Microsoft's New Killer App | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's New Killer App

jungleg.com

147 pointsRaphael65 comments

I work for Windows Azure. I'm going to try hard to not make this into a marketing thing. I want to clarify a couple of things from the blog post

- The web platform installer is really quite distinct from Windows Azure. The WebPI is a nice installer which gets all the right SDK+ tools installed to get you up and running with MSFT's web dev stack Windows Azure can run any code that runs on Windows Server (with caveats) and it just so happens that the webpi is a nice way to get something running.

- Windows Azure isnt really MSFT-stack specific (.NET/IIS) though that works real well. There was a bunch of content at PDC this year on how to run MySQL/memcached/php/python/RoR/whatever. Matt Mullenweg did a keynote demo running Wordpress on Azure for example.

- The blog post 'Microsoft is taking applications but in reality, you can just go and sign up and get a token in a very, very short time. After January, the platform billing kicks in so anyone can sign up anytime.

Interesting -- assuming that it's a true cloud compute environment (mostly application and language agnostic), is there a reason why the "installer" is Windows only? Is there a way to install and configure a compute node without using Windows?

My impression is that WebPI is for developers ... it installs on your computer the stuff you need for developing / running your application, with the bonus that you can also quickly install a prepackaged web app like Drupal.

I'm sure it wouldn't make any sense to make it available for Linux / Mac OS X since it's a Windows complement.

The problem here is that the TFA is wrong ... Microsoft hasn't released an "iTunes Store for Web Apps". It's just a convenient way to get your Windows Server up and running, or am I missing something?

Agreed -- I didn't think it was an "app store" it that sense, but it totally makes sense to make it cross platform. Django will run fine on ISS and I'm not sure a simple web interface and sftp is too much to ask for (so I could do updates from my macbook).

Btw, as a VMM developer I would be very interested to know if Azure is built off the type-1 Microsoft Hyper-V.

I want to clarify (and I have edited the post some) that this is all a forward-looking article. I am not saying that the WebPI is already working with Azure; but that knowing how Microsoft is a technology-leveler of sorts (specially for the enterprise) I could see the WebPI evolving into a point-and-click app installer once Azure is deployed, allowing developers to write packages that are cloud-aware to be listed on the apps gallery.

Thanks a lot for chiming in and clarifying this.

Azure not being MSFT-stack specific is an interesting move. It certainly will open the platform up to many more applications than otherwise.

As for getting tokens, I found that it actually takes a lot longer than “a very, very short time.” For me, it was about just over a week and some other people have mentioned waiting much longer. Is there a way to speed up the process or at least get a realistic time estimate for a particular case? Thanks!

(I am contracted by M80, working with them and Microsoft to promote Windows Azure)

So my graduate databases class recently took a look at several of these cloud computing environments, and Microsoft offering is clearly compelling both from an tool integration stand point and from the technical side.

For instance Microsoft's incremental innovation in their S3 like utility, called Simple Data Storage (SDS), is that SDS provides guarantees for Durability and Consistency, while Amazon really only guarantees Durability. There has been some work on implementing idempotent logs on top of S3, and SQS to provide similar guarantees but this is third party academic work see http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376616.1376645 for an introduction.

While at first glance Microsofts innovation is an improvement however, there is the question of how SDS performs at scale. Providing consistency for such a system will incur some amount of overhead. Has anyone here used SDS to serve larges amount of data with frequent updates? I would be interested to know how it compares with S3.

I appreciate the call for a comparison, but I think Microsoft's solution and Amazon's solution fit way different needs. The biggest S3 usages I have seen in production environments have been for large asset hosting on websites, not data storage for backends. We use S3 because it's dev friendly, cheap enough, and doesn't require talking to a sales person at Akamai.

I think he might mean "SimpleDB" where he says S3 and "SQL Azure" where he says SDS.

I definitely mean S3 when I say S3, take a look at the paper that I link to.

