Amazon Web Services introduced their Lambda microservices engine in 2014; and since that time AWS Lambda has been the standard microservices engine for the public cloud. As Microsoft’s Azure cloud has gained in popularity the question on my mind was: will Microsoft also create a Microservices solution?

I recently attended a Town Hall hosted by Microsoft presenting their solution for microservices in the Azure cloud. The session provided a view into Microsoft’s approach and support for this rapidly growing cloud computing technology.

At the beginning of the meeting, Microsoft spent a good deal of time on their container environment including the container types that they now support; Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Mesos DC/OS. As the meeting went on it became apparent that the MS container environment, along with Azure Service Fabric, was the basis for their microservices solution, but that there seemed to be no microservices engine per se.

Being that my experience is more on the AWS side of the cloud computing house I was hoping to form some comparison of Azure and AWS microservices solutions. So without providing a value judgment I will try to compare the two approaches.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a microservices engine that requires no pre-provisioning of resources other than the creation of a template for the Microservices container, including a pointer to the code to execute on activation. Lambda creates the Microservices container at event detection (events can be defined as input to a queue, creation of an object in a storage container or HTTP or mobile app request).

An obvious benefit to Lambda is AWS’ claim to have zero administration, other than the setup, configuration and maintenance of the code. In all microservices constructs, if a persistence model is required the developer is responsible for its creation. The AWS Lambda engine spins down the instance once the code execution is completed.

As part of the zero administration feature when using Lambda no availability solution needs to be defined. Even though Lambda intervenes in the process of deploying the service instance, AWS claims that any possible delay is on the order of a few milliseconds.

MS Containers

Microsoft provides no microservices engine, a la AWS Lambda. Rather, they base the solution, as stated above, on containers and orchestration.  Microsoft recommends that for each microservice a pair of primary containers be deployed, for availability. These permanent – as permanent as anything is in the cloud world – primary containers, through the use of Azure Service Fabric or a third party service construct, form a model for the creation of execution containers.

Execution containers are activated, similarly to Lambda, at event detection. The service construct will create and destruct execution containers based on the primary entities and rules configured for them. Again your own persistence model needs to be applied. While Microsoft’s solution does place some administrative burden on the user, this is slight even without a distinct engine.  

Conclusion

AWS and Microsoft present two somewhat different approaches to Microservices although at the root of the two solutions the goal is the same. Microservices computing’s goal is to provide an automated, low maintenance platform for rapid spin-up and spin-down of lightweight service instances. Service developers need to weigh aspects of these, or any other, microservices paradigms to determine the best fit for their organization and for the services under development.  Some of the aspects that should be inspected are performance, administration, ease of use, service deployment and update, and provider support. 

More than half of respondents in a survey carried out by managed cloud provider 2nd Watch say at least half of their deployment pipelines are automated, with 63% saying they can deploy new applications in less than six weeks.

The study, which garnered responses from more than 1,000 participants from US companies with at least 1,000 employees, found that companies embracing cloud automation were able to deploy new applications and workloads faster and more frequently.

Alongside the almost two thirds who said deploying new applications took less than six weeks, 44% said deploying new code to production took a day or less, while 54% say they are deploying new code changes at least once a week. A similar number (55%) say they are measuring application quality by testing everything, while two thirds argue at least half of all their quality assessments, such as lint and unit tests, are also automated.

“The survey results reiterate what we’re hearing from clients and prospects: automation, driven by cloud technologies, is critical to the rapid delivery of new workloads and applications,” said Jeff Aden, 2nd Watch co-founder. “Companies are automating everything from artifact creation to deployment pipelines and process, which includes metrics, documentation and data.

“The result is faster time to market for new applications, and less application downtime.”

Earlier this month, a report from Puppet found particular discrepancies between higher and lower performing organisations when it came to automation. Top performing firms automated 72% of all configuration management processes on average, while lower ranked companies spent almost half (46%) of their time on manual configuration.

Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation continuing its push into the open source space, the latter has announced.

The Redmond giant has joined as a gold member – although their logo is yet to appear on the Foundation’s member list at the time of publication – alongside the likes of Accenture, Google, and Huawei.

