Nuno Filipe Godinho : SaaS

PDC09 – Day One – SQL Azure Present & Futures

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:37:57 GMT

Data Platform as a Service

In the future will have Reporting, Data Analytics

SQL Azure Database

Relational Database service

SQL Server technology foundation
Scalable
Symmetrical

SQL Azure Provisioning

Each account has zero or more servers

Azure wide provisioned in a common portal
Billing instrument

Each server has one or more databases

contains metadata about the databases
Unit of authentication and security
Unit of Geo-location
The server is a logical grouping of you DBs

Each database has standard SQL Object

Unit of consistency
Contains users, tables, views, indexes, and so on,

Global Availability

North Europe
Southeast Asia
North and South USA

Futures

Goal: Provide and end-to-end experience for enterprise departmental apps and Saas ISVs scenarios
Improved Tools

Today we have

VS, SSMS, ADO.NET, ADO.NET Data Service

Data Backups

Multiple replicas of all databases with automatic failover. System backups for additional protection
Use Database Clone to create a clone of the Database with every capabilities of the original one
During 1H 2010

Continuous Backups

Configurable retention and lag period
Backups available for read operations
Local and regional options
During 2H 2010

Operational Models

SaaS

Provisioning APIs for ISVs
Template database support
Meta-data tracking
Additional billing scenarios

Scale-out support –Today

Databases and workloads partitioning is a classic

Better price/performance
Levels of throughput not possible with a single machine

What SQL Azure addresses

Highly available service on top of commodity hardware
Zero administration

There will be available several options and the 10GBs of space is not an issue

Customer Feedback

Add support for profiler, DMV’s
SQLCLR
and much more

Codename “Vidalia”

Sharing to trustworthy collaboration

Cloud is a grate place to connect
Empowers multiple parties
Businesses need control

Very interesting demos, need to see more about it.

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.

PDC09 – Day One – Software + Services Identity Roadmap Update

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:01:55 GMT

Announcement: WIF – Windows Identity Foundation RTW

Extensions to .NET for claim-based identity
http://www.microsoft.com/wif

Interesting Changes

“Genera” Server is now called “Active Directory Federation Services 2.0” and comes as part of Windows Server 2008 and not separately.
“Genera” Framework is now called “Windows Identity Foundation” and is an extension for .NET
Windows CardSpace “Geneva” is now called “Windows CardSpace 2.0” and is the usage of WIF with CardSpace

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “5”

Identity Challenges

Custom Authentication
Grant Access to users at partner organizations
Mash up: single sign on across applications and across companies
Support browser, rich and mobile clients

Now using WIF and ADFS 2.0 in order to get the Challenges solved

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010

Identity Challenges

Identity Flow

Client
Web Server
App Server
Sharepoint Content
Back-End Web Services

Use Customer Identity Provider

Several Authentication Providers like

Integrated Authentication
ASP.NET Membership
Live ID
Custom Membership

Automatic & Secure identity delegation
Authorization over Application specific roles
“No-credential” access to WebService

Directions

Authorization - .NET ACS CTP

Claims-based, rules driven authorization for REST Web Services
Developed with Google and Yahoo

OAuth Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP)
Simple Web Tokens (SWT)

Integrating with WIF and ADFS 2.0
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dotnettservices

OpenID

Key part of the Identity Management System

50.000 destination sites
US Government sites to be OpenID enabled

Major portals are OpenID providers

Yahoo, Google

Challenges

Usability
Security
Client Software

‘M’ Model : System Identity

Allow more interesting queries in terms of security tracking

Very interesting topics and certainly to keep seeing more information about it.

SaaS Architecture

NunoGodinho — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:30:35 GMT

When building Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions one of the things that is very important to consider is the Multi-Tenancy of the Database, and the different approaches that available in order to achieve the best option.

The option is always the same in every part of any solution, and this is from a Fixed Solution to a Fully Configurable Solution, and a SaaS solutions normally starts somewhere in the middle, that is when different customers can have different functionalities and even different UX. But a very important thing to acknowledge is the fact that in order to maintain this kind of differences we need a data model that needs to be Multi-Tenant, and so the next choice to make is the Multi-Tenancy approach that will be used, and it can be:

Separate Databases for each Customer
- Isolation, The most Isolation we can have, and the one we can be sure that no customer can access other customer’s data
- Customization, Each customer can have different data model without affecting other customers
- Performance, The fact that the data is isolated allows that the several customers have performances accessing that are dependent only on their amount of data, and not other customers data.
- Manageability, Whenever a customer has a problem with the data on the solution, or needs a migration, or backups are easier to achieve since they are isolated.
Same Database, Separate Schemas for each Customer
- Isolation, This is in the middle way since we have from one side the data isolated since we have different schemas for each customer, but all resides on the same database, simplifying the number of databases that reside on our server.
- Customization, Each customer can have different data models without affecting others
- Performance, The fact that the data resides on the same database as other customers, the amount of data from other customers can affect the performance of accessing the data, but of course this can be simplified by using Partitioning on the database.
- Manageability, Whenever a customer has a problem with the data on the solution or even a migration it’s still not so hard since we have different schemas for each customer, but for separate backups this is not that easy.
Same Database, Same Schema for each Customer
- Isolation, This is the less isolated solution for data since everything reside exactly on the same tables, and database, and then this will simplify the number of Databases and Database objects on the server.
- Customization, This makes that every customer have the same schema, and so customization is only possible using approaches like:
  - Having several Custom columns on the tables, like, Custom1, Custom2, and so on.
  - Having a table for customizable columns, like ColumnName, ColumnType, ColumnValue.
- Performance, The fact that the data is nor isolated makes that the amount of data from other customers affect the performance of accessing data, but of course this can also be achieved using Partitioning on the database based on the for instance in the TenantID.
- Manageability, This becomes harder since everyone's data is on the same tables and so the separation of the backups, as well as the manageability of the customers data becomes harder, but the possibility to run checks on customers data became easier since we always know at front the schema used for each customer.

