Developers View Microsoft as a Key Player in Public Clouds
Evans Data Corp. released the results of a Cloud Development Survey over the summer, which indicated that many developers view Windows Azure as a viable alternative for applications running on servers in a public cloud. Google ranked first among the 500 developers surveyed about the perceived "leader" in setup, infrastructure, app management software and services with 43 percent, Amazon was second with 19 percent and Microsoft followed on the Internet behemoth's heels with 17 percent.
Traditional datacenter vendors were rated highest for private clouds, according to Evans' Cloud Development Survey, namely IBM, Cisco and HP. Similarly VMware dominated virtualization in the private cloud, but developers were willing to consider alternative hypervisors in the public cloud with 28 percent ranking VMware first, followed by Microsoft with 27 percent, IBM with 10 percent and Citrix (open source Xen, which is used by Amazon) with 8 percent.
As Redmond makes inroads in the cloud, the company is also opening up Visual Studio as an IDE for cloud development beyond Windows Azure. This week, hosting company Rackspace announced a plug-in for Visual Studio 2010 that provides templates for developing and managing apps the run on Rackspace Cloud Servers for Windows.
In addition to security and reliability, the ability to move apps and content between public cloud implementations, if needed, is an important feature consideration for developers, according to the Evans Data research. Could Microsoft's public cloud strategy be headed in this direction? Express your thoughts on the latest developments below or drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 09/08/2010 at 9:35 AM