Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular, or at least, more and more talked about in the tech press. Like many of you, I am not sure that I want to run my database servers from the cloud, but that might change. I ran across a note that said Microsoft is looking to certify private cloud stacks with a number of vendors, similar to the Fast Track program that they implemented for data warehousing.

For some time now I've felt that to really get large scale adoption of the Azure cloud framework, Microsoft really needed to have a way for corporate IT departments to build and deploy to private, internal "cloud services." Clouds they could build, expand, and most importantly, secure, according to their own requirements, on their own premises. The idea of trusting a central provider seems foreign to many companies, especially when governments could subpoena your information or the cloud provider could shut down your business. To what extent you are more protected on premises is unclear, but many companies do no want to trust a third party to safeguard their rights.

The idea of a service that you can deploy to, connect to, and use to abstract your applications away from specific machines is one that makes sense. We constantly build abstraction layers to simplify the interconnections of our systems. The "cloud", whether public or private, is another extension of this. I know I'd like to be able to manage one large SQL Server cloud, rather than individual machines.

Actually, it seems like  a lot of the work I've done over the years is to try and make all my instances appear as one single group that I can manage together. Kind of my own type of "cloud."

Steve Jones

Update: I found this site after this editorial was published. It has more information on the Microsoft Private Cloud.

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

• Windows Media Podcast - 20.0MB WMV

  

• iPod Video Podcast - 14.2MB MP4

  

• MP3 Audio Podcast - 3.3MB MP3

  

The podcast feeds are available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com. Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there. Overall RSS Feed:

or now on iTunes!

Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

You can also follow Steve Jones on Twitter: