The figures around the Microsoft Cloud

That Cloud services, or in the Cloud, are the trend towards which the industry and the information society are heading firmly , is something known by all professionals in the sector.

The commitment to the permanent ubiquity of infrastructure, software and services is the "Holy Grail" that is offered by companies of the most diverse sizes to change the paradigm of buying services for license to the acquisition of rights of use adjusted to its real and instantaneous use.

Ubiquity, accessibility, Availability

I am no longer required to buy an Office, or a full SharePoint or Exchange to be able to use it. I only have to pay for the use, and that in cases where such a license exists, because there are services like Skydrive or TFS Services or Azure Web Sites that are completely free.

But for that, a level of investment is necessary, which David Gauther, Director of architecture and design of Microsoft datacenters, tells us about in this article.

This investment is truly impressive: more than 15 billion dollars, since 1989. A little more than four times what Spain is going to spend on He alth in 2013, and at the level of Bankia's financial hole.

But the number of centers and users is not far behind in spectacularity. So the Microsoft Cloud is actually made up of more than 200 Cloud services such as Bing, SkyDrive, Azure, etc; which serve more than one billion customers, exceeding 20 million companies.

Virtual hardware for a physical Cloud

Another thing that has caught my attention in the article is the “different” approach that the people of Redmond have opted for.

Traditionally, the construction of services on a cloud is based on the brute force of the hardware and, in order to meet the current demanding SLAs of the market, a constant increase in computing capacity, power and capacity is required. availability through adding more and more hardware, more powerful and in more layers of redundancy to ensure service requirements.

Instead, MS has opted for an abstraction layer - I'm not saying virtualization because it goes much further - where a virtual cloud is built and kept separate from the hard hardware that supports it – whatever this is. Thus, incidents, error fixes, maintenance and updates of "virtual hardware" are much easier and faster, while physical devices grow at their own pace.

In summary, they have put an abstraction layer on the “ iron ” and work on a purely software Cloud.

Without a doubt we are talking about computing at an industrial level, with bigger words. And what is most stimulating is knowing that the furthest possible limits to this growth that will be delighting the future SkyNet still do not appear on the horizon

Via | Software Reigns in Microsoft's Cloud-Scale Data Centers