Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Windows Azure Service Platform'

Windows Azure SDK July update

NunoGodinho — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:00:00 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 05:00:00 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 05:00:00 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 05:00:00 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.

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

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:00:00 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.

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

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:00:00 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.

Windows Azure Service Platform: July CTP Breaking Changes Announcement

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:00:00 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.(…)

Experiments with the new SQL Data Services

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:00:00 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 – Worflow Services Changes

NunoGodinho — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:00:00 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.

Interesting Incubation and Innovation Projects from Microsoft in the Cloud spectrum

NunoGodinho — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:00:00 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.