Cost and benefit of your cloud application on Azure - Part 1

While exploring posibilities of cloud development I often stumble upon a lot of questions and some fragmented answers. It is an exiting project in which we turn existing on premise and partly classic hosted functionality into a cloud service. Main concern and focus on these kind of developments for our company for me is the viability of the business model. The way to investigate this is from a platform architecture and design patterns angle that influence the resulting application in several ways.

Part of that is of course cost, but this has to be considered in combination with technical issues as scalability, flexibility, performance and security for instance. Techonolgical innovation is business innovation and thus expanding opportunities, rather than just operations. Again, Azure is NOT about technology.
Moving an application to the cloud can be (seem to be) pretty straight forward. Starting with an existing application you can map several functionalities to this pure cloud based version of that application. Two basic considerations of this quick and dirty approach come to mind.

1. If not designed for the cloud, the application will not benefit from the promisses of the cloud. So flexibility and scalability can be less than expected.
2. Second when not properly designed the cost of the Cloud application can be unpredictably high. Promises that Cloud applications should be able to not only move from CAPEX to OPEX but potential have a better TCO will never meet expectations.

So for me is looking at the development of a new business model also overseeing the technical implications and map these on the current knowledge and competences of our development teams. When moving from the technical design and development of the application, the business model as a whole is designed too. This means a very broad look on the possibilities, market requirements, added value, deployment and delivery models, development roadmaps, pricing etc. All these considerations have to be mapped on the available resources and channels. When driving new business models an extra complexity is the changing knowledge and competences needed to run this business.

Microsoft Excecutive Briefing Center visit about 'Cloud' with a special event at the end: 'the ASHcloud'

The 13th of April me and my collegue took a plane to Seattle. We planned our trip back to The Netherlands on the 18th. Well... The volcano 'Eyjafjallajökull' on Iceland changed the plans of a lot of people depending on the 'Cloud'. It took us some extra days to get back to Europe.

Cloud was the theme of the Microsoft Excecutive Briefing. Azure and BPOS. These developments at Microsoft are huge. Major investments in this area. Checkout the -We're All In- statement of Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer at his keynote at the University of Washington.

During this briefing the latest developments were unveiled. We had the opportunity to take a look at the investments in datacenters all over the world. More important is the evolution in the way the datacenters are build, a different level of utilizing 'flexponsive' computing and storage.

This is the layer 'Azure' is build on. Eventualy most of Microsofts products will be ported to this platform in the cloud. At this moment BPOS is not yet build on the Azure platform.

BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) is the name of the suite that includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online. This package with this terrible name has been given the code name 'Union' and will be rebranded. Expect this to happen at the WPC10 (Microsoft Worldpartner Conference) in Washington DC July this year.

The functionality set of Union is much, much more comprehensive than the functionality available now in BPOS. The first step is the launch of all wave14 developments (Exchange2010, Office2010, SharePoint2010 etc). One of the biggest complaints in the market (partners and customers) was the problem that the SharePoint part of BPOS lacked the possibility to be customized. Well you have some possibility's to make changes, but no custom code in the multi tennant BPOS environment. A single tennant environment (dedicated version) is available from 5000 seats. This is all going to change.

The pricing per seat per month has been changed since the introduction about a year ago. In the Netherlands you can have the functionality of a total set for just €8,52 pppm. So you get a Mailserver; a collaboration site where you can store your documents, share information etc; one can setup online conversations and even choose to do so if a person appears to be available (presence). Think of the infrastructure needed to build and maintain this in your own datacenter!