I see this as an area where Microsoft could pull out a big win. Imagine if, instead of their half-baked BigTable clone that they just released, they had instead put 1000 or so brains on the problem of distributing a single SQL Server database across N machines.
Scaling out to a dozen DB servers that master/slave their way to scalability is no fun, but it's solved. The problem is that you're currently required to do it yourself. It would rock to be able to outsource that to the cloud.
I want to toss my ASP.NET application up into the Microsoft Cloud, where it will figure out how many webservers it needs to spread itself across and how many database servers it needs to fire up to handle the load it's seeing. And I want it to pretend like it's a single webserver talking to a single DB instance on a single box.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have the skills to pull that off. I sure hope they're working on it.
Imagine if, instead of their half-baked BigTable clone that they just released, they had instead put 1000 or so brains on the problem of distributing a single SQL Server database across N machines.
Unfortunately brains don't scale, so you're better off using one huge brain, like Michael Stonebraker.
Scaling out to a dozen DB servers that master/slave their way to scalability is no fun, but it's solved. The problem is that you're currently required to do it yourself. It would rock to be able to outsource that to the cloud.
I want to toss my ASP.NET application up into the Microsoft Cloud, where it will figure out how many webservers it needs to spread itself across and how many database servers it needs to fire up to handle the load it's seeing. And I want it to pretend like it's a single webserver talking to a single DB instance on a single box.
Say what you will about Microsoft, but they have the skills to pull that off. I sure hope they're working on it.