Cloud Computing and Windows 2008

Hi,

It was a long time since the last post... more working, less talking....

Pain
This time we'll talk about a real pain in the Microsoft camp: why Windows 2008 is rarely supported by cloud providers such as Amazon AWS/EC2, AppNexus and Rackspace Cloud?

One of the few exceptions is Microsoft Azure which is still in CTP and is using a modified Windows 2008 version.

New features, New challenges...
Windows 2008 which has a lot of new features such as safer service shutdown and kernel transaction manager also includes a new activation method (which is probably familiar to those of you who use Vista).

According to my conversation with a leading cloud provider, this new activation method prevents them from generating images with predefined keys. Therefore, they cannot provide on demand Windows 2008 instances. The cloud providers are currently in advanced negotiations with Microsoft and provide only Windows 2003 instances.

The Question
Are there hidden causes behind this Microsoft restriction? or will a solution will be found before Azure RTM? Only time will tell...

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier - The Performance and Cloud Experts.

The Cloud Computing Triple Play

I just read a great article by Ted Dziuba at the register. In this article Ted covers the three different attidutes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft to Cloud Computing. This 3 large players, each provides its own attidude to this topic: EC2 with cheap books... oops.. servers, App Engine with lightweight web applications and Azure heavy weight windows/SQL server/.Net based applications.
Ted also described the three different marketing attitudes of these companies.
It is clearly that we are getting into a battlefield between cloud providers who provide open root access servers (Amzaon, Flexiscale and AppNexus) and the providers who give you a closed environment (Walled garden?) which is heavily depended on using the provider web services and API (Yap, Microsoft and Google definitly seems to share the same prespective...)

Have a bright and shiny day,
Moshe
RockeTier