Q&A: Mark Taylor – Microsoft UK developer and platform director

Taylor: "Our SQL Azure service replicates your database three times"

There has been much talk about the potential for enterprise cloud computing services. Now, with the launch of Microsoft's Azure cloud compute platform, IT leaders have one of the industry's heavyweights promising to deliver an enterprise-class platform. Is this the moment cloud computing comes of age?

Computing talked to Microsoft UK developer and platform evangelism director Mark Taylor about how Azure services are delivered and the advantages firms would gain by rolling out applications on Azure.

Computing: Could you cope if the demand for Azure cloud compute services became massive?
Mark Taylor: We have a datacentre in Dublin with an area of 500,000 square feet. Parts of it look like a Tesco's loading bay, because this datacentre has "Generation 4" capabilities, which means containerisation. This allows us to plug in a substantial amount of power in quite a modular way. So we're hedging our bets that we can cope with demand, and we can scale in a way that we don't have to break new turf and construct new buildings.

What do you think are the biggest problems for large companies moving to a cloud compute platform?
I think it's primarily around security – in all its forms, so whether that's trusting a third party, whether they have a regulatory requirement and what their infrastructure looks like today. Business will use the elastic capabilities of the cloud for specific instances, for instance to open a new channel to market or to do something around an event as opposed to their day-to-day business.

Could you see significant take-up by companies?
Over time, as enterprise trust in the environment increases, and firms see the benefits of linking their in-site and internal firewall to the cloud, I think there will be a greater evolution towards it. The concept of the cloud is not just "This is a public thing that's out there", you can offer an inside-the-firewall cloud-type service, or something that straddles the two. It's evolutionary, and we don't expect too many companies to up their computing environments and put them into the cloud any time soon.

We have a project called Geneva which allows firms to connect [cloud services] to their Active Directory systems. So as you traverse your firewall, you can use the same domain authorisation to connect to services sitting inside your firewall which could be shared with cloud services. So you don't have to build new infrastructure to connect internally out to cloud services.

How will Azure services guarantee high availability?
Currently, there is a number of datacentres in North America – there's one in the North West, one in the mid-West and one in the South – so they're geographically spread, and as far as Europe is concerned, we have Dublin.

One of the interesting things is that the obvious way to implement high reliability is with hot standbys, which is pretty expensive to do, and we look for other ways for creating a high degree of reliability. For instance, if you use the SQL Azure service, it creates three copies of your database, so you can create some resilience at the application level if you get a corruption or data loss.

Then there's how we work within the datacentre environment, such as how we ensure the power is uninterruptible and how we ensure the correct service levels. How you purpose-up and purpose-down hardware applies a greater degree of reliability without having to have a hot standby.

That's intra-datacentre availability – what about inter-datacentre availability?
This is going to be the challenge – you can build the most fantastic infrastructure, both inside and outside your firewall, but there's the connectivity in between, and that's an issue we can't resolve because we don't own it.

It's about how we can best work with the customer to ensure that the network infrastructure they use is optimal for their needs. There are lots of services we have to help, for example Smooth Stream [an Internet Information Services (IIS) media service enabling adaptive streaming to Silverlight clients over HTTP]. We have agreements with global web services vendor Akamai, and content delivery specialists LimeLight, and lots of edge networking capabilities. All these can give you the right service level no matter what end of the network you're at, which takes account of the fact that you don't own every mile between your datacentre and the cloud.

Remember: when you specify that your services need to run in a specific location, they will stay in that location.