Ballmer on Cloud

In our continuing conversation on Cloud computing I stumbled today across an interview with Ballmer where he gives his view of cloud computing. This occurred about 6 weeks before the release of Azure.

Here is what he had to say.

We have a form of cloud computing today. We've have hosted services for a number of years. Hosted services are not cloud computing primarily because nobody went back and rearchitected the underlying server software designed specifically for the kind of scaling, fault tolerance, geo-replication, security that you would want in an environment that is multi-tenanted and shared.

So when people are talking about cloud computing we are talking about outside the firewall and software that has been specifically architected to be managed and propigated in a certain fasion. Do I think their is a relationship between the cloud and the datacenter, absolutely. People don't want to rewrite application depending on where they want to happen to instance the software, so I think I would agree with Maritz on this notion of federation and a certain level of symmetry and homogenaity between the two environments.

Interesting comment that people don't want to rewrite applications. Ballmer was probably referring to the continued use of .net rather than the VMware IaaS workloads of today and tomorrow mantra, but its still a validation of the VMware position.

What does that description of rewriting the underlying fabric for cloud sound like? Can you say VDC-OS and vCloud API, that is essentially the features and services these bring to todays server workloads.

Likewise Ballmer agrees with the cloud definition we have been working with, referring to the outside the firewall, which we can translate into accessed via the network.

There is a video recording of the whole interview where quite a number of topics are discussed.



Here are the times of the interesting bits.

23:50 VMware, server and desktop virtualisation
28:13 Cloud computing

Great conversation.

Rodos