Will there be other .NET providers of Cloud Computing services?

Question

Cloud computing is about providing computing, storage and networking capacities on demand. It is a fresh but very compelling concept for solving some specific tasks, for example:

• Running CPU heavy computations
• Having a scalable storage system for raw data
• Scaling realtime services up to the customer demand as it goes up and down.

I'm mainly working with Microsoft stack, which helps a lot in delivering complex enterprise applications. Yet, cloud computing offering for .NET is somewhat behind the market. Amd the only provider is Microsoft, any way (Windows Azure).

Do you think there will be any diversity in .NET cloud providers any time soon? How many players, do you think will be on the market, and what could be the pricing (considering that .NET could be run on Linux which should makes things a little cheaper )?

Answer 1

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service now supports Windows: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

On the same page you'll find pricing. Amazon is always trending towards lower and lower prices for it's services, so you should find them to be VERY competitive.

Here's another provider that provides cloud computing for the Microsoft Stack: Mosso

Answer 2

A newcomer in this area is AppHarbor. Their tagline is 'Azure done right' (aka 'Heroku for ASP.NET')

Answer 3

An important point to note is that EC2 was build on top of Amazon's existing infrastructure in order to extend that to outsiders. The important thing to note about this is that the instances are ephemeral -- meaning that if there's a host failure you lose all data for that host.

This isn't good or bad, but it's important to recognize that you will need to possibly compensate for this potential failover at some layer in your infrastructure stack.

Answer 4

There are a few competitors on the market though I suppose that depends on what you mean by cloud.

If you mean virtual servers, there are GoGrid and SoftLayer. I would expect to see some consolidation among these "traditional" providers, and prices to drop over time. Amazon EC2 belongs in this category.

Another one is Mosso, which virtualizes the application stack in a way that appears similar to Azure. You upload the app and don't know much about what it's running on. It claims to scale automatically like Azure.

Answer 5

Microsoft Azure is much more than a simple "cloud" provider, is an entire stack of technologies related, with specific options to manage them, so it cannot be compared to Mosso. Amazon EC2 is more similar, but it still do not have the full architecture design that Azure has.

When Azure was announced at PDC2008 the numbers behind it was something that will makes very difficult (if not impossible) for providers outside Microsoft to provide Azure compatible platforms (they were talking about tens of thousands of servers).

Said that I believe that a different (and easier to work with) "cloud" option for .Net could be created by competitor, for people not needing the whole MS offering or not willing to port their applications to Azure because of the architectural rework required.

A very nice scenario I would like would be to have a cloud offering made of Linux machine running Mono and the creation of a "Azure like" stack on Mono, open sourced, but it's just a dream.

Answer 6

Seems like cloud computing could end up being a commodity best offered wherever electricity and taxes are cheapest, and there is decent security. Seems like many larger ISPs could eventually position themselves as players. If this happens there could later be a consolidation of them, although this could take 5-10 years to play out.

The cost will trend down based on clouds developed with non-proprietary operating systems, such as Linux, etc.