Platinum members – Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware – pay $500,000 per annum with a commitment to three years, compared to gold membership which is $100,000 per annum for three years. Yet, as the Foundation’s prospectus document from last year shows, while Microsoft hasn’t gone all in with platinum membership, the company still gets various benefits, as well as the expectation for something in return.

Microsoft gets access to Cloud Foundry’s Global Perception Study, which provides ‘vital information about awareness and adoption of PaaS and Cloud Foundry’, as well as the opportunity to offer an executive candidate for one of two gold seats on the Cloud Foundry board of directors. Gold members are “encouraged to participate in all aspects of the Foundation including code contributions, community development, user education, and Foundation related marketing activities,” the Foundation notes.

“Microsoft and the Cloud Foundry community are deeply aligned around our mutual understanding of enterprise business and technical requirements, and our commitment to help organisations modernise their applications without vendor lock-in,” said Corey Sanders, partner director at Microsoft in a statement.

“By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we will be able to work with members to contribute to Foundation initiatives and bring a wider range of solutions to Microsoft Azure for our customers and the community.”

The decision from Microsoft to sign up to the Foundation is just the latest step in the company’s move away from the walled gardens of its past. Last year, the company joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member to ‘better collaborate with the open source community’. It’s a brave new world, and as CEO Satya Nadella explained at BUILD last month: “The opportunity for us as developers to have a broad, deep impact on all parts of society, and all parts of the economy, has never been greater.”

Wooed by the promise of faster innovation, lower TCO, and greater agility, businesses of every shape and size have embraced the cloud at every layer of the IT stack – from apps to file sharing to infrastructure. The typical organization currently uses more than a dozen sanctioned cloud apps and will shift more than half of all workloads to the cloud by 2018. Such cloud investments have delivered measurable benefits. But they’ve also resulted in some unintended side-effects: complexity and risk. End users now struggle to navigate multiple environments with varying degrees of performance. Companies are unclear on the security of their data and network access. And IT squads are overwhelmed trying to monitor and manage it all.

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When growing capacity and power in the data center, the architectural trade-offs between server scale-up vs. scale-out continue to be debated. Both approaches are valid: scale-out adds multiple, smaller servers running in a distributed computing model, while scale-up adds fewer, more powerful servers that are capable of running larger workloads. It’s worth noting that there are additional, unique advantages that scale-up architectures offer. One big advantage is large memory and compute capacity that makes In-Memory Computing possible. This means that large databases can now reside entirely in memory, boosting the analytics performance as well as speeding up transaction processing. By virtually eliminating disk accesses, database query times can be shortened by many orders of magnitude, leading to real-time analytics for greater business productivity, converting wait time to work time.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced the launch of Box Drive, a desktop application which aims to match the power of the cloud with the more familiar feel of traditional network drives.

The goal of the product is to ‘make it easier to adopt the cloud without changing the way people work’. “The future of work is working in the cloud,” the company notes. “Box Drive makes moving to the cloud incredibly easy. Users are freed from the constraints of their local hard drives because they have instant access to all their files in the cloud and real-time collaboration is even more simple and intuitive.”

“Box Drive combines infinite access to the cloud with an intuitive, natively integrated desktop experiences that is familiar to hundreds of millions of people today in enterprises all over the world,” said Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box in a statement. “Not only will Box Drive make collaborating on content easier than ever before, it also signals the beginning of the end for expensive network file shares.

“With Box Drive, enterprises can accelerate their move to the cloud, enhance security, and significantly reduce IT costs.”

While not in the same ballpark with regards to technology, this move from Box is reminiscent of Amazon Web Services (AWS), who announced the general availability of Greengrass earlier this month. Greengrass enablers users to perform tasks on premise while leveraging the process, analytics and storage of the AWS cloud.

This differs from Box in that the storage provider is trying to help organisations phase out expensive legacy infrastructure such as traditional network file shares. The company added that estimated cost savings through retiring legacy tech – across industries such as real estate, healthcare, and finance – can be as high as $6 million over three years.

The product is free for all Box users and is available today in public beta. You can find out more here.