Earlier this week at Cloud Expo executives from Microsoft and Oracle discussed the differences in the way they see cloud servers working with enterprise businesses. Microsoft whole emphasis was on public cloud offerings while Oracle talked all about tools for building out internal clouds.
Hal Stern, Oracle president and former Sun Microsystems chief technology officer for services said “I’d argue that if you’d run today’s applications in the cloud with exactly the same utilization as you would in your own data center … [it] will probably cost you more.” The advantage of the cloud, Stern argued, is elasticity. It is those “impulse functions of demand, where you want to go to 100 CPUs to 1,000 CPUs, but give them back,” he said.
Stern later said “If you look at every one of the cases that has been held up as a great case of public cloud, they ran for a period time and then put the resources back. That’s what made them cost effective.”
“When building multitier applications, it is inevitable that you will have to piece together multiple components,” said Arvind Jain, Oracle product strategy director, in a presentation of the new technologies. “The ideal environment for the application developer teams would be an IT infrastructure that would be easily and readily provisioned, so the teams can focus on the application logic.”
Cloud computing is different from simply rehosting, for a number of reasons, Khalidi said.
For one, applications must be built with “scale-out architectures, rather than scale-up architectures,” he said. This means that if you need an application to serve more users, you should be able to spin out more instances of that application. “You have to think about state in a different way.”
“We are very serious about the cloud. We view it as a natural extension of on-premise software,” said Yousef Khalidi, a Microsoft distinguished engineer working on the Microsoft Azure cloud offering, during his talk. “We believe in a hybrid model going forward, that would span the whole spectrum.”
