Nuno Filipe Godinho : AppFabric

BUILD WINDOWS CONFERENCE 2011 – Keynote 2

NunoGodinho — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:57:16 GMT

Satya Nadella - President of Server and Tools Business @ Microsoft

Connected Devices and Continuous Services

Design Point

Elastic resources
Composable services
data as a namespace

Expose data as a first class namespace for other developers to use

identity & access
continuous delivery

This design point was the base for building Windows Azure and the Windows Server 8

Scenario: Building a Metro-Style Application with Jason Zander – Corporate VP, Visual Studio @ Microsoft

Visual Studio 2010 & Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio – September

Managed Service Configurations

Allow you to create several configurations for the same cloud service, like Staging, QA, Production, and so on.

Advanced Diagnostics, including profiling is now available on Windows Azure
Visual Studio 11 has now the Productivity tools included in the base and not has an extension
Now available to search for Copy & Paste code, even small sections of the code
Visual Studio 11

Designer for DirectX also available with supports for effects, alpha blending, and more.
Diagnostics of DirectX viewing that gives you the frames that were rendered
Diagnostics from DirectX views included with call stack

Announcements:

Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview
Windows Azure SDK 1.5
Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8

App Platform and Application LifeCycle Management (ALM)

Application Platform – Scott Guthrie – Corporate VP, Server & Tools Business @ Microsoft

ASP.NET MVC 4

new Style for the default site, and with security and more elements already wired up.
DOM Explorer also available for Web Apps
HTML Inspector is now available inside Visual Studio
Live Design to enable the Page Inspector as a different Pane that allows you to view the Page Inspector and the code side by side.
Bundeling and Minification

we reference a folder and it bundles on the server side all the contents of the folder and send it to the customer as a single and minified file

Async and away language capabilities available on C# and VB.NET

Enhances greatly the performance both in .NET 4.5 and Windows Server 8

There’s a new Mobile ASP.NET MVC template to create a new Mobile app, and also we can start using a already build ASP.NET MVC 4 project and mobile enhance it using:

jQuery.Mobile.MVC NuGet Package

jQuery.Mobile will shipped as now part of the ASP.NET and Visual Studio from now on.
This also adds a new file called _Layout.Mobile.cshtml

Will override the layout when the site is called by a mobile device

Supports iPhone, Windows Phone or Android

.NET 4.5 and Windows Server 8 support WebSockets deeply

WebSocket API in .NET 4.5 that allows us to connect to WebSocket from everywhere.

Deployment

Add Windows Azure Deployment Project is now available in every project type and will add immediately the Cloud Service project, configure and them deploy it to Windows Azure.

ALM – Jason Zander – Corporate VP, Visual Studio @ Microsoft

Hosted TFS Preview – Visual Studio Team Foundation Server in Windows Azure

SaaS – Software as a Service
Visual Studio 11 and ALM is using SCRUM Template
Easily add user stories, make the sprint planning, create tasks, Task Board in order to manage the stand up meetings
Works directly in Visual Studio 2010 with a specific patch

Announcements

ASP.NET MVC 4

Windows Server 8

High availability & management
Virtualization & cloud

Built on top of a high availability platform
Taken some parts of Windows Azure into this version

App Platform
Identity & secure access

claims-base identity

Note: There is a huge symmetry between Windows Azure and Windows Server
Capabilities – Bryon Surace – Senior Project Manager @ Microsoft

Storage

New File Services Manager
Storage Spaces
You don’t need a Phd in Storage, just connect the disks

Networking

Multiple High-Speed NICS, previously available only on HPC

Virtualization

Hyper-V supports now using a virtual disk from a file share
Now in Windows Server 8 we can move a disk from one machine to a remote file share without stopping anything.

Announcement

Windows Server 8 Developer Preview is already available for download

Windows Azure

High cadence of releases
Current features

Compute
Database
Storage
Virtual machines
CDN
Caching
Virtual Network
Service Bus
Marketplace
Business Intelligence
Access Control

Key services

Database Platform

Reporting
SQL Azure
SQL Server
Windows Azure Storage
SQL Data Sync

Data Marketplace

eBay uses Bing Translator DataSet from Data Marketplace to translate the texts

Access Control Service

Scenario: Build a Metro-Style application with Identity & Access Control using Windows Azure ACS – John Shewchuk – Technical Fellow @ Microsoft

How to Build the Margie’s Travel app with ACS

Using ACS and Windows 8 Security APIs
All of this code is available on the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8

