into the infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS) world, and directly into competition with Amazon, which has been offering its EC2 service since 2006 -- and Windows operating system support since 2008, before Azure was even announced. As elegant as the Azure platform might be as an architecture, it's also intimidating to customers that are getting started with cloud computing -- that's just about everyone, isn't it? The ability to migrate existing applications to cloud-based servers encourages people to get their feet wet; up until now the best place to do that was on Amazon Web Services.

Although IAAS requires customers to do more of the grunt work of managing servers, it's a natural and simple transition to cloud-based services. You just create an operating system image for the software to be run in the VM image, upload it to the cloud, and spin it up on one or more VM instances. You can easily migrate existing servers to a cloud without changing any of the application software. That's not the case with Azure, which is a new platform (incorporating many existing Microsoft technologies) best suited for new development.

When it comes to cloud computing, Microsoft has one big advantage over its competitors: it doesn't have to pay for Windows licenses. This adds some uncertainty for Amazon EC2 pricing, and Amazon concedes it with a disclaimer: "If Microsoft chooses to increase the license fees that it charges for Windows, we may correspondingly increase the per-hour usage rate for previously purchased Reserved Instances with Windows."

Essentially, Microsoft has simply broadened the Azure umbrella to cover VM-based IAAS as well. Yet I'm still puzzled why this didn't happen sooner. If anything, it seems like Microsoft could have started Azure with IAAS and let customers grow into PAAS as they became comfortable with having their data in the cloud. Now, it may become harder for Microsoft to convince the industry it's a leader (or even a player) when Amazon has a four-year head start on the IAAS business.