Microsoft Azure and the Road to Cairo

Wednesday, August 06, 2008 (updated December 19, 2009)

“A fella told me this here road leads to Cairo
I got to get me a ride “

David Ackles, “The Road to Cairo”

It's "Back to the Future" time at Microsoft, folks. In 1992 the GoogleGazer wrote a long piece on 'The Road to Cairo" about Microsoft's plans for an Object File Store (OFS) an object-oriented database designed to make it easy to search documents and other structured data by content no matter where located which was then codenamed Cairo. It was announced by Jim Allchin in 1991 and planned for release in 1993. Ten years later, in 2002 Computerworld reported that "Windows remains uncontaminated by many of the features originally slated for Windows NT and Cairo, including OFS."

While some of Cairo made it out the door as Windows NT 4.0, its charter to build technologies for a next generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips" promulgated in 1994 and made into a book published in 1995 called The Road Ahead (ISBN-13: 978-0140260403), was, sadly, never fulfilled.

Why not?

Simply put, the infrastructure and technology just was not there yet. Moore''s Law, famously first stated by Gordon Moore in 1965 predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, a prediction that has held true for over 40 years now. Indeed, computers today are 128 times more powerful than they were back then, at least. The average connection speed over the Internet has increased at least 25-fold, and Google gives each (free) user of Google Apps over 7 GB of managed network storage, so we've made great strides in the past 14 years in these areas.

Windows has not kept pace. Its kernel has accumulated too much baggage. Windows has gotten overly complex, and scalability is a serious issue with it. Vista was universally acknowledged to be a failure. Mean time, Linux and Open Source have blossomed, and have matured to the point that venerable IBM announced at LinuxWorld that In a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical IBM will offer "Microsoft-free" personal computers with IBM's Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The Linux desktop computer comes fully equipped and sells for 30% less. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office.

As Microsoft was forced to acknowledge in its SEC filings , Linux and Open Source pose a significant threat to Microsoft's long period of domination and control of the operating system and desktop. Suffering from acute Billionaire's Agita, Steve Ballmer saw that he needed to do something radical. He seems to have turned to a veteran Microsoftie, Eric Rudder, senior vice president, technical strategy, who worked closely with Bill Gates, and headed the Servers and Tools group until 2005. His mission, and he has accepted it,was to "incubate" a project called Singularity that came out of Microsoft Research and to turn it into into Midori, a scalable, saleable product for Cloud Computing that is unburdened with the accumulated baggage of Microsoft Windows. We now know the result to be Microsoft Azure, unveiled by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief technology officer on October 27, 2008 and scheduled to be generally available on Jan. 1, 2010.

Ballmer chose well. Rudder is an out-of the-box thinker. The GoogleGazer first met him shortly after Eric joined Microsoft in 1988. He is not only a clear-thinking, very smart and hard-working fellow, he is one of a handful of really nice people in the senior ranks of Microsoft. He is rumored to be Ballmer's ultimate successor, when the time comes (really, he would be Bill's successor). The affable and usually talkative Rudder was absolutely tight lipped about Midori, and when I asked him for comment, he first said, "I'm currently out of the country (he was in the UK); Frank should be able to make sure you get a reply for your blog," handing me off to Waggoner Edstrom PR flak Frank X. Shaw. The best Frank could come up with was, “Sorry that I don’t have more for you – Microsoft not really saying much about Midori.”

· “Microsoft is always thinking about and exploring innovative ways for people to use technology.

· Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft, as such we are not talking about it at this time.”

On the other hand while Shaw was not talking, some hard-working journalists got their hands on the real poop. David Worthington at SD Times writes that he has seen the Midori documents. He wrote, “Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic. Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones. According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

In Midori, concurrency (vital to support Cloud Computing) is a basic design principle.The technically inclined reader can work through this paper from Microsoft Research for some insight: “SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets,” While the GoogleGazer thought he was alone in observing the similarities to Cairo (which at one time employed over 1,000 developers), Mary Jo Foley of ZD Net seems to have found some other old geezers with long memories. We all see Cairo written all over Midori. Everyone agrees that Midori is critical to Microsoft's long-term health, but everyone also agrees that its delivery date is still off in the future. Ms. Foley wrote: [I]t’s likely to be launched sooner than a typical Microsoft Research project, but not so soon as to obviate the need for Windows 7 (released on October 22, 2009) and Windows 8. In other words, we’re looking at a new non-Windows operating system to debut some time before CEO Steve Ballmer retires (a date Ballmer has said is nine or so years away).

As released, Microsoft Azure is not Cairo by a long shot. Microsft Azure does not [yet] have an Object Filing System, but it’s getting there, as the diagram below shows.

The three kinds of Windows Azure storage are:

· Blobs: allow storing large binary objects, such as videos and images.

· Tables: provide highly scalable entity-based storage (not relational tables).

· Queues: allow sending and receiving messages, such as between an application’s Web role instances and Worker role instances.

Microsoft Azure consists of four “pillars”: Storage (like a file system); the “fabric controller,” which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Azure on their desktops and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud apps against it.

Azure services including .Net Services and SQL Azure sit on top of the Windows Azure operating system)

As Mary Jo Foley reported on ZDNet, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) held on November 17, 2009, Microsoft introduced three new codenames related to future Azure development efforts:

Project Sydney: Technology that enables customers to securely connect their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example.

Dallas: Microsoft’s “data-as-a-service” offering. Dallas is a new service built on top of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that will provide users with access to free and paid collections of public and commercial data sets that they can use in developing applications.

AppFabric: AppFabric is a collection of existing Azure developer components, including the “Dublin” app server, “Velocity” caching technology, and .Net Services (the service bus and access control services).

“The Road to Cairo” the song by David Ackles, is the first song from his eponymous album (Elektra Records,1968). Like Microsoft’s Cairo, it did not achieve [commercial] success, but it was influential among singer-songwriters; tragically, Ackles died from cancer in 1999. Microsoft shareholders hope that unlike the still-born Cairo, Microsoft Azure will be both a commercial and artistic success.

Ackles’ song ends like this:

I know this road; it leads straight into Cairo
Twenty-two miles straight ahead
I can't, I can't walk down this road to Cairo
They're better thinking I'm dead.
I've been traveling,
Gone a long, long time,
Don't know what I'd find
Scared of what I'd find
I can't I just can't walk down this road