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

A newcomer in this area is AppHarbor. Their tagline is 'Azure done right' (aka 'Heroku for ASP.NET')

Answer 2

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service now supports Windows: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

On the same page you'll find pricing. Amazon is always trending towards lower and lower prices for it's services, so you should find them to be VERY competitive.

Here's another provider that provides cloud computing for the Microsoft Stack: Mosso

Answer 3

There are a few competitors on the market though I suppose that depends on what you mean by cloud.

If you mean virtual servers, there are GoGrid and SoftLayer. I would expect to see some consolidation among these "traditional" providers, and prices to drop over time. Amazon EC2 belongs in this category.

Another one is Mosso, which virtualizes the application stack in a way that appears similar to Azure. You upload the app and don't know much about what it's running on. It claims to scale automatically like Azure.

Answer 4

...just to add another answer WAY AFTER the question was answered, but AppHarbor is a great cloud provider for .NET, using Git as the deployment method. It is hands down the simplist, fastest way to deploy a .NET app into the cloud. It's pretty new at this time, but take a huge leap forward in getting .NET caught back up to the big players (i.e. AWS, Heroku, etc)

Answer 5

Seems like cloud computing could end up being a commodity best offered wherever electricity and taxes are cheapest, and there is decent security. Seems like many larger ISPs could eventually position themselves as players. If this happens there could later be a consolidation of them, although this could take 5-10 years to play out.

The cost will trend down based on clouds developed with non-proprietary operating systems, such as Linux, etc.