Looking forward to the next RD instalment.
It has been four months since Microsoft took the official wraps off its cloud-computing initiative. Yet still relatively little still is known about the Azure platform and plans.
The part of Azure which intrigued me the most was the cloud operating system, code-named “Red Dog,” that is at its heart. Late last month, Microsoft allowed me access to many of the principals behind Red Dog — everyone from the infamous father of VMS and NT, David Cutler, to the handful of top-dog engineers who helped design and develop the various Red Dog core components. Over the course of this week, I’m going to be publishing a post a day about Red Dog.
Cutler: Old dogs need to learn new tricks
Dave Cutler, the father of the VAX VMS and NT operating systems, is a legend inside and outside Microsoft — and not just because of his coding skills. He’s quite the character, according to those who know him, and an incredibly demanding task master who doesn’t spare anyone with his pointed criticism.
Nonetheless, the engineers on the Red Dog team with whom I spoke cited the attraction of getting to work with Cutler — who has been at Microsoft since 1988 — as one of the main reasons they joined the effort. Cutler was the first person that Azure chief Amitabh Srivasta recruited for Red Dog, knowing Cutler’s interest and expertise in virtualization would be key to the team’s work. Once he had Cutler on board, other engineers wanted in, too, Srivastava said.
“The first system I ever worked on in college was VMS,” said Yousef Khalidi, the Microsoft Distinguished Engineer working on the Red Dog fabric controller. A chance to work with the guy who wrote that operating system was a huge opportunity, he said.
“Cutler can pick any project at this company he wants to work on,” said Todd Proebsting, Director of Technical Strategy for Azure. “He’s not here to mess around. I’m always clear about where he stands. He’s all about the success of the project, but he wants everyone to pull his own weight.”
(To see more on Cutler and other core members of the Red Dog engineering team, check out this slide show.)
During the decades I’ve written about Microsoft, one of the very few execs I’ve requested repeatedly but have been unable to get was Cutler. Unfortunately Cutler wasn’t at Microsoft headquarters when I met with the rest of the team, but I still had a chance to ask him five questions via e-mail.
Here’s our exchange:
MJF: What finally convinced you that it was worth your time/effort to join the Azure OS/Red Dog team? Was there something about it that you really wanted to do/try/learn?
Cutler: One of the major premises of Red Dog (RD) is being able to share a single compute node across several properties. This enables better utilization of compute resources and the flexibility to move capacity as properties are added, deleted, and need more or less compute power. This is turn drives down capital and operational expenses. The principle enabler for this type of sharing and the required security and isolation between properties is virtualization. At the time I was not a large proponent of virtualization because of the high overhead it extracted from the base hardware system. I spent a considerable amount of time studying Microsoft’s virtualization efforts and after about three months became convinced we could build an efficient hypervisor for RD if we predicated it on second generation virtualization hardware and ran a single OS that was modified to run in the hypervisor environment as efficiently as possible. I never had any doubt that cloud computing would become an important part of Microsoft’s product offering and getting over the virtualization hurdle convinced me I should join the team.
MJF: How was working on the Azure OS/Red Dog different from/similar to working on NT? on VMS?
Cutler: RD is very similar to the early days of NT and VMS. It is a small team of dedicated, energetic, smart people working toward a common goal with aspirations of producing a complete and very high quality competitive product. It is different in the sense that we are going after a new business for which we have no installed base or extensive knowledge set and there are significant competitors in the marketplace.