Windows Azure Announcements

Windows Azure Service Bus September release
Windows Azure Geo-Replication now enabled by default in Windows Azure Storage
Windows Azure Marketplace Expansion

Additional 25 Countries available
New Bing Data

Hybrid Scenario – Jeff Sandquist (Senior Director, Channel Nine @ Microsoft) and Dan Fernandez (Senior Director @ Microsoft)

Using Service Bus Messaging

Topics ( Reliable Messaging )

Connected Devices and Continuous Services

Opportunity

Windows Azure
Windows Server 8
Visual Studio 11

Personal Notes

This was a very interesting Keynote that showed up some very cool things, like Visual Studio 11 that looks very interesting, and very slick, Windows Server 8 that is really a Server OS that leverages the elasticity that we love in the cloud, and that can help a lot make our businesses better, but the things that really impressed me was the scale up and Hyper-V capabilities of it and that it was built to leverage and use the Windows Azure and Cloud lessons that we’ve learned and bring them into our company.

Of course if you know me I’m a more Windows Azure guy and so Windows Azure was really very impressive also, and mainly the geo-replication of Windows Azure Storage is huge, because we now have the capability of having our storage replicated in more than one Windows Data Center, and this is done automatically without any need of change. This is huge in terms of disaster recovery and security of your data, since in the end of the day we don’t want to lose anything. Also the usage of Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Messaging is very interesting and will enable us to make more reliable solutions that is very important. So I’d say, great job Microsoft and continue to invest on those and that leveraging between Windows Azure and Windows Server 8 is very interesting and I’ll dig more in order to see exactly how it will work.

Finally the new capability that Windows Azure brings to allow that any project can be changed into a Cloud project with a single selection in the context menu is very good since it allows us to really start taking more Windows Azure into account.

Some Q&A about Windows Azure AppFabric Caching

NunoGodinho — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:59:12 GMT

Today someone asked me about Windows Azure AppFabric Caching, and how it works and so I thought it would be interesting to do a blog post about it, with the Questions and Answers for everyone to see and comment and even ask more, to complete it.

Question: What are the Cache Sizes available in the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service?

Answer: 128 MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB

Question: What happens when provisioning Windows Azure AppFabric Caching in the Portal?

Answer: When you do the provisioning of the Caching Service, you define the Cache Size you want to use, and so that Cache Size is Reserved for you in the Internal Cluster of Cache Machines that are associated with the Service.

Question: Is Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Cache Size Always Available?

Answer: Yes, the complete size is always Reserved for you only.

Question: Is Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Cache Size all stored in the same Machine?

Answer: No. Caching Service has a Distributed Architecture and so it spreads your cache size across several machines.

Question: Security is very important and it’s important to understand how does Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service works in terms of Security? How can we define the security of the Data?

Answer: Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service is highly integrated with the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS), and so that is the way to define the security that will be used to access the cache.

Question: What about the Princing? What is the pricing associated with Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service?

Answer: The Price depends on the Caching Size you choose.

128 MB cache for $45.00/month

256 MB cache for $55.00/month

512 MB cache for $75.00/month

1 GB cache for $110.00month

2 GB cache for $180.00/month

4 GB cache for $325.00/month

But you have it free until August 1st, 2011. More about this check here.

If you have any more questions just ask away and I’ll try to answer them.

MIX11 – Day One Keynote – Developer Platform Part

NunoGodinho — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:38:53 GMT

Scott Guthrie ( Corporate Vice President )

Shipped over the Last 12 months:

Visual Studio 2010
ASP.NET 4.0
ASP.NET MVC 3
WebMatrix & IIS Express
Razor Syntax

Launched the nuGet project

Contributed for Open Source projects like jQuery

ASP.NET MVC 3

Announced Today a Refresh for ASP.NET MVC 3 tools that include:

HTML 5
jQuery 1.5 + Modernizr
Entity Framework 4.1 (Shipping officially today)

Includes the CodeFirst capability

Scaffolding support in VS2010
Preinstalled nuGet Packages

WebMatrix

Popular WebMatrix Helpers

Facebook
PayPal
Twitter
TemplateMonster.com
WuFoo
polldaddy
bit.ly
UserVoice
get Satisfaction
Scribd
DISQUS
Foursquare
PlanCast
EventBrite
GroupOn

