On Cloud Computing, Integration Technology, Mobility, RFID, ERP etc...
Sr, Program Manager at Microsoft and MBA from UNC Chapel Hill.My small world includes my beautiful wife Swati and our awesome twin boyz Arni and Abhi.
Yesterday at BUILD, Microsoft Server and Tools Business President, Satya Nadella made two announcements around the Windows Azure Marketplace and shared details on how Ford Motor Company and eBay are using the Marketplace to add further value to their business. This post will dive deeper into both of these announcements.
International Availability
Microsoft announced the upcoming availability of the Windows Azure Marketplace in 25 new markets around the world, including: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and Singapore. Customers in these new markets will be able to discover, explore and subscribe to premium data and applications on the Marketplace starting next month.
Starting today, partners can submit their applications & datasets to publish on the marketplace. Interested partners can learn how to get started here.
Microsoft also announced the coming availability of a number of exciting data offerings on the Windows Azure Marketplace. The first of these, the Microsoft Translator APIs are available today, along-side a fast-growing collection of data sets and applications, with more being introduced through the remainder of the year. The Microsoft Translator APIs, which were previously available here, allow developers and webmasters to provide translation and language services in more than 35 languages, as part of their applications, websites or services. This is the same cloud service that delivers translations to millions of users every day via Bing, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products.
Through the Windows Azure Marketplace, Microsoft will make available both a free, limited throughput version of the Microsoft Translator APIs, as well as a number of paid, higher throughput versions of the APIs. Starting today, Microsoft is offering customers a 3 month promotional period during which the higher throughput versions of the APIs will be available free of charge.
Developers can now start using Microsoft Translator APIs through Windows Azure Marketplace in web or in client applications to perform machine language translations from or to any of the following languages (list updated regularly).
How are others using the Windows Azure Marketplace?
Ford Motor Company
Ford will launch its first battery-powered electric passenger vehicle at the end of the year. Fully charging the vehicle at home or a business should take just over 3 hours to complete, however as the cost of electricity can vary by the time of day, when you charge the vehicle can have an important impact on costs of ownership. So, every new Focus Electric will offer the Value Charging system powered by Microsoft, to help owners in the US charge their vehicles at the cheapest utility rates, lowering cost of ownership. To do this, Ford will rely on an electric utility rates dataset on the Windows Azure Marketplace that currently has information from 100 utilities covering more than 10,000 US zip codes and 1,500 Canadian Postal Codes.
eBay
eBay has a popular mobile application on Windows Phone 7 called eBay mobile, with more than 300k downloads to date. In the coming weeks, eBay will release a major update including faster payment flows and selling capabilities as well as the ability to have listing details automatically translated to and from 37 different languages. This is accomplished by leveraging the Microsoft Translator API, which is now available in the Windows Azure Marketplace. By leveraging the Translator API, eBay is able to create a more global product - delivering product listings in multiple languages to a broad global audience.
ESRI
Esri, a leading provider of geospatial software and services, is extending their ArcGIS system to Windows Azure Platform. With ArcGIS Online customers can create “intelligent maps” (starting with Bing, topography, ocean and other base maps) to visualize, access, consume and publish data-sets from Windows Azure Marketplace and their own data services. This will make a rich set of geographic tools, once only available to geographic information professionals, broadly available to anyone interested in working with geospatial data e.g. environmental scientists interested in visualizing air quality metrics against specific geographies. These maps can then be served up to the cloud and shared between individuals and their defined groups, across organizations and devices. This solution is available today, and can be accessed here.
To read more about all of the Windows Azure-related announcements made at BUILD, please read the blog post, "JUST ANNOUNCED @ BUILD: New Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8, Windows Azure SDK 1.5, Geo-Replication for Windows Azure Storage, and More". For more information about BUILD or to watch the keynotes, please visit the BUILD Virtual Press Room. And follow @WindowsAzure and @STBNewsBytes for the latest news and real-time talk about BUILD.
Visit the Windows Azure Marketplace to learn more.
