Microsoft Cloud Briefing October 20th 2014

I tuned in a minute or two late to see Satya Nadella rehashing his cloud first, mobile first thing that has started to bore people. Substance, not mantras, please.

It’ the same small room in San Francisco as the non-streamed Windows 10 announcement.  He starts off talking about the cloud being the most complete cloud:

• Productivity with CRM Online and Office 365
• Hyper scale cloud with hybrid and public and private cloud offerings

 

He starts to talk about San Franciso and San Jose governments that adopted Office 365 for supporting mobile workers. Not just big enterprise, but also government sector and small businesses. NBC does encoding and live streaming of events via Azure. German company ThyssenKrupp manages over 1 million elevators using a service they built on Azure.

Azure compute power and research tools are being made available to Ebola researchers.

Paul Smith stores are using Hyper-V and are using ASR for DR. Datacenters are in a constant purchase cycle for storage – here’s the push on a non-selling StorSimple (it’s virtually an EA benefit that customers pay the shipping/import costs of – and pay for the Azure storage).

At this point, there is nothing new here. This is like a marketing operation for the media.

Scott Guthrie comes out wearing read (read that as announcements coming). G-Series of huge VMs are announced. A new premium storage account offering is accounted with much greater scalability and performance:

This is unparalleled scalability in the cloud. This is stuff that on-premises VMs cannot do.

He goes on to talk about on-premises and hybrid solutions, supporting any infrastructure including bare metal, Linux, and vSphere:

Microsoft provides the only consistent experience across public and private cloud, thanks to Windows Azure Pack.

Here comes a new hardware plus software solution called Cloud Platform System to bring Azure to your datacenter (San Diego codename). You get WAP, management APIs (REST) and hypervisor, similar to Azure. This is a partnership with Dell, available starting in November. This will be a flop. Dell are clueless about their current massive portfolio, and they usually prefer to sell Dell-owned management products over System Center, not to mention their general lack of knowledge of Hyper-V.

Now he talks about Docker to enable greater densities and to allow app mobility to the cloud.

CoreOS Lunix is coming to Linux, to give a memory optimized memory footprint. It’s the fifth Linux distro on Azure.

A dude from Cloudera comes on stage. Cloudeera is announced on Azure. Here’s a demo of the new Azure preview portal running Windows 10. There’s a Cloudera Enterrpsei offering in Data, Services etc.

And that was that. Event over. I bet the media were glad that they travelled across a continent for all that.