Customers and partners alike often ask the question, “How does Microsoft manage its vast network of data centers worldwide that power our 200+ cloud services such as  Office 365, Windows Live and Xbox Live, and our cloud platform Windows Azure?”

Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) is the team that builds, manages, and secures Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and today we are launching our new external web site on the Windows Azure platform to address these questions and to more broadly share our cloud infrastructure best practices with external audiences!

The GFS team has a newly revamped website that contains content and tools that that addresses the following:

• Customer Priorities that dive deep into infrastructure architecture, operations, reliability, security and compliance, and the sustainability strategies for our data centers and fiber optic network – all top of mind for customers, including:
• 20-30 minute interactive presentations featuring data center subject matter experts addressing some of the top 3-5 customer questions we receive
• Strategy Briefs for downloading and sharing
• Video overviews from strategy leads addressing key priorities
• Related whitepapers, technical content, and slideshows
• Future Insights that explore the forward-looking challenges of providing cloud services at massive scale and the business impact, reliability, security, sustainability opportunities and roadmap
• Blogs with industry relevant discussions on cloud infrastructure issues and best practices
• Video tours of our data center facilities

The resources available via this website have been designed to help customers better understand Microsoft’s data center strategy, and to more broadly share our best practices as we make strides towards more efficient and operationally robust infrastructures.

Check out this great resource if you want a deeper understanding out how Microsoft does what it does in the cloud!

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Microsoft has just launched a new service offering as part of Windows Azure called Windows Azure Media Services.  Windows Azure Media Services is a cloud-based PaaS  solution that enables you to efficiently build and deliver media solutions.  It provides a bunch of ready-to-use services that enable the ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming of video.

If you’re looking to integrate rich media capabilities into your cloud-based solution architectures, I highly recommend you take a look at Windows Azure Media Services today!

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Microsoft has recently published an aggregated set of resources for structured learning of cloud computing.  These resources are in the form of a set of courses designed to refine your skills on delivering cloud-based solutions on Windows Azure.  Each course has a set of hands-on labs and videos that focus on Windows Azure.  Just head over to http://walearningpath.cloudapp.net and take advantage of these great resources.

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Customers of Office 365 and Windows Azure have entrusted Microsoft to protect their key data and intellectual property.  Microsoft regards security, privacy, and compliance as a top priority.  To further support this claim, Microsoft has launched two trust centers for both Windows Azure and Office 365 to provide up-to-date information around security, privacy, and compliance of these cloud services.  Head over to the trust centers to get the latest information on Windows Azure and Office 365.

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A big ”THANK YOU” to those who attended my panel discussion around cloud migration and datacenter consolidation at this year’s FOSE conference.  Hopefully, everyone who attended gleaned some value from the exchange around how to approach the process of consolidating datacenters and making the transition to cloud computing.  After the talk, I was approached by one of the attendees interested in learning more about Microsoft’s Private Cloud strategy and offerings.  We had a very engaging discussion and I promised that I’d provide him with some resources to learn more.  After  thinking about it more, rather than just sharing with him, I thought I’d post it here so that everyone can benefit.

• Microsoft Private Cloud Website
• Microsoft Private Cloud Whitepaper (compares/contrasts Microsoft’s private cloud solutions versus VMware)
• Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Whitepaper
• Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Services Solution Brief
• Microsoft Cloud Computing Solution Accelerators
• Microsoft Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises Whitepaper (by the way, this tool is running within the Windows Azure cloud)
• TechNet TechNet Magazine Article, “Cloud Computing: Architecting a Microsoft Private Cloud”
• Microsoft Private Cloud Solution Hub

There’s a ton of information in the form of whitepapers, presentations, videos, demos, and software downloads referenced by the links above.  This should hopefully be a good start to understanding the breadth of the Microsoft offerings as it relates to private cloud and building out your own private cloud infrastructure.

Enjoy!

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