I work for Windows Azure. I think the right equivalent to S3 is Windows Azure blob storage. I'm really not sure what you're refering to by SDS. SDS used to refer to an older version of what is now called SQL Azure but the technology there has been changed dramatically.

You are probably right. We reviewed this paper about a month ago so i probably mixed up the names.

After seeing http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx, I feel sad that Google App Engine (GAE) still does not have a "click to install"

Currently, there are two options for application developers in GAE

1. The code needs to handle segmentation of customer data based on login and also arrive at billing strategy for the resource usage.

2. Ask customers to sign up for GAE, create an application and invite the developer; after which, the developer can manually deploy the application. Code need not have segmentation logic and resources can be purchased directly from Google.

Though my application http://crm.ifreetools.com supports both options, it could be better if there was a marketplace allowing a "click to install", rather than the current marketplace which focuses on services.. http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

..and a GAE application gallery acting as just a directory... http://appgallery.appspot.com/results?q=crm

A GAE application marketplace would be a great idea.

Is anyone from Google googling this?

Yeah, I was really expecting GAE to turn into this. But it would be a first of Google bringing a side project to it's full potential, I guess.

I have an interesting perspective on this since my startup, flooha.com is extremely similar, but actually better in some ways IMHO.

First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC, but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure.

Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server). There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps.

It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though most website will never need it.

Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps, especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores, private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain.

I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my comments.

If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing budget.

Flooha is cool & useful stuf people, go check it out!

I've been following WPI for awhile, but I'm missing the actual connection to Azure here. From my perspective as someone who has been working in the Windows cloud ecosystem, Azure is more of a platform as a service than an infrastructure as a service play -- I'd love to hear how arbitrary apps a la WPI fit into that.

Agreed. I can't tell how Azure fits in here... It looks like this just installs the tools on your local machine (or I guess server). So, perhaps they are taking the next (perhaps logical) step and assuming that you can use this to install stuff on an Azure instance?

As I said above, I'm not saying there is a connection now, but if MS plays it right, there could be a connection.

I dunno about killer app - but the Web Platform installer is pretty sweet. Glad to see it's finally coming out of beta.

Scott Hanselman blogged about web platform / web application installers about a year ago: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftWebApplicationInstall...

I haven't looked it at lately, it will be interesting to see how many of those apps they can integrate with Azure..

The App Store model extends to just about everything and everywhere. Is this what web 3.0 will be all about? An internet of many walled gardens? If so, is it really that bad?

Interoperability will suffer! Interoperability and open standards are two of the lynchpins of the Internet.

Ultimately, if a large group of users keeps to the interoperable philosophy, the large walled gardens will fall. (Witness AOL.)

We sell some ASP.NET (dont get me started) software and this was a god send when it appeared a little while ago. Before our setup procedure (we usually let clients do it themselves due to them being paranoid about letting people on their networks) was just complicated enough to require a phone walkthrough. This makes it a breeze. Click XYZ, then install. Install our app. Slight cfg tweaks. Win.

What in the world does this have to do with Outlook?

Nothing.

It is just an analogy. According to the article, what Outlook is for Microsoft's application suite, Microsoft's Azure (or web platform installer per another comment) will be for cloud computing.

Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer. So I think I'll give Azure/whatever a miss.

Yes, I originally had a parenthetical comment comment about it being locked-in because of PHBs, but deleted it because the comment was snide and detracted from the point.

Correction: Outlook is to most people on Hacker News the most irritating ... To most people who don't read this site, its a tool that reliably does everything they need it to do.

Which usually means the shark fins are starting to circle, regardless of whether the folks in the boat have noticed the mindshare leak.

Yeah, until they need to find an email from 2 months ago. Then they wish they had Gmail at work.

Apart from searching. Or anything else useful.

I use it daily and love it. I switched from Gmail to Thunderbird to Outlook 2007 with Exchange and have never been happier.

