An Interview with Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich

Jeff: So it took a mindset change at Microsoft to move to this new development model, but I’m sure it’s also a learning process for Microsoft customers and IT administrators, too. Do you have any advice for them on how to get the most out of the new way some of these Microsoft services are being developed and deployed?

Mark: Once you start consuming software as a service like this, it takes a lot of the burden off of IT of that rolling out software, doing that testing. It puts the burden on the software developer, the software service. And so, the IT pro can focus on other activities. A common saying among IT pros is that the list of to dos is always longer than the capacity to go after them. Taking some of the things off that to do list gives them the opportunity to go after higher value activities.

The Growth of Microsoft Azure

Jeff: About nine months ago, if I remember correctly, you gave a presentation at Microsoft BUILD 2013 where, as part of your presentation, you showed some stats on Azure growth? Maybe you could talk a little bit about what has Azure’s growth been like since year to date 2014? What numbers can you talk about?

Mark: We’ve got a slide that we show at our executive briefing center that has a bunch of stats. Updated versions of some of the ones that we probably talked about at Build. Some of the examples are, as far as our hybrid story, one of the numbers that’s important is that Hyper-V has grown five points of share against VMware.
We’re seeing the cloud help drive Hyper-V on prem as customers want that hybrid consistency. If they’re going to pick a cloud like Azure, it makes sense for them to go with Hyper-V.
As far as Fortune 500 company adoption, we’re up to more than 57 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Azure. Our database as a service is growing at 10 percent month over month and has over a million active databases at this point. Our storage service has over 30 trillion storage objects now.

Talking about Azure Active Directory, back to your question about nostagia, because there’s a nice parallel here with what’s going on with Azure and what went on with Windows Server. Azure Active Directory is now over 300 million users. The number of authentication requests that is served per week is over 13 billion now.

Our Visual Studio Online, which I think around the time [of BUILD 2013] was at preview and has GA’ed now. That has over 1.6 million developers using it now. That’s growing at 10 percent month over month, as well.

A Bit About Azure Active Directory

Jeff: I have a quick side question about Active Directory and Azure Active Directory. Say you’re a small business, maybe you’re using Google Apps and you’re born in the cloud and you’re using various cloud apps and you really don’t have an on prem Windows Server infrastructure. Can you get Azure Active Directory and use it without having an on prem existing Active Directory infrastructure?

Mark: Absolutely. What you mentioned is a great scenario because Azure Active Directory serves as an identity point of federation with things like Google Apps. In fact, I can’t remember the number of SaaS apps that have integration with Azure Active Directory federation. Let’s see if I can pull up the number….

Jeff: I was just going to say over the last 5 or 10 years it seems like there’s been a big trend towards startups starting really lean and just running with an infrastructure in the cloud and not having a lot of on premise infrastructure because the cloud gives them agility and a bunch of other advantages. It’s interesting to see the growth that you’ve seen in Azure Active Directory Premium.

Mark: It’s been a huge amount of growth. That number, by the way, is over 1,200 SaaS apps are in our gallery that are pre-integrated with Azure Active Directory. Google Apps is just one example of that. Of course, Office 365 is a huge driver of identity in Azure Active Directory.

Jeff: I’ll let you finish your point there, but my next question was going to lead into how Microsoft is positioning Azure versus Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform…

Mark: Yeah, I’d be happy to talk about that. I mentioned the point about Azure Active Directory having a nice parallel with what happened with Server. If you look at what really drove the success of Server it was messaging with Exchange, but Exchange using Active Directory as its identity and directory service.
The combination of Server, Active Directory, and Exchange is really what propelled Server to where it became a critical part of the back office across the IT landscape. The stat that you’re familiar with is that over 95 percent of IT is using Active Directory as their identity directory.
What we’re starting to see is that same thing happen with Azure. Azure being the equivalent of Server, Office 365 being the equivalent of Exchange, and Azure Active Directory being the equivalent of Active Directory, creating this nice virtuous cycle.

Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform

Jeff: We could argue that Microsoft Exchange was the killer app for Windows Server over the last decade or so. It’s a great foundation to build on. How do you position yourself against AWS and Google’s offering?

