Nuno Filipe Godinho : Windows Azure Service Platform

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 – Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:56:04 GMT

Steve Marx – Technology Strategist

Now we can have the ability to have more than a Web and a Work Role, since we have several different types of Roles.

Example:

IIS Role
SMTP Role
…

Now the there is the new Storage API that is currently being shipped with the SDK and not only a sample.

Some new features:

Inter-role communication
Non-Http endpoints
Role instance lifecycle
VM Sizes
Full-trust in the Cloud
Local Storage

Upgrading the local storage

How to model you application

Draw the boxes and arrows
Each box is a role

Which receive traffic from the internet
Which need IIS?

Receive Traffic: Input Endpoints

Different ports on same domain
There’s always load balancing
Declared in ServiceDefinition.csdef
Handled by IIS

InputEndpoint

Defined the protocol, port and name of the endpoint that will opened in order to listen for the requests
Protocols supported

Http
Https
Tcp

RoleEnvironment is the class that allow us to communicate with the Windows Azure fabric, for example in order to know the Configurations

Aside about Email

Spammers will use Windows Azure then the IP ranges can get blacklisted

Best Practices: Use a relay service in order not to have your mails marked as SPAM

Send mail via a rely mail
Receive mail is fine

Searching

Lucene.NET

Popular search API
.NET port of original Java implementation

Index data

Bring index up to speed on startup
Continually update index

Serve searched (via WCF)

Asynchronous Work without a Queue

Queues deliver messages to one worker only
We need every worker to see the message

Solution

use Table instead

Build your own secondary index
Order references

Initialization of Roles

Now we have:

OnStart() – “busy” state, initialization
Run() – do work
OnStop() – traffic stops, graceful shutdown

Internal Endpoints

Declare endpoints in ServiceDefinition.csdef
API to find out what port to listen on RoleEnvironment in Order to know if the port or anything change about the endpoint since the last call

How to Get More RAM

RAMDiectory pouts everything in memory
Choose the VM Size:

Small
Medium
Large
Extra-Large

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.

Windows Azure TCO and ROI Calculator

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:30:51 GMT

One of the most asked questions about Windows Azure is what is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and the ROI (Return of Investment) that we have in order to decide if we are going or not into the cloud.

Based on this questions Windows Azure Team putted together a TCO and ROI Calculator that will help you make your decisions better, and also plan how much are you going to spend in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform in order to maintain your business going. This is very important because even when having things going into the cloud our management still need some predictability on the costs and also some numbers to support the decision of moving to the cloud.

Start predicting and planning your TCO and ROI using this calculator here.

Windows Azure November SDK and Tools release

NunoGodinho — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:37:32 GMT

There is already available the new November set of SDK and Tools for Windows Azure, that can be found here. Also you can see here more about the new .NET Services and also here on the Windows Azure Development Center for .NET Services. Read more in this post from the .NET Services Team.

There are some breaking changes in this version so check also this post from the team.

Windows Azure SDK July update

NunoGodinho — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:03:16 GMT

Windows Azure has a new SDK release that is now available. A very interesting new feature is the possibility of having several Roles per deployment, unlike what happened in earlier releases where we would only be able to have one Web Role and also a one Worker Role. Another interesting feature is now we have the possibility to chose between a normal ASP.NET Web Forms application and a ASP.NET MVC application as the Web Role.

Download the Visual Studio Tools here.

Download the Windows Azure SDK here.

More on Windows Azure Commercial Availability

NunoGodinho — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:14:51 GMT

Microsoft announced on 14th July the commercial availability of Windows Azure as I posted previously and now there are more information’s about the the same subject so I decided to write again on the subject.