Web Application Ecosystem

Several OpenSource Web Applications

Orchard CMS

Built on ASP.NET MVC 3

Windows Azure

Focus on Apps not Infrastructure
Scale elastically
Pay only for the resources that you use
Announcements

v2 of Access Control Service
Caching
CDN
Traffic Manager

Niels Hartviq – Umbraco CMS

A new Windows Azure option available in
Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco available on CodePlex

Microsoft TechDays 2010 Portugal – “Workflow Services and Windows Server AppFabric – How they work great together”

NunoGodinho — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:49:27 GMT

So in TechDays 2010 Portugal I did a session about “Workflow Services and Windows Server AppFabric – How they work great together”. Basically this session was sliced in the following parts:

Introduction
- What are the Workflow Services?
- What is Windows Server AppFabric?
How to achieve Coordination Of Work
How to achieve Message Correlation
How to do Monitoring with Windows Server AppFabric
How to do Persistence with Windows Server AppFabric
In terms of Farm Availability, How does AppFabric helps

So these were the several topics of my presentation that can be found here.

MIX10 – Day One – Designing and Delivering Scalable and Resilient Web Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:24:41 GMT

Ron Jacobs – Sr. Technical Evangelist – Microsoft

http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs

“Do the simplest thing that will possibly Work”

Scalability – Able to support the required quality of Service as the system load increases – Wiktionary

Typical Web Architecture

Users
- Need a to get routed to same machine (ex. stick sessions)
Web Tier
Data Tier

Problem: “It’s simple but isn’t scalable”

Solutions:

Keep your data near where she’s processing
- Ex. Cache
- Cache is scoped to machines / process
  - machine dies
  - processes recycle
- Cache memory
- Imagine “What if?”
  - You could have as much cache as you wanted?
  - You could share giant parts of your applications?
  - What about if it was free?
- You have: Windows Server App Fabric

What is AppFabric Caching?

An explicit, distributed, in-memory application cache for all kinds of data
- Caching clients can be across machines or processes
- Clients access the cache as if it was a large single cache
  - This creates a Unified Cache View.
- Doesn’t need to be recycled or recompiled when some other process or machine is added

Data Distribution

Scale on Data Size – more machines => more memory to cache
Scale on Cache Throughput – more machines => keys are distributed across machines => better throughput
It’s better to scale with several machines that with a large machine with lots of memory, because the throughput

Take control over AppFabric Cache using the DataCacheFactory class.

Steps:

Configure the AppFabric Configuration Store
Copy the Client Dlls
Update the Web.Config to host the AppFabric Caching

Supports:

Clients: .NET 4.0 and 3.5
Cache Server: .NET 4.0

Administration

PowerShell commands
- get-CacheHelp
Performance Counters

AppFabric Cache Codeplex Tool – http://mdcadmintool.codeplex.com

Security

Domain-Based Security Option
- Domain Account / Load Account based Authentication
- Only authorized servers can join the clusters

AppFabric Caching Logical Hierarchy

Machine –> Cache Host –> Named Caches –> Regions –> Cache Items –> Objects

Host
- Physical processes hosting AppFabric Caching instance
Named Caches
- Can span across machines
Regions
- Groups that you want to treat together

Types of Data

Reference Data
- Primary Read Only
- ex. Catalog Data
Activity Data
- Read-Write not shared
- Ex. Shopping cart
Resource Data
- Read-write and Shared
- Ex. Auction Data / Seat Assignment

Reference Data

Performance
- Catalog data doesn’t change often
- Unnecessary network cost to access from different machines
- Solution – Local Cache
Bulk Get
- Bulk Fetch from region
  - 200-300k of calls per second
  - better performance

Activity Data

Session Integration
- Just define SessionState to Custom mode and use the “SessopmStoreProvider” to use AppFabric Caching
Availability
- It’s possible to define AppFabric Caching to use High Availability and replicate the cached data

Resource Data

Optimistic Locking
- GetCacheItem returns a version object
- Every update to an object internally increments it’s version
- Supply the version obtained along with the Put/Remove
Pessimistic Locking
- GetAndLock return a lock handle
- Doesn’t lock the Get

Resource and Activity Data

Get Cache Events Notifications
Register on any client to notify changes
Batched Notifications

Scalable Notifications

Register the notification for a specific key
Map keys to partition
Poll Required nodes
Nodes return list of changes

How to get this

Use at the Web Platform Installer, on the Options to enable the Enterprise Tab
Afterwards just select the Enterprise tab and install it

View the endpoint.tv Shows Channel 9

PDC09 – Day Three – Building Scalable and Reliable Applications with Windows Azure

NunoGodinho — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:22:41 GMT

Brad Calder – Director/Architect

Data Building Blocks

Types of Storage in Windows Azure

Volatile Storage

Local Storage
Caches (eg. AppFabricCache and MemCache)

Persistent Storage

Windows Azure Storage

Blobs

Provide interface for storing name files

Tables

structured storage.

Queues

reliable storage and delivery of messages

SQL Azure

Storage Account Performance at commercial Availability

Capacity

100TB

Throughput

Up to a few hundred megabytes

Partitioning of Data Objects

Load balancing is an internal concept of Windows Azure Storage

Allows the system to automatically scale out access to your data to meet its peek traffic demands

What matters to the application is the partitioning key used for objects

All objects with the same partition key are always grouped

Per Object/Partitioning Performance for Commercial Availability

Throughput

Single Queue and single table partition

Up to 500 transactions per second

Single Blob

small reads/writes up to 30 MB/s
large reads/writes up to 60 MB/s

Scaling Computation

Compute Service Model – What is describes?

The topology of your service

Types of roles and their binaries
How the roles are connected

Configuration of the service

How many instances of each role type
Application specific configuration settings
How many update domains you need

Best Practices

Due to application failures, upgrades or hardware failure

Use multiple instances

Queue Workflow Concepts

Windows Azure Queue Provides

Guarantee delivery

Worker dequeues Message and marks it as Invisible
Worker deletes Message when finished processing

Note: If worker role crashes, message becomes visible for another worker to process

A message may be processed more than once
Assume messages put into same queue can be processed in any order

Best Practice

Make work items idempotent

Scaling Queue Throughput

Batch Work Items into Blob

Group together many work items into a blob
Queue up pointer to the Blob for the message

Use Multiple Queues

Job Manager

Responsible form managing the execution of the Queues

Work Items

Continuation for Long Running Work Items

Want to continue on failover
High level approach

Bread work item into smaller and repeatable steps
Record progress

Lifecycle Management

In-place Rolling updates

Specify the number of upgrade domains in service model

Breaks your roles evenly over the number of domains

Rolling upgrade

Walk each upgrade domain one at a time
Upgrade just the roles in the current domain

Benefits

Minimizes availability loss

Only one domain of roles are restarted at a time

Allows local state to be uses across upgrades
Caches application upgrade issues early

Detect upgrade issues after first few domains

Versioning with Rolling Updates

Always assume you will have old and new running side by side in your service
Version Everything

Protocols, Schemas, Messages and everything else

Windows Azure Tables Schema change

Have a version property in each entity
Types of Schema changes

Adding a non-key property

Perform similar step update process
Update “IgnoreMissingProperties”

Removing a non-key property

Perform similar upgrade process
Update “IgnoreMissingProperties”

Changes in Partition Key or Row Key

Most uses schema change is adding a non-key property

PDC09 – Day Two – Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 from the Inside out

NunoGodinho — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:15:25 GMT

Bob Schmidt – Program Manager

For WF4:

Programs are data
Scheduler-based program execution
- stackless & serializable
Runtime-mediated code rendezvous
Natural Control flow
- run it the way you think of it

Authoring

WF is an activity

Can author programmatically or using XAML
Can contain other activities
Separate base classes for activities that return a value

WF program is a definition from which many instances can be created

Each instance of an activity has a unique environment (visible data values)

Execution

WF runtime just sees activities and not sequence or parallel or recurrence

WF runtime is a referee that enforces the rules of the work
CacheMetadata is how an activity describes itself

WF runtime knows when an activity is done
An activity can schedule the execution of a child activity and be notified upon its completion

There can be multiple, distinct method invocations per activity
Can Express all kinds of patterns (control flow)

There can be multiple paths of invocation …

Scheduler

WorkItem represents the invocation of a method
WorkItems can be created by:

Activity Code
External Code

Flow of execution

The Activity Code or the External Code Add a WorkflowItem
Them the elements get Pushed or Enqueued for execution
Afterwards the Scheduler will Pop it and execute it

Details

Scheduler per program instance
Manages an ordered list of work items

Threading Model

One thread at a time is used to process work items for a program instance

Simplifies the programming model of activities
Thread may differ work items in the same instance

WF runtime uses host-provided SynchronizationContext
Standard TLS mechanisms do not apply to WF

Instead use WF Execution Properties – names properties visible for a part of a workflow
Attached / detached from the current environment by the WF runtime before / after work item invocation

