IaaS for Azure and inclusion of cloud use in enterprise agreements has helped Microsoft’s cloud services gain momentum, says general manager Mike Neil.

Microsoft’s Mike Neil said the Windows Azure cloud can have joined the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) competition only last April, but he said the chart of Azure IaaS growth “looks more like a flagpole than a hockey stick.”

Azure were primarily a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), a developer’s platform with Visual Studio and other tools available in Hyper-V and Windows Server settings. Azure IaaS came out of beta only seven months ago, while the PaaS version became available in preview form within the fall of 2009. Perhaps this is why supported IaaS have been available any such couple of minutes that its use “looks more like a flagpole” — a spike represents both pent-up demand and a comparatively small base on which to begin adding customers. Now, Neil said Azure is adding 1,000 customers per week and Azure revenues are up 100% year over year; that comes with the PaaS revenues in addition to IaaS.

Neil is the administrative who helped establish the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor and who’s now general manager of Azure. When there has been a slowdown or freeze up in Azure’s staging API on the end of October, it was Neil who reported to Qi Lu, president of Online Services, and Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools business, on what went wrong.

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Neil says that reporting process is a routine that Microsoft has incorporated into its culture. The purpose of it can be to continuously improve Azure’s uptime, not place blame on individuals. “It is not a blaming process. Our culture says an incident is a learning experience. I should fix this before it bites me within the butt. We take these learnings and translate them for customer use in addition,” he said in an interview earlier this month.

Implicit within the comment is the undeniable fact that Microsoft is running its own technologies to power Azure, Hyper-V, Windows Server, System Center with its Azure release pack, and its own Azure cloud software, and therefore it is going to have the ability to get the utmost out of them. It wants these components to give highly reliable operations at the new scale of cloud computing. That scale dwarfs the enterprise operations using Microsoft that preceded it. In keeping with documents filed in locations where it has built cloud datacenters, Microsoft invests $450 million to $500 million in an important new data center, reminiscent of the only outside Chicago, designed to carry 300,000 servers.

The more reliably it operates its cloud datacenters, the greater the possibility it has to convince customers to interact in two-tiered, hybrid cloud computing through Microsoft. Essentially, at the reliability front, Microsoft’s record, while shorter, is nearly as good as anyone’s. Certainly one of its few major outages was the eight-hour Leap Day failure on Feb. 29, 2012. It published an entire disclosure of what had gone wrong with misdated security certificates setting off a cascading shutdown of servers.

Neil said Microsoft will complete root cause analysis of its end of October service slowdowns and disruptions and publish a post mortem on it to boot. “We’ve been pretty forthright with customers. Enterprise customers appreciate that. Our competitors were a bit more opaque,” he said.

In an try to further engage enterprise customers, Microsoft is including whatever hours of Azure use that a customer wants in its Enterprise agreements. “That has greatly reduced friction for patrons” getting started with Azure, he said. They’ve a predictable cloud bill stated of their overall Microsoft contract, which they like to a bill that dips to a $10,000 low one month and a $100,000 high the following. “It seriously is not like your cellphone bill once you come again from Europe,” says Neil, with a wry nod to roaming charges.

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