Important elements to retain:

“During Community Technology Preview (CTP), services included in Windows Azure will be available without charge - subject to certain limits:

Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours

Cloud storage capacity: 50GB

Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day“

How Consumption is Measured:

How Consumption is Measured?
- Windows Azure
  - SLA
    - “(…)we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time (…)”
  - Compute time, measured in machine hours
  - Storage, measured in GB
  - Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure datacenter), measured in GB
  - Transactions
- SQL Data Services
  - SLA
    - “(…) will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. “Monthly Availability Percentage” for a specific customer database is the ratio of the time the database was available to customer to the total time in a month. Time is measured in 5-minute intervals in a 30-day monthly cycle. (…)”
  - Web Edition Relational Database includes:
    - Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
    - Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
    - Auto Scale with pay-as-you grow
    - Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.
  - Business Edition DB includes:
    - Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
    - Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
    - Auto Scale, Pay-as- you grow
    - Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
    - Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps
- NET Services
  - “(…)Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for .NET Services are equivalent to those specified above in the Windows Azure SLA. Due to inherent differences between the technologies, underlying SLA definitions and terms differ for .NET Services. Using the Service Bus module of .NET Services, customers will have connectivity between a customer’s service endpoint and our Internet gateway(…)”
  - Messages are charged to the customer in discrete blocks of 100,000 (“100k”) for each monthly billing period, meaning that
  - A customer who consumed 95,000 messages would be billed for 1x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
  - A customer who uses 150,000 messages in a billing period would be charged for 2x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
  - A customer who uses 20 million messages in a billing period would be charged

More information can be be found on the Windows Azure site.

Windows Azure Commercial Availability and Business Model announced

NunoGodinho — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:40:45 GMT

Just today in the WPC 2009 Microsoft announced the Commercial Availability and Business Model that will be used in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform, and so a brief info about the amounts involved.

Windows Azure
- Compute – 0.12 $ per hour
- Storage – 0.15 $ per GB by month stored
- Storage Transactions – 0.01 $ per 10K

SQL Data Services
- Web Edition – up to 1 GB relational Database – 9.99 $ per month
- Business Edition – up to 10 GB relational Database – 99.99 $ per month

.NET Services (includes Service Bus, Access Control)
- Messages – 0.15 $ per 100K message operations

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged:
- 0.10$ for inbound communications
- 0.15$ for outbound communications

Guarantee Availability:

at least 99,95 % for external connectivity
at least 99,9% for storage

Availability at launch will be Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the United States.

In the March 2010 timeframe we expect commercial availability to expand to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, and Taiwan.

More information's here.

Windows Azure Services Platform Changes

NunoGodinho — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:52:43 GMT

.NET Services July 2009 CTP Release

An one more CTP of Windows Azure was made available and this one has some interesting points like Windows 7 RC Support, easier setup, but of course the large amount of changes is in terms of connecting heterogeneous environments, in terms of:

Connect Applications and users
Interoperability by Default, very important since it supports now even more standards than before
Federation of Data, Messages, Identity and Access, that makes solutions more easier to interoperate between each other.

Of course this changes occur in the spectrum of the .NET Services Bus and Access Control, since the Workflow Services is now offline in order to incorporate more customer feedback.

Check more information here.

SQL Data Services

Now we can look at SQL Data Services as a real Database, and now give support for TSQL in SQL Data Services, of course in this release we only have a subset of TSQL, but this is a good way to go.

Of course there are differences between SQL Server on-Premise and SQL Data Services and some of they are:

“(…)

SDS is a multi-tenant system

The hardware resources are owned, hosted and maintained by Microsoft

SDS is a service

(…)”

So what’s in?

DDL
- FUNCTION
- INDEX
- PROCEDURE
- ROLE
- SCHEMA
- STATISTICS
- SYNONIM
- TABLE
- TRIGGER
- VIEW

DML
- SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE functionality
- DML triggers
- JOINs
- Transactions
- A large number of built-in functions (aggregates, math, date and time, ranking, etc.)

Manageability
- Query tuning via SET SHOWPLAN and SET STATISTICS
- Index tuning via create and drop index
- Statistic management via UPDATE STATISTICS
- Information schema views and system catalog views (e.g., sys.databases)
- Local HA is automatically provided as part of the service.
- Upcoming version of SSMS and VS tools will work against SDS

Ok very nice v1 of SQL Data Services, check more in this post from the SQL Data Services Team.

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.

Data Services – Can be ADO.NET or SQL – What’s the difference

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:18:41 GMT

Just a while ago I was talking about Data Services and suddenly a confusion between ADO.NET Data Services and SQL Data Services took place, because we were talking about different Data Services, and so in order to try to clarify the differences I remembered to write this post.

There are two types of Data Services that are:

SQL Data Services

Cloud – at this moment is being converted from ACE (Activity, Container and Entity) to TDS (Tabular Data Stream) as I’ve presented in this post.
In this case we are talking about a Database in the Cloud and the ultimate desire will be to just change the ConnectionString used.

