Microsoft To Offer Governments Local Version of Azure Cloud Service (reuters.com) 28
Microsoft on Monday said it will soon make it possible for government clients to run its cloud technology on their own servers as part of a concerted effort to make Azure more appealing to local and federal agencies. From a report: The pairing of Azure Stack, Microsoft's localized cloud product, and Azure Government, the government-tailored version of Microsoft's cloud, comes as competition against Amazon.com Inc for major clients in the public sector ramps up. The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure's head of global infrastructure.
A locally hosted cloud solution? (Score:3)
All the expense of hosting it locally, with the vendor lock in of a cloud solution!
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maybe the local one will have console access (Score:2)
maybe the local one will have console access as in KEYBOARD / MOUSE AND VGA out. like vmware / qeum or libvirt.
Re:A locally hosted cloud solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is being misunderstood, because the traditional purchasing model is not the way they government wants to purchase software any more - at least within the DOD. DISA - the IT arm of the Dept. of Defense, has bought into the cloud movement wholesale. One of the benefits that the cloud brings to them is that software - once sold as SaaS, becomes opex, instead of capex. This means that when they put out requirements for software, they will ask for the entire SaaS stack - down to the compute, storage, and networking, to be provided as part of the bid. The only caveat is that quite often, all of this has to run on DOD premises, or DOD accredited premises. Both Amazon, and IBM have the ability to run a private cloud on premise, and could respond to RFPs like this. Microsoft was missing out on multi-million dollar bids because they didn't have a private cloud offering till now.
Given that the DOD _wants_ a local hosted solution, there is nothing net new about the expense of it being hosted locally. With a cloud / SaaS model though, the DOD can now walk away from a vendor if they chose to, at will. So, the hosting cost will be baked into the price of the service, but the depreciation will be owned by the Cloud Provider. The DOD wins because it can be nimble ("oh - you want to add 5000 more users as users of service X? No problem, we just provision more users in the system. It will be ready in two days"), scaleable ("Oh there is a war breaking out? No problem, our cloud platform can scale up and meet the additional load"), and modern (because the software will have to be maintained _by the vendor_ in an evergreen state). And the SaaS / Cloud provider wins because they get $$$$ from the government.
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The government demands that its loads be run on separate servers from public customers. (This is somewhat well-founded in light of Rowhammer and more recent attacks.)
The government also has rather comprehensive accreditation requirements for any information system that wants to connect to a government network.
From those two requirements, the need for a separate government product is born. This has nothing to do with backdoors and everything to do with ritualistic IT security practices. Most of the bureaucra
special Government version adobe CC offline (Score:2)
they get the offline environment ver.
Azure is HPC in the cloud. (Score:2)
And now, HPC will be local Azure.
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Comparing cloud architecture with "terminal/server" is missing the whole point.
A modern multi-GPU gaming PC and a Turing machine can both compute stuff, but I don't say they're the same thing.
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VMware started on private servers and recently expanded to offer public cloud services in which you can manage everything with the same tools. You can migrate easily between private and public clouds and manage scaling and redundancy from one location.
This is somewhat the same, in reverse.
The market is there. You just might not be the target audience.
How about a cloud version of this? (Score:2)
So... MS is going to offer their "cloud" services placed locally on your servers. I wonder how far they can stretch this?
2 years from now:
Admin: "Hmmmm.... I wish there was a way I could put my local Azure Cloud Server out on the internet."
Microsoft: "Ahhhh! Microsoft hears you, good sir! We now offer (for a low, low monthly fee) Microsoft Clouded Local Azure Cloud Server Add-On!!
5 years from now:
Admin: "Hmmmmm.... I wish I could put my Microsoft Clouded Local Azure Cloud Add-On onto my own, local ser
All cores (min 16 per box) must be licensed in you (Score:2)
All cores (min 16 per box) must be licensed in your DC even you have an small need for windows servers.
Too much cynicism here (Score:2)
Wow, there's too much cynicism here for a valid concept.
Have you ever tried to set up OpenStack or CloudStack?
I'm managed bare metal, cloud, and on-premises cloud installations. Why wouldn't you want to be able to manage a data center from one spot?
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You can manage a data center from one spot, but it isn't a cloud service. The key element to cloud services cost savings is that Computing power is shared across multiple customers. So your peak business hours processing that you need is taken away from an online store that has much of its traffic after hours, or with businesses in different time zones. Unless your are hosting a global business with thousands of apps with varying peak usage times. You local cloud system will be under utilized, because it
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You local cloud system will be under utilized, because it will be built for peak usage, however there will be long periods of times, where it is under utilized.
That happens only if you go with a naive implementation of your system.
The big advantage of running Azure Stack locally is that your applications can, with a bit of care, run on either your local machines or in the Azure cloud. This gives you a lot of flexibility. You can expand to the cloud if you have unexpected (or even planned) peaks in usage, or fail over to the cloud on catastrophic failures in your local data center. If you need to run occasional tasks that require special hardware (large amo
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So explain how to design your apps properly without starting a flame war.
Sounds like Eucalyptus (Score:2)
HP was backing Eucalyptus which worked pretty well for having transparent local or cloud hosting.
It would basically front-end AWS or local hosting and actually worked pretty well when I was testing with it. Alas it was always a bit behind of AWS so the idiots I work for didn't like the fact that we could use the latest greatest AWS feature in production.
Just for the Americans (Score:1)