And there can be no question that Microsoft is committed to Azure. What a difference a year makes. It wasn’t even a year – as Build 2013 was in June – and we had a completely different format and group of executives. Ballmer, Larson-Green, Leblond and Pall were on stage then on Day 1 – Ballmer and Leblond are gone, Larson-Green is now Chief Experience Officer and Pall is heading Skype. Both could have been on stage at Build 2014, too – but I guess the agenda was too packed. And contrary to Ballmer who presented and introduced big news a year ago (the Start button is back), Nadella only did a 30 minute or so Q&A of previously recorded video questions. Symbolically, he was introduced by Elop on stage.
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| Nadella took video questions on stage at Day 1 of Build 2014 |
But most keynote time went to executives whose teams delivered products for Build and that was Belfiore (Windows Phone Mobile) and Guthrie (Azure) – accompanied by developer advocate Myerson and demo guru Guggenheimer. So significant change in presenters, but it seems not to have slowed down Microsoft.
The difference to Build 2013 was that last year it was all the other Microsoft products (Windows, Office, Bing etc.) coming to help of Azure, by exposing services and APIs. That led me to call the blog post ‘Princess Azure and the 7 dwarfs’. Well nothing like that this year. While Office was shortly on stage – it was more about supporting touch than Azure. And Bing wasn’t even directly on stage (though indirectly as a huge contributor to Cortana’s intelligence). And not a single word of Biztalk.
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| My Visual takeaway of Build 2013 - all to the help of Princess Azure |
I have blogged on my top 3 takeaways for the enterprise from Day 1 already here – so let’s take a look at the enterprise takeaways from Day 2:
Azure momentum
Microsoft invests in Azure and had 44 new announcements of capabilities in store. Tough to keep the overview – but let’s start comparing the Azure live stats – using the Build 2013 and 2014 information shared. Unfortunately Microsoft – like other cloud vendors, too – makes it hard to compare progress by offering different metrics – but the following three could be deducted from slides and statements:
- Azure sees increased usage from 50 to 57% with the Fortune500
- Storage objects have increased from 8.5T+ to over 20T
- Microsoft stay with the story that Azure doubles every 6 months
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| A comparison of Azure stats - Build 2014 (left) and Build 2013 (right) |
No surprise the stats Microsoft presented are pretty impressive. In a Q&A an executive gave up the number of US3B+ being invested into Azure CAPEX in the coming quarters.
So how do you test and explain that scale bewww.titanfall.comst? Games and media events and Microsoft are two good showcases with the Titanfall game (over 100k VMs used) and the streaming coverage of the Sochi Olympics by NBC. Then NBC’s Cordella made the perfect example for elasticity – he mentioned how you go from almost no streaming demand from a curling match to the peak of the Olympics for NBC this year – the USA vs. Canada hockey match.
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| Azure Data Center locations as presented at Build 2014 |
Improved tooling
Similar like Google the other week, Microsoft showed programmatic control for VMs, right from Visual Studio – a key requirement, almost table stake today. Cloud customers want to have direct control on elasticity, auto-scaling is a great feature, but running it yourself is the preferred choice. The remote dynamic debug capability is a very powerful new feature, too. And with the addition of Puppet, Chef and Powershell Microsoft has given developers the access to configuration control with their favorite tools. There can be no question that Microsoft wants (and needs) Visual Studio to remain the development tool of choice.
But Microsoft needs to balance its own ambitions with the reality where developer populations live now, so the addition of Java to the popular Azure Websites is a tribute to that. And in an acknowledgement of Internet Explorer ruling the world, the BrowserLink and F12 debugging can synch CSS changes across browsers of competitors. Moreover Microsoft gives away a SSL security certificate for each Azure Website – making it easier for developers to build secure sites…
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| All 44 Azure announcements by IaaS, Web, Data and Mobile |
On the mobile side Microsoft makes it easier to get users ramped up, with improved AD support – either supporting on premise or Office365 / Sharepoint repositories. And with AD Microsoft has a ‘higher ground’ in regards of giving (known) users quickly access to newly built applications, mobile being a prominent example. And again Microsoft straddles beyond its platforms with the Xamarin capabilities of Visual Studio to build mobile applications for iOS and Android. And with Docusign and Vesper there were two good reference on stage for using Azure without living completely in the Microsoft ecosystem.
On the data side Microsoft moved the MS SQL limit from 150 to 500 GB, and while this if perfectly enough for 90%+ of applications, the question is why that limitation is needed and exists in the first place. Raising the SLA for MS SQL to 99.95% is definitively going to be a head scratcher for any local on premise SQL Server install. As mentioned before the active geo-replication across the data centers in the same legal, statutory zone is a key addition.
Big shift to open source
One of the major (positive) surprises was the significant push towards open source, and while that part of the keynote started nicely with developer legend Hejlsberg on stage announcing the open sourcing of the Roslyn compiler, Guthrie topped that the .Net foundation announcement with a long list of products being contributed. In an ironic course of the developer tool industry, the company that took out most of the competition (Microsoft) – at the end of the day needs to acknowledge the power of open source and with that the significant revenue deflation happening in the tool space.
