back to article Microsoft's three-way only goes one way: Backends merge into Azure App Service

Microsoft is merging its Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services into a single service: Azure App Service. The Windows giant hopes the embiggened beast will woo developers to craft applications for all manner of things from smartphones and fondleslabs to desktop web browsers, all deployed from Redmond's cloud. " …

  1. 101

    Cloudy Skies

    I would really, really, really like to do the cloud. But.

    The problems are security and privacy. Governments and corporations don't want to allow us to have either, at all.

    Yes, that is a deal breaker. It should be for anyone who values their liberty or wants to preserve what little money they let us have these days.

    1. Bogle

      Re: Cloudy Skies

      @101 - you're absolutely right and it is currently stopping a lot of applications being moved to the cloud. There is a way now, though, that will let you perfectly encrypt everything in Azure so that M$ cannot access it, even when they are rubber-hosed by the NSA. 'Key Vault' uses Hardware Security Modules to store your keys so that they never escape the boundaries of the hardware itself.

      [http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/key-vault/?rnd=1]

      1. Blane Bramble

        Re: Cloudy Skies

        How does this protect against the Feebies visiting Microsoft and taking the hardware?

      2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Re: Cloudy Skies

        Er? Just who has access to the HSM's? Who has the master keys to those devices?

        Microsoft. That's who.

        Are you really sure they can't get their sticky mits on your encrypted data?

        More importantly, are you willing to bet your business on their inability to get hold of it.

        The only upside is that it isn't Google.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Cloudy Skies

          "Er? Just who has access to the HSM's? Who has the master keys to those devices?

          Microsoft. That's who."

          Nope. You can manage your own keys, and they can't be extracted by a third party. You obviously don't understand what an HSM does. See https://www.thales-esecurity.com/msrms/cloud "Thales nShield HSMs ensure that your key is always under your control and never visible to Microsoft"

          "Are you really sure they can't get their sticky mits on your encrypted data?"

          Yes, at least not without compromising our internal security. And if they did that, then there would still be a tamperproof audit trail.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cloudy Skies

      If this is the attitude then surely it's time to start moving everyone back to on premises?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BizTalk is the most unbeatable part of that package for those that need it. Nothing off the shelf from AWS, Google, etc even comes close.

    1. dogged

      BizTalk is awful.

      Almost as awful as all of its competition.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Almost as awful as all of its competition."

        So that's a twisted way of saying it's actually the best product of it's type then. Which I would agree. Nothing else on the market to beat it. There are some also rans like Tibco, but nothing that has the range of features and ease of use that BizTalk does.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Biztalk the best of its class?

          Oh come on.

          We just replaced 10 Biztalk servers at a customer with one clustered pair of servers simply because the Biztalk software didn't scale. sure the solution cost a good bit more than Biztalk but it was very easy yo develop for. What software? IBM Message Broker.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Biztalk the best of its class?

            ~"We just replaced 10 Biztalk servers at a customer with one clustered pair of servers simply because the Biztalk software didn't scale"

            We have hundreds of connectors with thousands of messages per second working just fine on Biztalk. And that's on a not particularly high spec server cluster. Your customer clearly didn't have someone competent managing and tuning their BizTalk install and / or SQL cluster. And you have effectively ripped them off with an over priced solution rather than fixing the problem.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is a great innovation

    The important thing is to have a single point of failure and this is a great step in that direction as you would be hard pressed to find a more failure-intensive service than Azure, which vanishes globally on a fairly regular basis and locally a few times most weeks.

    The other great thing about Azure, as a developer working with it, is the way that although it behaves as a single point of failure, it has no equivalent single point of sign-on. By no means! You have to have nine different Microsoft accounts to access your subscription, although they can all have the same credentials, you still need to know which of the identical accounts you need to sign in with to any given part of the service, or it won't work.

    So single-point-of-failure but no single sign-on. That is how The Cloud is supposed to work, isn't it?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. BongoJoe

      Re: This is a great innovation

      Living in North Wales my experiences of clouds is that they are there so that I can get regularly pissed on.

      The Cloud seems to have been built with the same philosophy

      1. breakfast Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: This is a great innovation

        At least in north Wales you don't have to pay more when it rains harder. Also when the clouds break apart there it reveals some pretty great scenery, though my experience of living in Wales is that most of the year the cloud is far more reliable than any web services.

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