Windows Azure

Windows Azure ISV Blog Series: sociobridge, by ReedRex

DavidMakogonMS — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:15:00 GMT

The purpose of the Windows Azure ISV blog series is to highlight some of the accomplishments from the ISVs we’ve worked with during their Windows Azure application development and deployment. Today’s post is about Windows Azure ISV ReedRex Co. LTD and how they’re using Windows Azure to deliver their CMS service for Facebook pages.

ReedRex recently launched a new SaaS offering called sociobridge, a Content Management System (CMS) service specifically for Facebook pages. Distributed by top Japanese Ad Company Dentsu Razorfish, sociobridge was jointly established by Dentsu and Razorfish.

Company and ad agency staff can use sociobridge to do the following:

Create and maintain Facebook pages
Schedule posts
Monitor walls, comments, and likes

sociobridge consists of two multi-tenant web applications written in ASP.NET MVC with Facebook C# SDK . One Web Role runs a subscriber portal, which is a content management application for subscribers (customer companies and ad agencies). The other runs an application runtime, which hosts public Facebook pages for end users.

There are also Worker Role instances, which are responsible for Facebook monitoring and other background processing.

sociobridge uses Windows Azure Storage (Table and Blob) as a persistent data store. This is because Windows Azure Storage provides higher scalability with much lower cost.

Information about subscriptions (tenants), user accounts, scheduled posts, poll results, statistics and others are stored in Table Storage. There are only two tables in Windows Azure Table Storage:

Subscription metadata
Subscriber data

In Table Storage, tables are partitioned to support load balancing across storage nodes. A table’s entities are organized by partition. A partition is a consecutive range of entities possessing the same partition key value.

Relational database systems, such as SQL Azure, provide transactional support, with properties often referred to as ACID:

Atomic: Everything in a transaction succeeds, or is rolled back.
Consistent. A transaction cannot leave the database in an inconsistent state.
Isolated. Transactions cannot interfere with each other.
Durable. The results of a transaction are stored permanently.

Unlike relational database system, Windows Azure Table Storage does not support multiple operations (such as Insert, Update and Delete Entity) within a transaction in general. But if all entities subject to operations as part of the transaction have the same partition key value (and belong to a same partition), you can perform these operations in a batch update known as an “entity group transaction” or EGT. More details about EGT’s may be found here.

To leverage the schema-less data model and EGT of Table Storage, different type of data are stored in a single data table. Subscription ID is used as a partition key, so each subscription’s data are stored in different partitions, and table access is spread over many storage servers for scalability. The row key is a combination of data type and some kind of unique row ID.

Every table query from Subscriber Portal is carefully designed to specify the partition key (subscription ID), so that they query is limited to a single partition and a full table scan over many partitions never happens.

There are transactions of two or more types of data in a single subscriptions’ data, but there are no transactions of two or more subscriptions’ data. So, this table design enables atomic transactions using EGT (entity group transaction) because data in a single transaction reside in a single partition in a single table.

Currently, Windows Azure Storage Analytics provides metrics data per storage account. With this table design, it is not possible to estimate cost of table storage per subscriber. This table design was chosen because of benefit described above and quota of number of storage accounts.

Staff in a customer company and/or an ad agency create and maintain Facebook pages in the subscriber portal. When definitions and metadata of Facebook pages are created or modified, actual web content of Facebook pages are generated in advance, and stored in Blob Storage.

A Subscriber may create multiple custom tabs in a single Facebook page. Each custom tab has its own Blob container, and web content of each tab is stored there. Permissions of Blob containers are set to public, because Facebook pages are inherently public.

At runtime:

An end user browses a Facebook page (included in Facebook using an HTML inline
frame).
The web browser sends a HTTP POST request to the application runtime on Web Role.
The application runtime accesses Table Storage to query a Blob Storage URL.
The application runtime returns the Blob Storage URL (using HTTP 302 Found).
The web browser is redirected to the web content in Blob Storage.

The purpose of this architecture is to reduce the workload of Web Role by avoiding dynamic web content generation, and to achieve much higher scalability to process huge requests from many Facebook users.

Facebook pages are required to handle HTTP POST requests. But the “Get Blob” operation in Blob Service REST API needs to be a HTTP GET request as its name suggests. Because of this, direct access to Blob Storage does not work, and the application runtime is necessary to handle HTTP POST.

Partition Key for Blob Storage is a combination of container Name and Blob name, so access to different Facebook pages (Blobs) are spread over different partitions.