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| All contributions to the .Net Foundation |
On the flipside of the argument Microsoft announced the online version of Visual Studio – and while introductory rates are attractive, developers (or their managers) will pay more beyond the traditional purchase of a development tool that ran locally sometime in the 2nd year of usage. But then with an online development environment systems, developers receive more than a tool – its storage, networking, sandboxes, backup etc. – all costs hidden in the traditional on premise tool installation.
A new face for Azure
Azure is getting a new face with a band new Azure Portal. .Impressively the portal went live same day for Azure customers. It looks clean and easy to use, is extensible through the Azure Gallery. What Microsoft missed to mention in the keynote but clarified in a subsequent Q&A was that the new Portal works well with Systems Manager and can with that show both on premise and cloud resources. In fact it can even be deployed locally to monitor cloud resources, or in the cloud to monitor on premise resources. And with that it will make the transition to more Azure emotionally and practically easier for most traditional on premise Windows customers – as you don’t have to ‘leave the living room’ anymore.
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| The new Azure Portal |
But administrators need to learn a new user interface, and as well as it demoed and looked like to be intuitively usable – I’d love to know why Microsoft thinks that a Metro style user interfaced that has proven to be unpopular with most of its user base, will appeal to a technical audience.
Death by Demo - 20 Demos in 60 minutes
And then we were off to Guggenheimer’s rapid demo show, all centered on partners building applications on Azure with Windows tools. And while Guggenheimer framed the presentation with desirable goals (investment protection, build for cloud and mobile, platform portability) – the rapid demo sequence never tied back to these three value propositions. Probably Microsoft could have achieved more with less demos.
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| All 20 partners features in the demo hour |
Implications, Implications...
Implications for developers
While Microsoft tools and platforms may not be the most popular places to start with – Microsoft has done a big step ahead with a bounty of 44 announcements. Adding Java support last year and adding it for websites should make it an interesting option for deploying cloud loads. If the Xamarin capability – though innovative and powerful – will make developers jump ship is doubtful. But for an existing Microsoft developer the tooling and capabilities have vastly improved. Developers should certainly look at the value proposition of the new cloud based development tools.
What a Microsoft developer may not be able to make up in sizzle factor in meeting with peers, she / he may well be able to make up in productivity. And developers respect that – at the end of the day everybody wants to get work done.
Implications for CIOs
Microsoft has made it more compelling to use its platform and tools with this Build conference. On the pure IaaS side geo-replication will be of significant value for a number of enterprises. Using the AD and Office investments will move most enterprises to a certain extent of using Azure, and Microsoft certainly makes it compelling with a lot of ease of use to move to Azure. With Microsoft giving proof of its price match commitment to Amazon (Microsoft just reacted to the 42nd AWS price reduction) – cost is not a reason not to use Azure. If enterprises use 3rd party pieces of technology that Microsoft is not supporting, seek the dialogue with Microsoft.
On the tools and PaaS side Microsoft has made it easier to build next generation cloud applications. And with Xamarin there is less of a platform lock-in and easier access to other Microsoft products. Microsoft has also done a good job showing migration of older .Net and even a VB6 application. And while these migrations are never as easy in the real world as on a demo stage – it is good to see Microsoft paying attention and making these migrations easier.
Implication for ISVs
Azure remains a cost competitive platform with potential data center location advantages. The extension of MS SQL storage makes Azure more palatable for SaaS ISVs segregating tenancy by database. ISVs with their technology stack running on Microsoft have more good reasons to look at new tools and capabilities in Azure. It’s likely the new Azure Portal will give them better instrumentation and diagnosis tools from the get go than what they have right now.
Implications for competitors
Cross platform arguments are getting weaker and weaker to be used against Microsoft as the ‘new’ Microsoft has no fear to provide that and has a strong self-interest to succeed here (e.g. Office on iPad). Apart from Amazon and Google, competitors need to take a hard look at infrastructure costs and differentiating value services. With the build announcements Microsoft is moving the yard stick in regards of platform capabilities at low costs – with a strong pitch and benefits to the Microsoft eco system. When Microsoft gets traction I’d expect the usual competitors to ramp up corresponding offerings – but it may be too late for that already.
Implications for Microsoft
Microsoft needs to go down the path of ‘open, but’ path. With that I mean that the openness and standard messages are key to attract developers, but then the tie into higher productivity and other Microsoft assets need to be balanced out. To match Amazon, Microsoft needs to continue to add popular 3rd party products to its platform – last year Oracle and Java were a huge step – but more steps need to follow. The open source move now needs to be lived and Microsoft needs to show that it listens and works well with the open source community.
MyPOV
A build conference with a huge number of announcements that will take the ecosystem quarters to dissect, evaluate and measure on. Key milestones for Microsoft on the value side were the universal Windows apps (to get to these platforms – amazingly less prominent on day 2), significant advances in Azure and developer tooling and a huge contribution to open source. On the cost side the landmark takeaways are the re-confirmed price match to AWS (notably not mentioned at build) and the free licensing of Windows on small devices (which extends the Windows platform reach). Well done by Microsoft which keeps adding attractive value propositions for all its constituents. Not an easy task to balance.
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A tweet stream in Storify can be found here.
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More about Microsoft:
- Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
- Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
- Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
- Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
- How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
- How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
- How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.