Tag Archives: Azure

Microsoft will cut some Azure compute prices

The cloud pricing race to the bottom continues

Good news for businesses using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: their infrastructure bills may be shrinking come February.

Microsoft announced that it will be permanently reducing the prices for its Dv2 compute instances by up to 17 percent next month, depending on the type of instance and what it’s being used for. Users will see the greatest savings if they’re running higher performance Linux instances — up to 17 percent lower prices than they’ve been paying previously. Windows instance discounts top out at a 13 percent reduction compared to current prices.

Right now, the exact details of the discount are a little bit vague, but Microsoft says that it will publish full pricing details in February when they go into effect. Dv2 instances are designed for applications that require more compute power and temporary disk performance than Microsoft’s A series instances.

They’re the successor to Azure’s D-series VMs, and come with processors that are 35 percent faster than their predecessors. Greater speed also corresponds to a higher price, but these discounts will make Dv2-series instances more price competitive with their predecessors. That’s good news for price-conscious users, who may be more inclined to reach for the higher-performance instances now that they’ll be cheaper.

The price changes come after Amazon earlier this week introduced scheduled compute instances, which let users pick out a particular time for their workloads to run on a regular basis, and get discounts based on when they decide to use the system. It’s a system that’s designed to help businesses that need computing power for routine tasks at non-peak times get a discount.

Microsoft’s announcement builds on the company’s longstanding history of reducing prices for Azure in keeping with Amazon’s price cuts in order to remain competitive. Odds are we’ll see several more of these cuts in the coming year as the companies continue to duel to try and pick up new users and get existing users to expand their usage of the cloud.

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Microsoft needs SDN for Azure cloud

Microsoft needs SDN for Azure cloud

Couldn’t scale without it, Azure CTO says
The Microsoft cloud, through which the company’s software products are delivered, has 22 hyper-scale regions around the world. Azure storage and compute usage is doubling every six months, and Azure lines up 90,000 new subscribers a month.

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Fifty-seven percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure and the number of hosts quickly grew from 100,000 to millions, said CTO Mark Russinovich during his Open Network Summit keynote address here this week. Azure needs a virtualized, partitioned and scale-out design, delivered through software, in order to keep up with that kind of growth.

“When we started to build these networks and started to see these types of requirements, the scale we were operating at, you can’t have humans provisioning things,” Russinovich said. “You’ve got to have systems that are very flexible and also delivering functionality very quickly. This meant we couldn’t go to the Web and do an Internet search for a scalable cloud controller that supports this kind of functionality. It just didn’t exist.”

Microsoft wrote all of the software code for Azure’s SDN. A description of it can be found here.
Microsoft uses virtual networks (Vnets) built from overlays and Network Functions Virtualization services running as software on commodity servers. Vnets are partitioned through Azure controllers established as a set of interconnected services, and each service is partitioned to scale and run protocols on multiple instances for high availability.

Controllers are established in regions where there could be 100,000 to 500,000 hosts. Within those regions are smaller clustered controllers which act as stateless caches for up to 1,000 hosts.
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Microsoft builds these controllers using an internally developed Service Fabric for Azure. Service Fabric has what Microsoft calls a microservices-based architecture that allows customers to update individual application components without having to update the entire application.

Microsoft makes the Azure Service Fabric SDK available here.
Much of the programmability of the Azure SDN is performed on the host server with hardware assist. A Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) in Hyper-V hosts enable Azure’s data plane to act as a Hyper-V virtual network programmable switch for network agents that work on behalf of controllers for Vnet and other functions, like load balancing.

Packet processing is done at the host where a NIC with a Field Programmable Gate Array offloads network processing from the host CPU to scale the Azure data plane from 1Gbps to 40Gbps and beyond. That helps retain host CPU cycles for processing customer VMs, Microsoft says.

Remote Direct Memory Access is employed for the high-performance storage back-end to Azure.
Though SDNs and open source go hand-in-hand, there’s no open source software content in the Azure SDN. That’s because the functionality required for Azure was not offered through open source communities, Russinovich says.