According to “Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability Targets”, the target throughput of a single Blob is up to 60 MB/sec. Performance tests revealed that the throughput of the sociobridge application runtime (on one Small instance) is about 200 requests/sec.

At a rough estimate, if only one Facebook page is hosted and the size of Facebook page is less than 300KB, the application runtime becomes a bottleneck. If it is greater than 300KB, Blob Storage becomes a bottleneck. It is possible to remove these bottlenecks by adding more Web Role instances and leveraging Windows Azure CDN respectively. Note that usually multiple Facebook pages (Blobs) are hosted, and Blob access will scale out.

sociobridge was designed to utilize the power of Windows Azure, especially Windows Azure Storage. The sophisticated table design (with the tenant ID as a partition key) and the usage of EGT (entity group transaction) will be helpful in designing your multi-tenant application!

For additional information about scalability of Windows Azure Storage, refer to these blog posts:

Special thanks to Takekazu Omi, Lead Architect of sociobridge at ReedRex, for help on this post.

NEW! Wiki launched for Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure

Michele_Hart — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Although Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure is currently only available via CTP, you can get a jumpstart learning all about it by visiting the Apache Hadoop on Windows wiki. This wiki also covers Apache Hadoop on Windows Server.

The wiki contains overview information about Apache Hadoop, as well as information about the Hadoop offerings on Windows and related Microsoft technologies, including Windows Azure. It also provides links to more detailed technical content from various sources and in various formats: How-to topics, Code Samples, Videos, and more.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Topics	Content Types
Hadoop Overview	How To
Hadoop on Windows Overview	Code Examples
Apache Hadoop on Windows Server	Videos
Apache Hadoop on Windows Azure
Elastic Map Reduce on Windows Azure
Learning Hadoop
General
Hadoop on Windows
Hadoop Best Practices
Managing Hadoop
Developing with Hadoop
Using Hadoop with other BI Technologies

This wiki is relatively new and we would absolutely appreciate any feedback or requests for additional information. Moreover, since it is a wiki, feel free to update any of the wiki articles or add new ones!

Solve ‘Complex Data Restructuring’ Using the ‘List’ Operations in the Service Bus EAI/EDI Mapper

RaviBollapragada — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:34:00 GMT

Problem at Hand

Anyone who has done serious mapping would have encountered the problem of transforming related data from one set of complex structures to another. This is because of the fact that different applications and systems use different ways to normalize data to best suit their needs. When such systems need to interoperate the data must be mapped from one schema structure to another.

Observed Pattern

One of the most prevalent patterns used to solve this problem, especially when dealing with complex restructuring, is to de-normalize the data into one flat structure and then normalize it to the target schema structure(s). BizTalk users had to deal with this logic using scripts (in the language of their choice). This was because BizTalk had no support storing intermediate de-normalized data, while the scripting languages did (For example, XSLT programmers typically de-normalize the data into one or more hashtables of complex data strings and then parse them out to the destination).

Lack of support for storing intermediate data would force users to develop scripts by themselves or scripting experts. The more such cases in a map the more it becomes a collection of scripts making mapping a programmer’s domain and mostly unmanageable and unreadable for non-programmers (IT pros, SMEs, Business Analysts). In most such cases, the visual mapping tool is typically sacrificed and a programming tool is adopted, resulting in higher costs in development and maintenance.

Good News, You Don’t Have to Know/Use Scripting to Solve the Problem

In the new transforms functionality of the Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs release, we have introduced support for storing intermediate data in Lists, and perform operations on Lists, the same way one would on source message tree. And all this through visual modelling on the mapper surface. Lists can store multiple members making them two-dimensional and almost equivalent to storing data in tables. Let me illustrate the usage of Lists in solving a complex problem of heterogeneous structural mapping.

The Much Dreaded LIN Loop with SDQ Segments in EDI Mapping

LIN Loops commonly help capture the information of items in an inventory tracking application. A nested structure of LIN segments, ZA and SDQ segments full information pivoted on each item type is reflected. The SDQ segment is a bit complicated as it stacks up multiple location and quantity pairs for the different line items. Mapping this structure to a target application structure that is pivoted on locations makes a challenging task; this can be addressed in a two stage procedure.

Stage1: De-normalize LIN,ZA,SDQ data into a list containing all the data. Here are the steps we followed:

This nested set of loop operations within List scope helped us denormalize all the item/location/qty/qty_type data. This data can now be restructured into any relevant target structure.

Stage 2: Use the denormalized data to build the target structure. Here are the steps we followed:

This second stage operations help us complete the target schema structure that is pivoted on locations and items within each location.

SUCCESS!!! Once you get the hang of it, this two-stage procedure supported by the new mapper, is simple, intuitive and readable. You could apply this to more complex HL Loop and other complex nested structures.

Please use Discretion

With great power comes great responsibility; storing data in Lists will add tax to the performance and other SLAs. For not-so-complex structural transformations, one could do without intermediate storage. We recommend that you use Lists only when you don’t have a workable alternative.

We are continuously striving to provide you with more usable and powerful mapping tools. Do optimize their usage against your maintainability and performance needs. And kindly share your feedback and suggestions to help us improve the mapper tools.

Ravi Bollapragada, Senior Program Manager

Don’t Miss FREE MSDN Webcast, Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts (Part 1) “Get Started with Cloud Computing and Windows Azure”, Tuesday, Feb. 7 at 11 am PT

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:48:00 GMT

If you’re new to the world of Cloud Computing, the new MSDN webcast series, Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts, will be a great place to start learning what it’s all about. Hosted by Microsoft Cloud Evangelist Mike Benkovich, the first session of this new series premieres February 7, 2012 at 11AM PST. From understanding concepts of compute, storage, and roles, to exploring the various services and technologies that make up Windows Azure and SQL Azure, this “Soup to Nuts” series starts at the beginning and takes you all the way to being a Windows Azure expert.

You can watch the latest webcasts live, every Tuesday at 11AM PST. Visit the Cloud Computing “Soup to Nuts” series homepage for registration links and on-demand replays of episodes you’ve missed or want to watch again.

Read the blog post, “New Webcast Series–Cloud Computing Soup to Nuts” on Mike Benkovich’s blog to learn more about the full series.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #5)

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:07:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

Gartner Says Platform as a Service is on the Cusp of Several Years of Strategic Growth, HPC in the Cloud (posted Feb. 1.)

Indiana Students Receive $100k to Research Cloud Computing by Charlie Osborne, ZDNet (posted Feb. 1.)

More Business Intelligence Moving to the Cloud: Survey by Joe McKendrick, Forbes (posted Jan. 30.)

Microsoft Rolls Out Test Security Service for SQL Azure by Kurt Mackie, Redmondmag.com (posted Jan. 31.)

Europe Stumps up £8 Million for Cloud Computing Strategy by Jennifer Baker, Computerworld UK (posted Jan. 27.)

New Book Featuring Windows Azure Case Studies (thanks to @ApolloGonzalez for the tweet.)

Bytes by MSDN Interview: Vishwas Lele, CTO of AIS and Tim Huckaby, Founder of Interknowlogy and Actus Software (posted Jan. 24.)

CloudCover Episode 68 – Throttling SQL Azure with Scott Klein (posted Jan. 29.)

Get Started with Node.js + Windows Azure: Resources blog post by Peter Laudati, developer evangelist at Microsoft (posted Feb. 1.

Windows Azure Data Security (Cleansing and Leakage) blog post by Walter Myers III, principal consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services (posted Feb. 1.)

Hosting Your Moodle on Windows Azure blog post by Lee Stott, academic evangelist at Microsoft UK (posted Jan. 30.)

Help us ensure that these weekly roundups are useful to you by telling us what type of content would you like to see here. And please share any articles you come across that you think we should highlight, or content of your own that you’d like to share. You can use the comments section below, or talk to us on Twitter @WindowsAzure.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Updates

Nathan TottenMS — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:52:00 GMT

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games makes it easier for developers to quickly build social and casual games using Windows Azure. Last week, we released version 1.2.2 of the toolkit. You can download the source here or the self-extracting package here. This version adds significant performance increases, improved stability, and now uses Autofac for dependency injection. Additionally, as part of this release, we have moved the toolkit Github – this allows you to easily fork, clone, and contribute back to the toolkit in the same fashion you can with the open sourced Windows Azure SDKs.

For those who haven’t downloaded or used the social gaming toolkit yet I would encourage you to check it out. There are a lot of common patterns and tons of reusable code in the toolkit that applies for many scenarios besides the gaming space. With more and more applications relying on real-time communication, sharing, and feedback the mechanisms that are used in games can be applied to many kinds of software.

The core features of this toolkit are:

Samples Games (Tic-Tac-Toe and Four in a Row)
Authentication with ACS (Access Control service)
JavaScript Tests
Leaderboard
Game Friends
User Profiles
Invites and Notifications
Tests for both server and client code
Reusable JavaScript libraries

You can read more about the social gaming toolkit on the project site’s wiki. We have documents that will help you get started using the toolkit and deploying the toolkit. Additionally, you will find blog posts about this release and other on my blog.