At Build we announced support for geo replication which I think is the key differentiator in the industry. You want to store you data in the cloud and make sure it will be highly available and we now geo replicate your data for disaster recovery scenarios. More details below…
During the BUILD Day two keynote, we announced the release of geo-replication and a new version of the REST API to enable functionality improvements for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables, and Queues. At this time we are now geo-replicating all Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two data centers. Geo-Replication Customers have continually emphasized the importance of Disaster Recovery capabilities in Azure as well as other cloud platforms. Wednesday’s announcement on Geo-replication helps in this area and does so without increasing costs to our customers. Geo-replication replicates your Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two locations that are hundreds of miles apart and within the same region (i.e., between North Central and South Central US, between North Europe and Europe West, and between East and South East Asia). We do not replicate data across different regions. Geo-replication is now turned on for all Windows Azure Storage accounts for Blobs and Tables. Note that there is no change in existing performance as updates are asynchronously geo-replicated. New Blob, Tables and Queue features For REST API improvements, we have just released the new version (“2011-08-18”), which contains: Table Upsert – allows a single request to be sent to Windows Azure Tables to either insert an entity (if it doesn’t exist) or update/replace the entity (if it exists). Table Projection (Select) – allows a client to retrieve a subset of an entity’s properties. This improves performance by reducing the serialization/deserialization cost and bandwidth used for retrieving entities. Improved Blob HTTP header support – improves experience for streaming applications and browser downloads. Queue UpdateMessage – allows clients to have a lease on a message and renew the lease while it processes it, as well as update the contents of the message to track the progress of the processing. Queue InsertMessage with visibility timeout - allows a newly inserted message to stay invisible on the queue until the timeout expires Table Upsert The Table Upsert allows a client to send a single request to either update or insert an entity; the appropriate action is taken based on if the entity already exists or not. This saves a call in the scenario where an application would want to insert the entity if it doesn’t exist or update it if it does exist. This feature is exposed via the InsertOrReplace Entity and InsertOrMerge Entity APIs. InsertOrReplace Entity – inserts the entity if it does not exist or replaces the existing entity if it does exist. InsertOrMerge Entity – inserts the entity if it does not exist or merges with the existing one if it does exist. Table Projection (Select) Table Projection allows you to retrieve a subset of the properties of one or more entities, and only returns those properties/columns from Azure Tables. Projection improves performance by reducing latency when retrieving data from a Windows Azure Table. It also saves bandwidth by returning only the properties of interest. Improved Blob Download Experience We have added additional HTTP header support to Windows Azure Blobs to improve the experience for streaming applications and resuming download. Without this support, some browsers would have to restart reading a blob from the beginning if there was an interruption in the download. Queue UpdateMessage With the current Queue API, once a worker retrieves a message from the queue, it has to specify a long enough visibility timeout so that it can finish processing the message before the timeout expires. In many scenarios, the worker may want to extend the visibility timeout if it needs more time to process the message. This new UpdateMessage API enables such scenarios. It allows the worker to use the visibility timeout as a lease on the message, so that it can periodically extend the lease and maintain the ownership of the message until the processing completes. The UpdateMessage API also supports updating the content of the message. This allows the worker to update the message in the Queue to record progress information. Then if the worker crashes, this allows the next worker to continue processing the message from where the prior worker left off. This functionality enables worker roles to take on longer running tasks than before. It also allows faster failover time, since the leases can be set at fairly small intervals (e.g. 1 minute) so that if a worker role fails, the message will become visible within a minute for another worker role to pick up. Queue InsertMessage with Visibility Timeout We have added support in the InsertMessage API to allow you to specify the initial visibility timeout value for a message. This allows a newly inserted message to stay invisible on the queue until the timeout expires. This allows scheduling of future work by adding messages that become visible at a later time. For more information see our BUILD talk or one of the following blog posts Windows Azure Storage BUILD talk Geo-replication New Table Features New Queue Features New Blob Features To read more about all of the Windows Azure-related announcements made at BUILD, please read the blog post, "JUST ANNOUNCED @ BUILD: New Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8, Windows Azure SDK 1.5, Geo-Replication for Windows Azure Storage, and More". For more information about BUILD or to watch the keynotes, please visit the BUILD Virtual Press Room. And follow @WindowsAzure and @STBNewsBytes for the latest news and real-time talk about BUILD.
During the BUILD Day two keynote, we announced the release of geo-replication and a new version of the REST API to enable functionality improvements for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables, and Queues. At this time we are now geo-replicating all Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two data centers.
Customers have continually emphasized the importance of Disaster Recovery capabilities in Azure as well as other cloud platforms. Wednesday’s announcement on Geo-replication helps in this area and does so without increasing costs to our customers. Geo-replication replicates your Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two locations that are hundreds of miles apart and within the same region (i.e., between North Central and South Central US, between North Europe and Europe West, and between East and South East Asia). We do not replicate data across different regions. Geo-replication is now turned on for all Windows Azure Storage accounts for Blobs and Tables. Note that there is no change in existing performance as updates are asynchronously geo-replicated.
For REST API improvements, we have just released the new version (“2011-08-18”), which contains:
The Table Upsert allows a client to send a single request to either update or insert an entity; the appropriate action is taken based on if the entity already exists or not. This saves a call in the scenario where an application would want to insert the entity if it doesn’t exist or update it if it does exist. This feature is exposed via the InsertOrReplace Entity and InsertOrMerge Entity APIs.
Table Projection allows you to retrieve a subset of the properties of one or more entities, and only returns those properties/columns from Azure Tables. Projection improves performance by reducing latency when retrieving data from a Windows Azure Table. It also saves bandwidth by returning only the properties of interest.
We have added additional HTTP header support to Windows Azure Blobs to improve the experience for streaming applications and resuming download. Without this support, some browsers would have to restart reading a blob from the beginning if there was an interruption in the download.
With the current Queue API, once a worker retrieves a message from the queue, it has to specify a long enough visibility timeout so that it can finish processing the message before the timeout expires. In many scenarios, the worker may want to extend the visibility timeout if it needs more time to process the message. This new UpdateMessage API enables such scenarios. It allows the worker to use the visibility timeout as a lease on the message, so that it can periodically extend the lease and maintain the ownership of the message until the processing completes.
The UpdateMessage API also supports updating the content of the message. This allows the worker to update the message in the Queue to record progress information. Then if the worker crashes, this allows the next worker to continue processing the message from where the prior worker left off.
This functionality enables worker roles to take on longer running tasks than before. It also allows faster failover time, since the leases can be set at fairly small intervals (e.g. 1 minute) so that if a worker role fails, the message will become visible within a minute for another worker role to pick up.
We have added support in the InsertMessage API to allow you to specify the initial visibility timeout value for a message. This allows a newly inserted message to stay invisible on the queue until the timeout expires. This allows scheduling of future work by adding messages that become visible at a later time.
For more information see our BUILD talk or one of the following blog posts
Now Available: Geo-Replication and new Blob, Table and Queue features for Windows Azure Storage - Windows Azure - Site Home - MSDN Blogs