A very interesting document regarding this subject is this one that is part of the MSDN site, and that is called “Multi-Tenant Data Architectures”. Another interesting reading about this subject is this article from Scott Mitchell in the 4GuysFromRolla community site about “Querying a Multi-Tenant Data Architecture”.

In order to know more about SaaS architecture and solutions I’ll suggest the following articles:

Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail, that explains the purpose of SaaS and why it’s interesting for customers and service providers.
Software as a Service (SaaS): An Enterprise Perspective, gives an insight of the need and advantages that SaaS can bring to Enterprises.

Hopes this can help you get started or even with your choices in terms of Multi-tenancy of Data.

Notes from the Windows Azure by David Chappell in ArCast.TV

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:18:44 GMT

I was viewing this ArCast.TV chapter about Windows Azure by David Chappell and I found that it would be interesting for me and for other people to get some notes about this, and so this post was created due to it.

We see in Cloud Computing two types of elements:

SaaS – Software as a Service

Examples:

SalesForce.Com
Microsoft

CRM Online (competitor of SalesForce.com)
Exchange Online
Sharepoint Online
and so on.

PaaS - Platform as a Service or Cloud Platforms

Competition in this space

Amazon (1st company in this space)

EC2 – we get Virtual Machines

Provide Virtual Machines in the Cloud that can be Windows or Linux, and after that those are your VM’s that you have to manage. Very different approach from Windows Azure.

Microsoft

Windows Azure - We give the Applications and the Virtual Machines are managed for us, without we ever need to manage a specific Virtual Machine

Components:

Windows Azure – Think of it as a Windows in the Cloud, of course this is not the same thing but is a nice way to make the analogy to it
Windows Azure Service Platform

.NET Services

Service Bus
Workflow Services
Access Control

SQL Data Services
Live Services

Google

AppEngine – Not like EC2 but more like Windows Azure

We give a Java or Phyton application and the will be place on VMs like the Windows Azure, but this is completely transparent for user
All about Supporting Web Applications
Not possible to have a Batch Service like in Azure
Only 10 seconds available to process Responses, or else the AppEngine will shutdown the Request

What’s the best? EC2, Windows Azure or AppEngine?

It depends on the application your building and the way you’ll build it because the approaches are different and so it’s important to get the most correct Technology to your problem.

ISV’s Strategy

In case of a Windows ISV then is normal to think about Windows Azure in order to address the SaaS space.

Enterprise Strategy

Often enterprises look at the cloud only as a way to save money, and move the current apps unchanged into the cloud, but that is not the purpose of Windows Azure since now this is not possible, but of course there will be attractive to move existing applications into the cloud.
Of course all depends on the applications, because it’s possible if we have a Web Application with a SQL Server Database, because in this case we can move the Web Application to the Windows Azure and the SQL Server Database into the SQL Data Services.

What this makes?

Application more manageable
More Scalable
More Extensible
and so on.

Get Started using Windows Azure in www.azure.com.

Federated Security with Windows Live ID (PT/EN)

NunoGodinho — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:20:57 GMT

Being Windows Live ID one of the existing authentication modes and that has as big advantage the already existing infrastructure provided by Microsoft and with no cost associates, and also making the Single-Sign-On for several solutions that use Windows Live ID as the authentication mechanism, and if we add the fact that there are mode then 420 millions of registered users of Windows Live ID and more then 1 billion of authentications by day we see that this is a well known and with high used form of authentication. Of course we know that this values have to do with the usage of MSN Messenger, but we can capitalize the knowledge and trust from the users in our solutions. But when we look to enterprise solutions there can be situations that need to share authentication to our solutions between Windows Live ID and at the same time the users that exist on our enterprise and that are managed by Active Directory, LDAP or any other (Ex. An Online Store that we want to give customers the possibility of authenticating using Windows Live ID, and the Administrator Users are solutions from our Company, XPTO, that has their users registered on Active Directory.). In this cases what can we do?

The solution for this question is to use Federated Security. For this the Windows Live Platform Team made available a service that provides this and also published this very interesting article on MSDN where you can see how it works and how can we take advantage of it. I strongly suggest this reading.

Biztalk Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:54:00 GMT

Following our SaaS thoughts here is a very interesting article about Building Connected Enterprise Applications using Hosted Biztalk Services, that was made available on the June 2008 MSDN Magazine.

It's very interesting to see how Jon Flanders and Aaron Skonnard address this subject.