Recently there has been some healthy debate around the validity of “private clouds” and whether such a construct is new or just a different name for virtualization and automated provisioning, i.e. a marketecture. In this corner for the anti-Private Cloud sentiment, we have the 2009 Prediction – Rise...

In a blog posting earlier this week , the Azure team announced that they would be moving all Azure applications out of our “USA – Northwest” datacenter. I was fascinated by this given that the stated reason for this move is a change in local tax law which presumably make it less financially attractive...

As mentioned here and in a few other posts, I’ve been using Friendfeed and Twitter quite a bit over the last couple months. I’ve been extremely impressed with Friendfeed in particular. I’ve created two Friendfeed groups that I’ve been posting content to in addition to my main feed. The groups are: Microsoft...

There’s a good technical post over on Chris Adam’s blog about how to dynamically provision customized virtual machines by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager and unattend.xml. The unattend.xml file is used in combination with a sysprep’d image and applies customization (things like computer name...

Here’s an interesting and slightly amusing mock debate between Brandon Shell and Jason Conger on Citrix’s Workflow Studio vs PowerShell for automation . If you aren’t familiar with it, here is the description of what Workflow Studio is: “Citrix Workflow Studio™ is an infrastructure process automation...

Over on the Solution Accelerators Security Blog is a post and link to the IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide . From the guide: The IT Infrastructure Threat Modeling Guide provides an easy-to-understand method for developing threat models that can help prioritize investments in IT infrastructure...

The New York Times magazine has a very interesting article by Tom Vanderbilt on datacenters and the infrastructures that power today’s online services. Several Microsoft (and former Microsoft) execs were interviewed including Mike Manos, Debra Chrapaty, Daniel Costello, etc. The article ends with a very...

The main introductory whitepaper to the Azure platform written by David Chappell has been updated. The main updates are around SQL Data Services and the move toward a more relational model and the introduction of something code-named the “Huron” data hub which uses the Microsoft Sync Framework to synchronize...

Between MMS and TechEd there have been a lot of announcements on the virtualization and cloud computing front. First, over on the Virtualization Team Blog , Jeff provided the announcement and details around some new capabilities coming in Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2: 64 logical processor support...

MMS Day 1 Keynote: Bob Kelly, Microsoft corporate vice president, April 28, 2009, 8:30 am PT

Following up on yesterday's post, today an updated Azure Services Training Kit was released: The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform...

Here are a couple resources for getting started learning about Microsoft's cloud computing strategy: " The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications...