Cloud juggler eyes Microsoft’s floating VMs

RightScale – the southern California startup whose eponymous on-line service lets you juggle so-called infrastructure clouds – is preparing tools for managing Microsoft’s Azure cloud as well.

Azure is not an infrastructure cloud. It’s what the world calls a platform cloud. Rather than offer on-demand access to raw calculate power and storage – as, say, Amazon does – it serves up development tools and other services that let you build and host applications on-line without diving into those underlying infrastructure pieces. But Microsoft has long stated that Azure will offer limited access to raw VMs for those who want to test Windows apps, and it’s this infrastructure cloud–like piece that RightScale will help you manage.

Last month, Microsoft introduced a beta of the service, known as Azure “VM role”.

RightScale began as a means of managing Amazon’s AWS infrastructure cloud, but after Amazon introduced its own web interface, Crandell and company expanded the service to additional “public clouds”, including services from Rackspace and GoGrid, as well as platforms that underpin “private clouds” behind the firewall, including Marten Mickos’s Eucalyptus and the Cupertino-based Cloud.com. The idea is that you can you use one on-line service to manage applications across multiple clouds – both public and private.

“Our users run their servers in Amazon, RackSpace, GoGrid, Eucalyptus, etc. That’s the cloud they are using. RightScale is the management platform they use to manage all these cloud resources,” RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken once explained to The Reg. “In the end, our users are in control of their servers, disk volumes, IP addresses as they get them from the infrastructure cloud provider. We just enable them, make it easier, save time, reduce risk.”

As you might expect, the use of private clouds is still, well, largely theoretical. “There aren’t really production implementations – meaning people aren’t running production apps that way,” Crandell tells us. “There are a number of projects in the works, ranging from pilot projects to actual build-outs. But to be honest, none of them have reached the stage where they are actually running production apps.” But the use of public clouds is growing. The company now has customers in 30 countries worldwide.

Like other cloud efforts, RightScale states it’s receiving large interest in Japan. In December, it signed a deal with the Japan-based consultant Kumoya that saw the cloud-happy consultant become an authorized RightScale distributor. Just this week, Cloud.com – whose private-cloud platform is supported by RightScale – signed its own deal wih Kumoya. “We’re seeing significant traction in the Asian market across the board,” Cloud.com marketing chief Peder Ulander tells The Reg. “Japan is one of the most agressive markets.”

source : go.theregister.com

Cloud juggler eyes Microsoft’s floating VMs

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