It's been four months since Microsoft took the official wraps off its cloud-computing initiative. However nevertheless fairly little still is recognized about the Azure platform and plans.The part of Azure which intrigued me probably the most was the cloud working method, code-named “Red Dog,” that is at its heart. Late last month, Microsoft allowed me entry to countless of the principals behind Red Puppy — everyone in the notorious father of VMS and NT, David Cutler, to the handful of top-dog engineers who assisted design and develop the various Red Dog core elements. More than the course of this week, I’m likely to be publishing a post each day about Red Dog.Beginning from scratchBefore the Red Dog running system or even the larger Azure stack was even a gleam in anyone;s eye, Corporate Vice President Amitabh Srivastava had the chance to do almost anything he needed. He could hand-pick a crew of the very best and brightest to develop a brand new Microsoft platform for that cloud.Srivastava, who admitted he's “extremely anti-process,” assembled a handful of engineers he knew from diverse Windows and Research assignments at Microsoft. He knew he wanted to keep the core group small and well-knit.“If you only have 20 people, you don;t need as a lot process. It;s not like trying to make sure 5,000 people are all on the same page.” (Only recently did the Red Puppy staff expand, with new services-specific hires from Ask, Yahoo and other non-Windows centric companies. The current headcount for the Red Puppy crew is about 150,
Office 2010 Download, Srivastava said)His first intended recruit was Dave Cutler, the father of NT and VMS. Cutler “didn;t need to write another OS,” Srivastava acknowledged, but his “weakness is that he loves coding” and solving hard problems. He convinced him to join the crew. Srivastava consulted with Todd Proebsting, a former Microsoft Researcher and director of the company;s Center for Software Excellence. He called a handful of other former colleagues: Storage expert Brad Calder; former Sun utility computing expert turned Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Yousef Khalidi; programming tool and OS specialist Hoi Vo; engineering whiz G.S. Rana; datacenter provisioning expert Hunter Hudson; and developer evangelist Manuvir Das.“The quality with the communication (between the group) affected the agility and the quality,” said Rana, the General Manager of Engineering for Red Dog. “Many us had worked together for a long time.”(For a Red Canine core-team “Who;s Who list,” check out this slide show.)After an initial two-plus-month fact-finding mission where the core crew met with several Microsoft services teams in Redmond and Silicon Valey, the Red Dog group had some suggestions of what they did and didn;t want to perform.“We said, let;s not try to copy Google or Amazon,” Srivastava recalled. “We said we;d run things rather differently.”The staff decided to keep their approach and their mission a secret, even in the Microsoft management. CEO Steve Ballmer knew Srivastava and his core group were functioning on one thing for that cloud, but that was about all he knew.“Steve (Ballmer) asked me ‘why are you hiring all our best people;” for the staff, Srivastava joked. But he didn;t share substantially, beyond his overall vision statement, along with the sometimes loose-lipped CEO.[Letting the 'Red Dog' cat out with the bag] –>