It has reasonable search, which I don't need much anyway since it has hierarchical folders and great filtering. It has a preview pane, the lack of which makes Gmail unusable to me. Unlike Gmail the layout is intuitive and it doesn't take me forever to remember where the spam folder is. Between Barracuda and Outlook's spam filtering I get very little in my Inbox. And if I look in my Junk folder guess where 99% of the emails came from? They were sent to my Gmail account which auto-forwards to Exchange. Gmail's spam filtering might be good in comparison to Hotmail but Barracuda (and probably many other third party boxes) blows it out of the water.

It works with Exchange 2007 so that my emails, contacts, tasks, and calendar events are constantly and instantly synced across the 3 PCs I use frequently and my phone. I can enter an address in a calendar event on Outlook, then seconds later on my phone tap it and have the location pop up in Google Maps. I can save a phone number from an email on my desktop and call it almost immediately after from my mobile. Any smart phone user can do these things.

I'd probably have a much different outlook on Outlook if I had to run the Exchange server, but I just pay some company $6/mo per mailbox to do that for me. There are dozens of such companies for small businesses. (We use Sherweb, and they rock.)

Oh and Outlook doesn't make me disable Firebug :)

If you know people who email a lot, they'll pretty much all tell you that you really can't beat the Microsoft email stack. I'm small potatoes compared to the volume some of my friends do in a day, and they've all tried every email option available since its what they spend most of their time doing.

>Outlook is to most people the most irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish ever to grace their computer.

You're forgetting that it was competing with Lotus Notes.

Are you guys kidding? Compared to what alternative is Outlook an "irritating broken non-functional idiotic piece of rubbish?"

That alternative definitely isn't open source (like Evolution, which blows hard). It's definitely not a Web app somewhere (ala Google). Outlook isn't rubbish, by far, and y'all don't know what you're talking about. :)

Outlook is the most used enterprise application used written by Microsoft. Azure could potentially be the next Outlook, in terms of adoption and usage (and could be the next cash cow for MS).

Amazon AWS really should have a 'app store' of pre configured EC2s with wordpress, drupal, etc.

Online interface boots the EC2, makes sure it loaded, and links you to the admin interface, links to backedup s3 dumps, etc

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.js...

http://www.jumpbox.com/go/virtualization

MS has some interesting technologies, like F# & .NET, but I wonder if people trust MS to do the right thing on the server? (One braindead misfeature can screw up everything)

Given that Microsoft has anywhere between 25-45% market share (depending on where you get your numbers) on servers obviously someone is trusting them. And it's not like the Unix world hasn't had its share of "braindead misfeatures" over the years.

Interesting. Sort of like Heroku with "instant install", no admin. I don't touch .Net with a 10 foot pole (yeah, letting my M$crosoft biases show), but this does look cool.

That's kinda what I thought. The "OMG MSFT THIS IS CRAZY!!!1" was a bit much.

It's good to see people compete with Heroku and Engine Yard (and for more things than Ruby, as much as I love it.)

When Engine Yard and Heroku offer this kind of service, all you hear about from corporate IT is vulnerabilities in the VM layer and lack of security in the "cloud". But when Microsoft offers it, it's the next big thing. So sad.

Yeah.

This is slightly off-topic, but I find it moderatly disconcerting that I'm a Rackspace customer and I didn't even think to mention the Rakspace Cloud Sites. They're also totally technology agnostic...

And they have good marketing! I wonder why my brain doesn't think of them first.

it is not just .net tech anymore. now with php, ruby and most weird JAVA! but i have two reserves how is library support for dynamic languages and how does overall performance compare to the ec2+s3.

An idiotproof, point and click cloud solution is definitely what's needed for cloud to go mainstream (i.e. Joe User thinks nothing of putting his wordpress blog on the cloud). I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft, but kudos to them if they get it right. AWS, GAE etc are still all too hard just to push stuff out - I've tried explaining them to tech-savvy laypeople and had zero luck so far.

Joe User can already get 100% of the benefits of "the cloud" (whatever that means) by getting joeuser.wordpress.com . I don't see there being much upside for anyone whose relationship with their computer is similar to their relationship with their toaster.

