The next step is containers and microservices. That's why Azure and Windows Server support for Docker is so interesting, although Zander is keen to clear up the difference between the support for a specific technology and the wider idea of microservices and the orchestration layer you use to handle them.
"One of the confusions that we heard when we announced Windows containers and Docker was people saying 'I thought Docker was containers'. Actually, 'containers' are an OS construct. Just like Linux has containers, Windows has containers, but that's different from the orchestration components that are used to install images, and manage those images and repository components and so on."
Zander sees microservices (and how you orchestrate them) as one of the next big areas for innovation and there's plenty of customer demand: "I see a lot more folks trying to evaluate and understand microservices; what does that mean?" There's already been work on this in some open source projects, especially for handling big data, he points out, but not for general development – which gives cloud services like Azure an advantage.
"No big cloud vendor has a big public cloud at hyperscale without having already built this kind of technology; we have it as well. We have technology that we use for driving our own software, our own infrastructure, and those are the sorts of things where we bring our innovation out for customers."
Dose of realism
Not everyone is ready for that approach, though. Zander is realistic about the complexity of using cloud services, especially if you have existing software and processes where the clean abstractions of cloud theory don't fit the messy complexities of real life. That's why Azure has its blend of PaaS and IaaS services, and why Microsoft has added features like the Azure Batch automation services.
"There's always a desire to leap ahead and say here's this new cool thing, but people have to be able to come along for that ride." Blending infrastructure and platform services is designed to make that easier. Zander notes: "The composability between layers is getting to be better, so I can pull them through and I can start choosing which layer I'm going to be in. We also want to make sure as we move it forward that we don't make it such a sharp edge around the different layers.
"So the new version of Azure Resource Manager that we just released – that's an orchestration tool so you can write a manifest for what your app looks like. It was deliberately designed so that you can do things like very explicit network topology – here's my VM, here's my virtual network, here's what it's going to look like. But you can also start putting in the PaaS pieces. [The customer can say] I want a database, you go figure it out, I want to write an application, you go figure it out. You can mix those things together."
Zander predicts that this blend of platform and infrastructure tools will be an advantage for Azure for a long time. "I think we're going to have a long period where I'm going to mix and match some of these components; it's not all going to be one or the other."
As usual, Zander is bullish on the competition and the challenges cloud aspirants like IBM and VMware face. "We've said it before, we think there are only about three public cloud companies running at hyperscale because of the challenges and the capex associated with it."
