Scary: Microsoft Begins Offering Cloud Computing
Recently, Microsoft announced they’d offer cloud computing and they built these huge servers in Chicago or somewhere in a big building filled with servers.
The concept is to offer a cloud computing service where all the processing and data storage exists only on the web and not on your local computer. Yes, there’s all kinds of big brotherish kinds of discussion possible… Yes there’s all kinds of scary thinking around who’s going to protect this info, who’s going to police it and what happens if something goes wrong…
What’s so scary about that? I mean, Amazon’s offering it and a ton of other places are, but seriously what’s the big concern?
Microsoft is notorious for not playing nice, not being good corporate citizens in policing data and they’ve also lost tons of people’s data recently on an enterprise level!
They’re building a cloud computing infrastructure for the wrong reasons. They’re doing it because their competitors are, and they want a chunk of the pie… Not because they can build the best cloud computing system in the world, and because their team is excited to do it…
They built a server operating system that uses juice to run the Graphical User Interface (Processor clock cycles) that could be very well used to serve users content… At least linux servers and other simple operating systems use 98% of the processor for the job it was asked to do!
Anyway, you may here more about Windows Azure and cloud computing from Microsoft over the next few months… Should be interesting to watch, really great article in Forbes magazine this month, well written.
Here’s a video inside the Microsoft Azure Facility in Chicago..
It’s kinda strange to look at this facility, it really does look just like “The Matrix” movie with all these rooms upon rooms of servers, it looks like something straight out of a science fiction novel. You can only begin to imagine the security concerns, the down time concerns and other issues that can come up from cloud computing and trusting all of our data to these huge companies.
