Microsoft gets serious about cloud computing (and competing with Amazon)
Microsoft announced their first serious, developer-oriented cloud computing service yesterday, Microsoft SQL Data Services. This particular service doesn’t appear to compete directly with Amazon S3, but does appear very similar to another Amazon Web Service - Amazon SimpleDB.
There have been many rumors over the past few months about Microsoft making a serious push into cloud computing, an area which thus far has been pioneered (at least on a wide scale) by Amazon. It will be interesting to see where they go from here. Launching a bulk data hosting service or a virtual hosting service to compete with Amazon S3 and EC2 seems like a strong possibility. Beyond Microsoft, I think we’ll see other large companies get into this market including Google and Sun (which already has the Network.com computing service). All this competition can only be a good thing for cloud computing customers such as Jungle Disk and our users. Competition will drive down prices and start a functionality race as each service tries to attract developers.
It’s worth noting that although Jungle Disk only works with Amazon S3 today, we’ve designed the software to be flexible enough to allow us to add additional storage providers in the future if there is customer demand. Right now there really aren’t any viable competitors to Amazon S3, but it looks like that is going to change as the major Internet companies slowly transition from being simple web sites to Internet infrastructure utilities. While the media is focused on the “social” revolution changing the face of the web through sites like MySpace and Facebook, the real revolution is happening behind the scenes as the Internet changes from being a global communication platform to a global computing platform.
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Borek said,
March 6, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
I was thinking about my own FTP server as a welcome additional “provider” that could replace S3 - have you considered that? I love the simplicity of JD’s file access, setup-and-forget backup and on the fly encryption but for huge amounts of data, S3 can become costly. JD with some FTP server could solve that and you could still make some profit if you provided the Plus service for that scenario as well.
Just a thought.
Hans said,
March 6, 2008 @ 3:05 pm
Yep, you hit it: all the buzz around the so-called Web 2.0 and its social and user interaction “revolution”… (((yawn))) does not hold a candle to what is happening under the surface, far from the average people’s attention.
The Internet is becoming the world wide computing machine that it’s meant to be. Exciting times!
Len said,
March 6, 2008 @ 6:24 pm
This further confirms the wisdom of having your web services/storage client decoupled from the underlying service. This is the major reason I switched from a proprietary all-in-one backup service to the Jungle Disk + S3 combination. I’m confident that as more “clouds” appear, Jungle Disk is well positioned to leverage those choices and provide those benefits to its customers.
Robin said,
March 7, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
I would suggest that you first fix the problems of mapped drive on S3 posted all over the jungle disk forum and then add a new service. Until one service is stable, expanding into new will just make the product more buggy.
Jungle Dave said,
March 7, 2008 @ 4:25 pm
@Robin - We continually address issues as they come up, and most issues that users run into with the mapped drive can be traced to an operating system or 3rd party software rather than a Jungle Disk issue. We provide work-arounds and solutions to these issues where available.
Robin said,
March 7, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
I am just suggesting that loosing focus is not a good thing. You guys are the only onw who provide mapped drive for S3. Concentrate on that service and make it “the best” instead of diversifying and loosing focus. I am sure you can improve things with mapped drive.
Jungle Dave said,
March 7, 2008 @ 5:12 pm
Understood - I don’t want this post to be misread as we are suddenly focused on supporting every cloud provider out there (Microsoft doesn’t even have a storage service yet). Our focus is 100% on improving the software and service with Amazon S3. In the longer term, as other providers emerge, the flexibility we’ve got just means our customers will have more options.
SmarterGeek said,
March 9, 2008 @ 1:30 am
Dave - keep up the great work. I’m really enjoying JD combined with S3 as a part of my backup solution and moving my clients to it also. As other services come available, I would certainly hope you stay on top of them, and if viable make JD work with them. It’s all about choice.
Colin said,
March 10, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
I just wanted to say, after using JD for 14 months, I am so happy with the service, and reliability. I have reformatted by hard drive several times after I migrated to Linux last year, and the peace of mind that my files are there and always available is not something thats easy to earn. If I lost my laptop tomorrow, I am quite comfortable knowing I can be back in 2 hours, and just a little longer for the full 21Gb that I have backed up.
In short, while I trust Amazon S3, my confidence is 100% in JungleDisk providing me the access and support.
Thank you.
Colin
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