Activities should not block this thread

Bookmarks

Problems

What happens when your programs need to wait for input?
We want a “Zero footprint” WaitForInput()

Bookmark

A named resumption point in a WF program
Resumption will schedule an activity’s callback method
WF runtime mediates resumption – no need for the instance to be in memory

WCF Receive activity is built on top of bookmarks in order to give access to this possibility when using Workflow Services

Persistence

lets you pause an instance, save it somewhere & resume it later

has no affinity to a WF host instance, CLR instance, thread, process or machine

instances of WF are serializable

A CLR Stack is not serializable, but in WF program a stack only exists transiently, during work item execution

Sometimes you want a “no persist zone”

Automatic during execution of an async activity

Details of persistence are deliberately separate from the machinery of WF runtime

Serializable Instances

Contains

Work Item list
Bookmarks
Data (arg and values)

Environment for all executing activity instances

Activity instance info (callbacks, execution props)
Custom Data from persistence participants

Doesn’t contain

Workflow Definition
Why?

several instances can share the same workflow definition
management of definitions is responsibility of the host

PDC09 – Day One – Application Server Technologies – Present & Future

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:23:09 GMT

Cloud: Fifth Generation of computing

Cloud - 2010+
SOA - 2000s
Web - 1990s
Client-Server - 1980s
MainFrame – 1970s

Technology Disruptions

Cheap Processing and Storing
Virtualization
Advances in Networking
Advances in Web Technologies
Emerge of Service Platforms

Application Trends

Service-Oriented
Composite Applications
Model Driven
Scale-out
Elastic
Failure Resilient
Always available
Multi-tenant
Staged Production

AppFabric

Windows Server and Windows Azure platform
Composition

Bases

Windows Azure or Windows Server with Microsoft .NET Framework Available

Main Capabilities

High Availability
Scale Out
Multi-Tenant
Management

High Level Services

Service Bus
Caching
Workflow Hosting
Services Hosting
Monitoring
Access Control

2010 Wave

WCF and WF

Customer Momentum

Adoption of WCF and WF

> 27% year over year growth in developer adoption
Top 5 technologies used by ISV’s

.NET 4.0

Configuration simplification
Service Discovery with WS-Discovery support
Routing Services
REST service improvements

Intuitive flowchart modeling style
New activity model and runtime
Fully declarative authoring and composition
Designer performance and re-hosting
Change from XOML to XAML

Deep integration between WCF and WF

Workflow Services with Supporting activities
Integrated hosting and messaging
Enterprise grade messaging for workflows

Windows AppFabric

Manage Services and Workflows

Infrastructure for enhanced workflow and service hosting, configuration and control
Integration with IIS Manager and PowerShell

Monitor services and Workflows

Infrastructure for storing workflow and service monitoring
Dashboard for information’s regarding the usage

Distributed in-memory application cache (Previously known as “Velocity”
Server/Service symmetry

Symmetric application development, deployment and management
Common scale-out and availability fabric

Server/Services Connectivity

Service Bus for Connectivity
Access Control

Announcing Microsoft Biztalk Server 2009 R2

Customer Momentum

Adoption of Biztalk Server

10kç customers
80% global 1000

Innovations

Platform alignment

Windows Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 R2
VS2010

Productivity Gains
B2B Scenarios Made Easy

Summary

.NET 4.0 (WCF/WF)
Windows Server AppFabric
Microsoft Biztalk 2009 R2

Futures

Server-Service Symmetry

CTP of Windows Azure platform AppFabric in CY10

Common App & Programming Model

End-to-End Composite Applications Model
WCF Service Authoring Simplicity and Scale
WF Activity and Rule Libraries and Tooling

AppFabric

Loosely coupled Message-oriented Event-Driven
Multi-Tenancy

Common End-to-End Management

End-To-End deployment, configuration and management
Dashboard for management

Biztalk Server

Enterprise connector to the AppFabric
Deep platform alignment

Summary

2010 Wave

Rich Framework, server and tools for building service-oriented and distributed Applications
Build upon your existing investments
Scale & Performance Windows Server AppFabric
S+S – Symmetric Host, Development and Deployment

Futures

Agility – Common Application & Programming Model
Elastic Scale and Continuous Availability – Rich AppFabric Services
Enterprise Productivity – Management Model
Multiple Workloads – Unified Application Server for ASP.NET, Biztalk Server

Very interesting in terms of leveraging all the capabilities of “Dublin”, WCF, WF, Velocity, Multi-Tenancy, Scaling Out and so on.