What I do see happening is Microsoft doing what they usually do: figure out a way how to become the standard platform for smaller software companies writing niche software for businesses. There are an awful lot of businesses out there who have essentially infinite technology needs and very little capacity to absorb it. Previously, Microsoft said "Here's a windows computer. Run this installer which cost you $50 from some company using our products. Bam, you now have a need filled without learning how to program yourself."

In the future, I expect it sounds like "Hey, you've already got a computer. Cool. Click once and pay our vendor $50, and BAM we'll give you a website with X business software installed on it. You don't have to learn anything about programming or system administration."

Now personally, having done downloadable software and web apps, I would prefer to have users pay me directly for access to my web app rather than having them host a copy locally. However, that won't fly for all businesses, and if Microsoft totally took all the technology pain out of it for them and reduced barriers to purchase by getting payments totally right, well heck, I'd be happy to sell hosted apps.

(Particularly hosted apps which you have to pay for every month or MS will turn off your access for me.)

One problem with joeuser.wordpress.com is the price, though. At least if you want your own domains, most services seem to cost at least 10$/month (for example also GitHub, Issue Tracker, email?, storage > 2GB, ...). Using an individual provider for each service one might need quickly gets expensive. Atm it would be cheaper to deploy a single vServer with all the required apps.

No idea how much Azure & Co will cost, though.

"I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft"

Not even when they first announced it at PDC2008 a year ago?

They had about eight and a half layers of marketing bullshit during the presentation and on the website- if you squinted real hard while hopping up and down on one foot with a tin foil hat in correct alignment, it looked like something resembling a good solution to a real problem.

Now more information is coming out in an accessible way about what Azure actually is, no hat alignment necessary.

People announce stuff relating to technologies I don't use at conventions I don't go to all the time. A quick google suggests that it was more the concept of Azure that was announced, not its point-and-click accessibility (the WebPI). Even if I'm wrong on that, once again HN has confused me saying "I didn't..." with "Nobody did...". Sigh.

Sounds promising. I'll be sure to give it a try once I get the chance.

"Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications."

Wow, buzzword overload!

This smells like an MSFT PR hit. I bet this goes the way of ".NET" or "HailStorm" or some other all-encompassing, vague-enough-to-impress-corporate-types acronym-laden "vision".

This sounds perfect for custom MediaWikis.

<shamelessplug>...until you have to install a lot of extensions, which you normally have to do manually. This is the problem Flooha solves. </shamelessplug>

This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?

I'm a heavy user of the DynamicPageList, SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, TeX Editor and Lua extensions and had never heard of Flooha before so I took a quick look. While it looks promising, I didn't see any of those extensions available :-(

Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?

CORRECTION: based on http://flooha.com/build/addon_details/3559 it does appear you support DynamicPageList. I must have overlooked that earlier.

This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?

Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server.

I didn't see any of those extensions available :-(

You can upload any extension you want!

The process is very simple. Here are instructions from our wiki: http://wiki.flooha.com/index.php?title=How_to_upload_an_addo...

No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com

If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It's easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.

I have tried Azure and I have to say it is super cool

I am sorry i don't get it , how can a new "Killer App" be Windows only ? The installer only works on Windows , what happens to the rest of us.

According to Microsoft, there is no rest of us. At least, there won't be for long.

I'll flag the article as it looks an awful lot like Microsoft astroturfing. I suggest you do the same.

Lets see, their previous killer apps also either required Windows, or WAS Windows. I don't really see how being platform specific affects ability to be a killer app.

Obviously depending on how a "killer app" is defined.

Platform specific does effect the ability to be a "killer app".

Ms Windows being a killer app was in a completely different time period. Any app that has to have game changing ability has to be cross-platform or perhaps run on the web. Anything else and its not a "killer app". It might get the bills paid and be profitable but "killer app" it ain't.

The definition of a killer app is one where somebody will buy the platform just to use your app. By its nature it makes you choose a platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application

So, what's the catch, other than having to have annoying Microsoft naming conventions like ASP.NET show up in my field of vision?

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