A Googler Explains Why Microsoft's Cloud Services Crashed Today

Microsoft Cloud - Microsoft's current competitor to Google Apps, known as BPOS, suffered a three-hour outage this morning.

During the outage, Microsoft explained via Twitter that the next version of its cloud services for business, Office 365, has been rebuilt from the ground up to be more reliable.

Why did Microsoft have to do this?

Google Apps leader Rajen Sheth has a theory.

Basically, Microsoft has been TALKING about cloud services for the last several years, but a lot of its biggest customers have probably been using hosted servers instead. When it comes to true cloud computing, Microsoft is still getting its footing.

There's a subtle difference here that's important to understand. Microsoft kicked off BPOS in 2007 as a dedicated service. Basically, each customer got Exchange (and other software) running on its own server hardware. Customers would save money by outsourcing IT costs to Microsoft, but the technology was no different than running Exchange on site.

Sheth explains that Gmail and Google Apps were designed and launched more than five years ago as a multitenant solution. That means that that the service itself and underlying data is automatically distributed among thousands of physical machines. Next >

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Microsoft: Cloud computing won't hurt us

Microsoft Cloud - Cloud computing is widely perceived as a threat to Microsoft, because the maker of Windows and Microsoft Office earns the lion's share of its money selling licenses for packaged software. But Microsoft's new Server & Tools President, in his first public appearance since taking the top spot, said cloud computing is another opportunity Microsoft can exploit just as it did with the birth of the PC.

Microsoft cloud stumbles: Windows Azure turns 1 in 'anemic' market

"If you look at our history, it's always been about taking an inflection point and being the democratizing force behind," said Satya Nadella, who replaced longtime Microsoft executive Bob Muglia as the Server & Tools chief in February this year.
"At a philosophical level, if you say there is a fundamental change in architecture, we have to embrace it and ride it," Nadella continued, during a 20-minute on-stage discussion Wednesday with Eric Savitz of Forbes at the GigaOM Structure Conference.

Microsoft has always been about "low price and high volume," Nadella also said, making the case that the consumption-based economics of cloud computing fits into Microsoft's sweet spot.

"We're not the ones with high license fees," he said. "I look at this as structurally a very beneficial thing for us. But, sure, we have to innovate."

Windows Azure, Microsoft's platform-as-a-service cloud, opened for business more than a year ago but hasn't gained the adoption seen by Amazon's infrastructure-as-a-service offering or Salesforce's PaaS cloud. Read more

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