“As these requirements were hitting us, there was no open source out there able to meet them,” he says. “And once you start on a path where you’re starting to build out infrastructure and system, even if there’s something else that comes along and addresses those requirements the switching cost is pretty huge. It’s not an aversion to it; it’s that we haven’t seen open source out there that really meets our needs, and there’s a switching cost that we have to take into account, which will slow us down.”

Microsoft is, however, considering contributing the Azure Service Fabric architecture to the open source community, Russinovich said. But there has to be some symbiosis.

“What’s secret sauce, what’s not; what’s the cost of contributing to open source, what’s the benefit to customers of open source, what’s the benefit to us penetrating markets,” he says. “It’s a constant evaluation.”

Some of the challenges in constructing the Azure SDN were retrofitting existing controllers into the Service Fabric, Russinovich says. That resulted in some scaling issues.
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“Some of the original controllers were written not using Service Fabric so they were not microservice oriented,” he says. “We immediately started to run into scale challenges with that. Existing ones are being (rewritten) onto Service Fabric.

“Another one is this evolution of the VFP and how it does packet processing. That is not something that we sat down initially and said, ‘it’s connections, not flows.’ We need to make sure that packet processing on every packet after the connection is set up needs to be highly efficient. It’s been the challenge of being able to operate efficiently, scale it up quickly, being able to deliver features into it quickly, and being able to take the load off the server so we can run VMs on it.”

What’s next for the Azure SDN? Preparing for more explosive growth of the Microsoft cloud, Russinovich says.

“It’s a constant evolution in terms of functionality and features,” he says. “You’re going to see us get more richer and powerful abstractions at the network level from a customer API perspective. We’re going to see 10X scale in a few years.”

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Don’t look now, but Microsoft is surprising in the cloud

No doubt Microsoft will cling to on-premises until the bitter end, but it’s become a very successful cloud provider.

Conventional wisdom says that a revolutionary company in one segment usually can’t make the leap to the next, especially if the next revolution comes at the expense of the technology built by that initial company. Ergo, companies built on selling on-premises software should be abject failures at moving to the cloud, right?

Well, Microsoft isn’t failing at the cloud. It’s getting it better than anyone could possibly have expected, and while everyone beats up Windows 8 and defines the company by that hairball, what’s going on in other parts of the company are nothing short of remarkable.

First, there’s Azure. A whole lot of commotion was made over Microsoft’s claim that it had reached $1 billion in revenue from Azure because it happened so quickly in comparison to others. It’s still running a distant second to Amazon Web Services and there’s a hot competitor not many are watching called Softlayer, but to be sure, Azure is doing great business for Microsoft. It has 20% market share and could reach 35% by next year, according to Forester Research.

Then there’s Skype. A whole lot of people scoffed at the crazy sum Microsoft paid in 2011 – $8.5 billion. But it’s starting to pay off in market share. A third of the world’s voice calls are done through Skype, according to telecom market analysis firm TeleGeography.

Microsoft has integrated Skype with the new Outlook.com platform, along with Google Chat and Facebook chat, and Microsoft is claiming 400 million users of that platform. It’s even running TV ads touting the service. In February, Microsoft announced Skype and Lync sales had reached $2 billion in annual revenue and continues to grow.

Then there’s Office 365, which has already passed the $1 billion annual revenue mark just months after its launch. A rather burdensome end-user license agreement for Office 2013 probably helped, but you can’t deny the service has racked up good reviews.

These growing businesses join the Dynamics ERP & CRM systems and Sharepoint product line to reflect a company that really does seem to get the cloud and is doing a really good job of integrating its many assets and providing a one-stop shop for productivity applications on-demand.

All of these groups in total account for about $7 to $8 billion in revenues for Microsoft, about 10 percent of total sales. That’s going to continue to tilt as more people go on-demand and fewer go on-premises. It won’t be without challenges, especially in the IaaS market for Azure. Google is just now wading into the pool with its Compute Engine offering. And if Dynamics wants a piece of the ERP and CRM business, it will have to rumble with Salesforce, and we all know how much Marc Benioff loves a good fight.

Still, with double-digit growth projections for these markets, Microsoft can ride them to considerable revenue and market share and be the cloud success story no one thought it would be, and without Ray Ozzie, either.

Maybe the Azure team should run Windows.

 


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