Mark: This is a question we get a lot. “How do we differentiate from those guys?” “Why should I pick you and not them?” We’ve boiled it down to saying that there are three values that we think that we excel at when it comes to cloud and what matters in the cloud. One is hyper-scale, one is hybrid and the consistency story between on prem and cloud, and the other one is being enterprise grade.
We usually represent these things as three circles that overlap, showing that because we excel in all three of these. We are the only one of the three cloud vendors you mentioned that hit the center of that overlap, where the other two might excel in two of them but not all three.
When it comes to hyper-scale, what we’re talking about there is the size of our cloud and the global reach of our cloud. It’s pretty well acknowledged at this point that the three of us are the largest public clouds and, also, the three of us have larger private cloud infrastructure hosting our first party services, even behind the public cloud.
Google especially, their public cloud is a tiny fraction of their total infrastructure footprint, but we all know how to operate at massive scale on the order of millions of servers. When it comes to global reach, this means having pubic cloud presence in regions around the world.
This is a place that we’re ahead of Amazon and Google, actually by a good margin. We’ve got 17 regions now and more coming online. You’re going to hear news about some more in the next couple of months.

[Editor’s Note: After this interview was conducted, Microsoft announced that it had opened two new Azure data centers in Australia, bring the global total of Azure greens to 19.]

Because data center build out can take, typically, a couple of years, there’s a whole bunch in flight and there’s a whole pipeline. You’re going to see a constant stream of new regions dotting up over the next few years and that trend’s probably going to accelerate.
We’re at 17. That’s double what Amazon’s got, and that’s five times the number that Google’s got at this point.
Then, when it comes to hybrid and consistency, this is a case where we’re unique across those three clouds. We’re the only ones that are really focusing on hybrid and focusing on a consistency story.
When it comes to hybrid, that’s really about connecting on prem to the cloud. We do that through networking. This is a place where we’ve got a competitive advantage right now with our ExpressRoute offering because a lot of enterprises can’t connect over public Internet to a cloud service. There are a number of reason they can’t or don’t want to.
One of them is the quality of service that they get on the pubic Internet. Most of them are working with ISPs or network providers to have dedicated lines between their own data centers and connections to the Internet.
We partner with a whole bunch of those providers to provide wire direct access into our backbone. This is what we call our ExpressRoute offering with dedicate SLAs and bandwidth with high availability, so redundant [inaudible 22:37] lines and with support for hundreds of thousands of routes.
Many enterprises have very complex networks. We have partners like Level 3, Verizon, AT&T, British Telecoms, and Orange.
You’re going to see the list of partners continue to grow in the next three years. We’re on a full swing to the build out that palette to cover all the major network providers around the world.

That’s one part of the network connectivity aspect of it. Another part of the hybrid consistency story is having our own services be able to take advantage of the cloud when you’re on prem.

There’s a few different way that customers can take advantage of the cloud without really becoming dependent on the cloud. This is a really an important part of clouded option.
A few years ago we were in the “What is the cloud?” phase, and then we went to the “Why cloud?” phase, and now we’re in the “How cloud?” phase. What we find when it comes to the “how” is that customers need to start using the cloud and get familiar with it so they can understand the governance, and the SLAs, and what kind of configuration management systems they need to put in place to support it, and what the cost structure looks like.
Some of the very low risk ways they can get started with it are through dev/test, and backup, and DR. All three of those are really low risk ways to take advantage of it, where you’re not putting your mission critical software at risk.

For example, dev/test, of course if you’ve got developers creating, for example, a marketing campaign that they’ve built a website, some SQL database, your traditional IT, that can take a few weeks to a couple of months to procure the servers, and the virtual machines, and get everything configured, and the networking set up for them to get that going.
When it comes to the public cloud, what they can do is start doing dev/test on that marketing website while IT is getting that infrastructure ready. Within, literally, a few minutes, get those VMs up in the cloud, play with it.
When they’re done for the day, shut it down and they’re not paying the cost any more. They can create multiple dev/test environments like that very quickly, never putting production data at risk, never putting the production sites at risk, but just doing the development and testing up in the cloud and then bringing it back to on prem.

Another way is to do backup to the cloud. This is where we have things like integration of Windows Server with Azure storage for backup, integration of SQLs with Azure storage for backup, and integration of Data Protection Manager with Azure for backup.
All of the data’s encrypted when it goes up to the cloud. The keys are all back on prem, so instead of spending tons of money buying storage for backup and managing all that infrastructure, now you’re leveraging, basically, infinite storage in the cloud at costs that nobody can compete with.