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Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...
Posted By: JDQuackersDate: 10/31/12 2:30 p.m.

In Response To: Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship... (XXLChicken)


:
: http://news.yahoo.com/halo-4-first-major-game-backed-windows-azure-090032137.html

: An article about Halo 4 and Windows Azure. As a guy with no knowledge of
: cloud computing and Windows Azure, can someone please explain to me the
: benefits of having Halo 4 backed by Azure other than allowing for upgrades
: being made to the network without bringing it down?

There are a lot of advantages to cloud computing but many of them are transparent to the end users.

A perceived benefit of cloud computing for the end user is high availability (when a service is designed with the cloud in mind), such than if a regional node goes down, the user should theoretically be none the wiser. Recently a region of Amazon's cloud service went down, and it still brought down a number of websites (like Reddit), because none of them were designed for the cloud and did not do a good enough job of offloading their required services to another service node.

For Microsoft, one key advantage is the rapid scalability of the infrastructure with respect to cost. This will increase even more so as more games begin to take advantage of Azure. If multiple backends for multiplayer games are using the Azure platform, they can scale appropriately to balance demand for their respective networks as traffic increases/decreases per game. All of this is on the same hardware, without Microsoft needing to add new racks of servers for a new game. Instead they basically "install" the "game backend" onto the "cloud" (I'm vastly over-simplifying here), and the cloud infrastructure takes care of the rest.

Of course, if the backend costs can be minimized for Microsoft that might mean that the cost savings are passed onto the customer (HHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... *cough*, heh.. sorry)

Anyway, cloud computing is a very great concept, but there's still a lot of gaps in the technology and most importantly in the infrastructure that need to be closed before it's truly the "ideal" solution. The next generation of server hardware is starting to bridge the technology gap, but most solutions are simply too cost prohibitive at this point for widespread usage.

Message Index



Replies:

You thought War Games took place on a ship...Arithmomaniac 10/31/12 1:38 p.m.
     Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...XXLChicken 10/31/12 1:48 p.m.
           Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...JDQuackers 10/31/12 2:30 p.m.
           Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...stabbim 10/31/12 2:55 p.m.
           Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...Jironimo 10/31/12 3:11 p.m.
                 Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...Jironimo 10/31/12 3:13 p.m.
           The cloud is a future I'm excited for!serpx 10/31/12 4:27 p.m.
     Re: You thought War Games took place on a ship...Ragashingo 10/31/12 2:47 p.m.



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