ADO.NET Data Services aka. “Project Astoria”

This one is about making available a set of REST Services on top of ADO.NET

Highly Extensible:

Query Filtering (GET requests)
Operation Filtering (PUT, POST, DELETE, etc requests)
Making other Operations available with the same capabilities as the ones associated with ADO.NET Data Services.

Filter
Sort
Group
Take
Skip
and so on.

This layer can be placed on top of:

Entity Framework
Linq-to-SQL
Custom CLR Objects

Where to know more:

Overview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956153.aspx
Sample: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc748663.aspx

Offline Version:

Hope it helps you get the confusions out of discussions on this topic.

Windows Azure Service Platform – Worflow Services Changes

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:51:00 GMT

The team announced that several importance changes in the Workflow Services way of work and also that it will be taken offline for a while in order to proceed with all the changes.

Changes like the possibility of working in the Cloud Workflow Services the same way as in the .NET Framework 4.0:

“(…) An area of consistent discussion is the Microsoft .NET Workflow Service delivered via .NET Services, and how it relates to the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in the .NET Framework. One of the comments that we’ve consistently heard about the .NET Workflow Service is that you want the Workflow Service to be built on .NET Framework 4‘s workflow engine. This is currently not the case, since we are prior to the release date of .NET Framework 4.

As the direct result of user feedback, we will hold off further releases of the Workflow Service until after .NET Framework 4 ships. Since there will be important changes to the Workflow Service before it goes to full production, we are planning to take down the existing Workflow Service as part of service improvements in the month of July. This means any solutions that currently rely on the Workflow Service will have to be modified on or before July 1 in order to continue functioning smoothly. (…)

More information’s here.

Experiments with the new SQL Data Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:05:23 GMT

The SQL Data Services that are part of the Windows Azure Service Platform just recently, and due to customer feedback, changed the way of working from a ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) model to a TDS (Tabular Data Stream) model.

Eugenio Pace in this post show how he changes the IssueTracker application from the old model to the new one, and also showing the things missing from one to the other and what needs to be done.

Very interesting reading indeed.

Windows Azure Service Platform: July CTP Breaking Changes Announcement

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:11:07 GMT

The Windows Azure Team has just release a July CTP Breaking changes announcement since the already breaking changes in the Workflow Services, now there are changes also in the .NET Service Bus.

“(…)Queues and Routers data will NOT be persisted and restored after the maintenance. Users will need to back up their data if they wish to restore them after the July 2009 CTP release. Please see below for detail.

As previously announced, the existing Workflow Service will be removed from .NET Services in the July 2009 CTP release. Any solutions that currently rely on the Workflow Services will have to be modified on or before 7/7/2009 9am PST in order to continue functioning smoothly. Existing solution Workflow Service metadata such as Workflow Type will also be deleted and cannot be retrieved after the July 2009 CTP release. (…)”

Impacts on:

“(…)NET Services and the .NET Services Portal will be unavailable during this period.(…)

Interesting Incubation and Innovation Projects from Microsoft in the Cloud spectrum

NunoGodinho — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:40:54 GMT

I was looking at the Windows Azure - SQL Data Services page, and looked at some of the Incubation and Innovation projects that Microsoft is researching in this area, and found this to be very interesting and so here are the projects that I found:

Data Mining in the Cloud

This is very interesting because with this we have also SQL Server Analysis Services on the Cloud, and since Analysis Services are very important for companies to achieve the analysis of their data in order to perform better and to make better decisions, having those also on the Cloud and using the Cloud perspective of pay-as-you-go I think it will mean a that lots of more companies will start looking at their data differently, because now they can afford the costs of doing it.

Project codename “Anchorage”

Since the appearance of the Web that a lot of options appeared to share files, photos, movies and so on, but the problem is that along the way we reach a point that we have everything so separated along the web that we lose track of it. Live Mesh tried to address this problem and is being pretty interesting in his usage, but what about if I have photos in Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugSmug, and others as well as in my laptop? How can they all be synced? This projects does absolutely this and uses Live Framework in order to achieve it in a very interesting way.

