February 1 is considered the “one year” anniversary of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform (even though February 2 is the actual date that billing was “turned on”).
Last year, Microsoft said it had 10,000 Azure customers; this week officials are saying they have 31,000, though they are refusing to say how many of these are paying customers, how many are divisions of Microsoft, etc.
As I noted last year, Microsoft has been slowly and steadily adding new features to Azure. But I haven’t written much about longer-term Azure futures. Until today.
Bill Hilf, General Manager of the Technical Computing Group (TCG) at Microsoft, isn’t part of the Azure team. But he and his band are doing work on technologies that ultimately may have substantial bearing on the future of Microsoft’s cloud platform. The TCG has a server operating system team, a parallelization team and a team “with the idea of connecting a consumer to a cloud service,” according to Hilf.
The TCG late last year stated its intentions to allow customers to provision and manage Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC nodes in Windows Azure from within on-premises server clusters as part of Service Pack 1 of HPC Server 2008 R2. But Hilf and his team want to go beyond this and turn the cloud into a supercomputer, as Hilf explained to me last week. “We want to take HPC out of niche access,” he said.
This isn’t going to happen overnight, even though the biggest Azure customers today are the ones using HPC on-premises at the current time, Hilf said. HPC and “media” (like the rendering done by customers like Pixar) are currently the biggest workloads for the cloud, Hilf said.
To bridge HPC and Azure, Hilf has a multi-pronged strategy in mind. One of the prongs is Dryad.
Dryad is Microsoft’s competitor to Google MapReduce and Apache Hadoop. In the early phase of its existence, Dryad was a Microsoft Research project dedicated to developing ways to write parallel and distributed programs that can scale from small clusters to large datacenters. Both the Bing and the Xbox Live teams have used Dryad in building their back-end datacenters.
There’s a DryadLINQ compiler and runtime that is related to the project. Microsoft released builds of Dryad and DryadLINQ code to academics for noncommercial use in the summer 2009. Microsoft moved Dryad from its research to its Technical Computing Group this year.
“Dryad, in its first iteration, is really for on-premises,” Hilf told me during an interview last week. “Eventually, we’ll roll Dryad up into Azure, as even more data is put in the cloud.”
Go to the next page for more on how Microsoft’s parallel stack comes into play
