Windows Azure Services allows multi-tenant IaaS cloud

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Roger Jennings.

Microsoft added another arrow to its cloud computing quiver last month with the announcement of the technical preview of Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. The move enables cloud hosting service providers to offer customers subscriptions to multi-tenant Windows Azure VMs and high-density websites with SQL Server or MySQL databases from a private cloud. Whether enterprise IT can pass down this or similar self-service provisioning features to end users is the question.

The Windows Azure Services for Windows Server (WAS4WS) technical preview (TP) for Hosting Service Providers (HSP) provides only Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) core services for a private cloud — stateful virtual machines (VMs) and websites with persistent storage and optional SQL Server or MySQL back ends…

As a customizable hosting-specific version of the new Modern UI Style (formerly Metro), the Windows Azure Management Portal allows admins to set up multiple subscription plans with varying limits on the number and size of Windows Azure Virtual Machines (WAVMs), Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) and SQL Server or MySQL databases (Figure 1). The portal takes advantage of a full-featured, RESTful management API. WAS4WS offers the same choice of Web apps and programming languages as the Microsoft-hosted WAWS…

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