Can Microsoft Conquer Cloud Computing?

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"Amazon's EC2 made a big splash because it is true pay-as-you-go and really cheap," says Armando Fox, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Another key reason for Amazon's success, according to Fox, is the availability of free virtualization technology, namely the Linux operating system and a virtualization platform called Xen. This lets Amazon sell a virtual instance of a computer to a customer and distribute it across as many computers as necessary.

Until now, all computing clouds have involved some variant of Linux or UNIX. "Windows virtualization technology is a lot less mature, especially as far as consolidating multiple copies of Windows efficiently onto a single server," Fox adds. "And the Windows 'ecology' is far less diverse [than Linux]."

An alternative approach is used by another cloud operating system (of sorts). 3tera's Applogic runs in some data centers operated by hosting companies, and it, too, has announced that support for Windows applications is in beta testing. 3tera's Applogic creates what the company calls an "application appliance" from a target application--a bit of code that is a virtualized instance of the application, which can be replicated over and over as needed, scaling up or down to meet demand, along with having some failover protection.

Whatever approach Microsoft decides to take, virtualization would help Windows Cloud avoid the problems faced by a similar concept: on-demand computing. On-demand computing (also known as utility computing) looked as popular three years ago as cloud computing looks today, and it was embraced heartily by Sun Microsystems and IBM (the latter to the tune of $10 billion). The idea also involves offering computer power "on tap," but the only way to add more processing power is to add more processors.

However, to accommodate general-purpose applications, companies were forced to build a very complex and very expensive utility computing infrastructure. This is because most applications are not written to operate on parallel processors: they can't scale to run on more processors--only faster ones.

Since Microsoft will hope to avoid this issue, Windows Cloud may come with a slew of new application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow the applications to run seamlessly across simpler, lower-cost infrastructure.

But the most exciting part of cloud computing--and a fundamental issue for Microsoft--is the way that it could impact the very PC desktop it so dominates. Why get a new PC to edit your home videos if you can just grab extra computing cycles as needed from Windows Cloud? As Microsoft's Srivastava says, it's a risky move.