Project codename “Huron”

I read this phrase “This is a Sync-Enabled Cloud Data Hub.”, and thought, What? So I continued reading and understood the Idea, because this is something that in some cases needs to be done when we are doing Cloud Computing, that is having a Synced copy of the Database locally for the customers, and this project intends to achieve this goal since it gets the SQL Data Services and the Local Database and Synchronizes them using Microsoft Sync Framework, this way providing the ability for customers to always have their data even when having SaaS – Software as a Service solutions. This way we have best of both worlds.
Watched this great small series of videos about this project:

Reporting Services against SQL Data Services

Interesting, we have SQL Server in the Cloud, Data Mining in the Cloud and now Reporting Services on the Cloud. This seems very interesting because we can use the Cloud to take our solutions to the “Next Level” since we now have almost all necessary technologies available on the Cloud.
Try it here.

Hope this helps you see what we can expect and what level of Cloud usage we can achieve.

Microsoft Releases Roadmap

NunoGodinho — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:12:16 GMT

A lot is being announced this days regarding Microsoft Products and Technologies, and so this is a little summary of all those information's.

Cloud Computing Conference 2009 – Overview of the Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform

NunoGodinho — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:19:22 GMT

Luis Martins, Architect Advisor from Microsoft Portugal

Buzz Words

Cloud Computing
Cloud Services
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Services
PaaS – Platform as a Service

Microsoft’s Strategy in this case is “Software + Services” that can be more prepared here http://www.davidchappell.com/blog/2008/06/what-is-software-services.html by David Chappell and in this whitepaper paper.

Why do we need the Cloud Computing?

Increase happiness by easing the IT problems

Sample:

Think about an Expense Reporting processing system in the Cloud

Challenges Building Applications

How can I handle peak loads?
How do I provide high availability?
What are the upfront investment capital needed?

Platform Choices

On-Premises Servers
Hosted Servers
Cloud Platform
- We need an OS for the cloud

What’s in the Cloud OS?

Creates a layer on top of the Cloud computing elements used
Increase the Utility Computing
- 24/7 availability
- High availability
- Peak Loads

Windows Azure

Utility Computing
Think of several computers with Virtual Machines inside of each one (This is called Fabric)
Applications
- Will be place across several machines in the fabric
Fabric controller is responsible for the management of the fabric and if some machine fails just calls another one
Defining your service
- What are the components(roles) ?
- How do they interact?
- At what scale?
- Basically:
  - LB
    - Load Balancer in order to have the availability being managed and balanced to all the available machines that support our application
  - Web Role
    - Application that will be on the cloud that will be made available
  - Worker Role
    - Asynchronous processing
Windows Azure is made to Scale out
Stateless compute + durable Storage = Scalable Application
Data Centers Microsoft
- 5 known data centers
  - 4 in the US
  - 1 in Ireland
  - more to come, after the regulatory and legal problems that exist now with Cloud Computing have been solved
- Something like 20.000 machines in there
- All our data are placed on 3 different fault domains that will make almost impossible to lose data
- What’s being used with this structure
  - Live ID
  - Live Messenger
  - Live Search
  - Live Meeting (in the next version)
Storage
- Window Azure Storage
  - Durable Storage
    - Blob
      - Data Blocks like a file
    - Table
      - Not relational databases
    - Queue
      - Used to create asynchronous processing
  - REST API available

Promises of Azure

Microsoft runs your application
Don’t think about management costs
Grow the server as we need

Azure Vision

Windows Azure
SQL Services
- Services
  - Data Services
  - Data Sync
- Familiar SQL Server relational Database model
- Support for existing APIs and tools
.NET Services
- Services
  - Service Bus
  - Access Control
  - Workflow Services
Live Services
- Services
  - Directory
  - Identity
  - Storage
  - Communications & Presence
  - Search & Geospatial
- Live Mesh is the center of this Live Services vision
SharePoint Services
Dynamics CRM Services

Azure Services Platform Roadmap

Fall 2008
- First CTP – Developer CTP for Services SDKs and Tools
Spring 2009
- Updated CTPS
  - Enabled Full trust & Fast CGI
  - Geo-localization
Summer 2009
- Making the business model available
Winter 2009
- RTM version

How can we start?

Download SDKs and Tools
Get Invitation code
Review the hands-on labs and videos

http://www.azure.com