Windows clouds are rolling in

Posted by admin

October 5, 2008

So far, cloud computing has been a solely Unix, and more frequently Linux, affair. There are some good reasons for this, generally Linux is easy to deploy, easy to copy and quick to update and reconfigure, all vital capabilities when you want to quickly clone and duplicate your host environments across tens or hundreds of hosts.

But that doesn’t suit everybody. Windows has for some time had the scalability and the technology behind it to support large collections of computers working in a relatively autonomous fashion. Active Directory, Message Queuing and the deployment services built into Windows Server 2008, and the cluster services built into Windows Server 2003 are all good examples.

Now Microsoft have announced they are going to release a solution specifically for cloud computing. The Windows Cloud OS.

This comes at the same time as Amazon have announced that a Windows version of it’s elastic computing resource is on the way.

I doubt these two are the same, or even related, but it is clear that Windows is gently leveraging itself into the cloud space along with the existing mainstays.