Will there be other .NET providers of Cloud Comput

Question

Cloud computing is about providing computing, storage and networking capacities on demand. It is a fresh but very compelling concept for solving some specific tasks, for example:

• Running CPU heavy computations
• Having a scalable storage system for raw data
• Scaling realtime services up to the customer demand as it goes up and down.

I'm mainly working with Microsoft stack, which helps a lot in delivering complex enterprise applications. Yet, cloud computing offering for .NET is somewhat behind the market. Amd the only provider is Microsoft, any way (Windows Azure).

Do you think there will be any diversity in .NET cloud providers any time soon? How many players, do you think will be on the market, and what could be the pricing (considering that .NET could be run on Linux which should makes things a little cheaper )?

Answer 1

I'm sure that there will be more providers of Windows/.NET based cloud computing services. Especially because the market for it is growing and all big players (IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazone) are working on different solutions. In my opinion it is just a matter of time, that other companys will address this market. Currently there is some risk because Amazons EC2 images only work at amazon but that will change. I've talked to a CIO of a small company located in the Netherlands about the problem of 'being stuck to one vendor' and he told me that there is much effort spend by other companies to fullfill the requirements of the market.

Answer 2

SalesForce.Com are also getting into the Cloud computing services mainly for CRM style of services but they do support numerous languages including .net.

Answer 3

Although I haven't used it myself yet, I came accross DeployFu which is very similar to AppHarbor (.NET apps with Git deployment, hosted on Amazon EC2).

Answer 4

Microsoft Azure is much more than a simple "cloud" provider, is an entire stack of technologies related, with specific options to manage them, so it cannot be compared to Mosso. Amazon EC2 is more similar, but it still do not have the full architecture design that Azure has.

When Azure was announced at PDC2008 the numbers behind it was something that will makes very difficult (if not impossible) for providers outside Microsoft to provide Azure compatible platforms (they were talking about tens of thousands of servers).

Said that I believe that a different (and easier to work with) "cloud" option for .Net could be created by competitor, for people not needing the whole MS offering or not willing to port their applications to Azure because of the architectural rework required.

A very nice scenario I would like would be to have a cloud offering made of Linux machine running Mono and the creation of a "Azure like" stack on Mono, open sourced, but it's just a dream.

Answer 5

In addition to GoGrid, Appistry Cloud IQ provides a cloud computing infrastructure that can be run on Amazon or in-house on your own hardware. You can deploy .Net applications as well as Java and C apps.

Answer 6

An important point to note is that EC2 was build on top of Amazon's existing infrastructure in order to extend that to outsiders. The important thing to note about this is that the instances are ephemeral -- meaning that if there's a host failure you lose all data for that host.

This isn't good or bad, but it's important to recognize that you will need to possibly compensate for this potential failover at some layer in your infrastructure stack.