Need to Change Your Go-To-Market for SaaS? Here’s How One ISV Did It with Windows Azure

Yvonne_Muench — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:20:00 GMT

In a previous post, I wrote about traditional ISVs creating spinoffs to market and sell their Software-as-A-Service (SaaS) apps. Recently I was surprised to see Glassboard from Sepia Labs, a spinoff of NewsGator, come across my desk. I’m familiar with NewsGator. Based in Denver, CO, they have 8 years experience in SaaS, and multiple Windows Azure apps under their belt. Why would they go to the trouble of creating a spinoff for their latest Windows Azure app? Almost a third of their revenue is already subscription based, and they are by no means new to the rigors of SLAs, uptime and support – issues that challenge many SaaS newcomers. I called JB Holston, CEO of NewsGator and Walker Fenton, CEO of Sepia Labs to find out. Turns out, they have lot in common with many traditional ISVs using Windows Azure and SaaS for the first time – they are trying to reach a new customer segment. And which customers you’re going after can change everything. Here’s their story…

According to Holston, Facebook is defining the way people interact online. Consumers like what Facebook offers and want more of it in the corporate space. Both NewsGator and Glassboard take their cues from that reality, operating in the social computing space. NewsGator’s marquee offering, Social Sites 2010, is an enterprise social computing product that’s attached to SharePoint 2010. By all accounts it’s doing pretty well… per a Jan 11, 2012 TechCrunch article NewsGator added one million new paid seats over the course of 2011, on top of its existing two million. Forrester’s Q3 2011 report rates them among the leaders in enterprise social platforms. Customers are global 2000 enterprises worldwide, reached through a direct sales force about 35 strong, augmented by 50+ channel partners. It’s largely installed on premises, and sold most often through a perpetual license pricing strategy. Most of that should sound pretty familiar to other traditional ISVs.

The newer Glassboard offering, which launched in Aug 2011, still operates in the social computing arena. Glassboard is about sharing privately with groups - essentially Facebook without the ads, with better privacy, and with very cool Bing maps integration for location.

Watch this Channel 9 video for more on the technical reasons behind why they chose Windows Azure, including a demo of how different phone platforms process messages using notifications.

However, beyond the common social computing focus of the two products, most aspects of the Glassboard opportunity are completely different from Social Sites 2010. Glassboard is completely cloud-based and integrates with SharePoint Online. But the differences go deeper than that:

WHO they target: Glassboard targets small businesses (SMBs) looking for private social collaboration they can easily use internally and with partners, suppliers and customers. Glassboard even extends into the consumer space, as the app is popular amongst teachers, families, and others who are uncomfortable with Facebook’s privacy policies. To encourage trial among these price sensitive customers, they use a Freemium pricing model i.e. the app is free until you pass a certain threshold of use.
WHAT they offer: SMBs and consumers need turnkey, low touch, intuitive apps. That dictates a different design and engineering ethic. Fenton called it a “mobile first interface” that works on iPhones, Androids, and WP7. In fact, Fenton’s goal for his design center was “an app my Mom can download from an app store and use without asking anyone.” In other words, entirely self-provisioning. That’s a growing trend in enterprise apps, but an imperative in lower-end small business and consumer apps.
HOW they make it happen: Glassboard reaches SMBs and consumers in four ways, all via marketing:
- Online marketplaces – see their listings in Office 365 Marketplace, Windows Phone Marketplace, the iTunes Store, Android Market and Amazon’s Appstore for Android.
- Digital marketing – online advertising, primarily Facebook ads
- Social marketing – they are active on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Viral marketing – users get additional free product above the Freemium threshold for referring colleagues and friends.

Well when you put it that way, if the WHO, the WHAT and the HOW is different, a spinoff begins to make a ton of sense. Though NewsGator is successful with Social Sites 2010, they’d probably struggle with Sepia Lab’s Glassboard. Direct sales don’t work too well in reaching numerous and fragmented SMBs and consumers. Neither does a freemium pricing model get a commission-based sales force very excited. Glassboard called for a wholly new Go-To-Market strategy, namely a switch from sales-led to marketing-led demand generation. When Holston realized he had a team of folks within NewsGator that were passionate about this new category, he created a spinoff to release those passions. Walker Fenton had been responsible for the mobile group within NewsGator so Holston put him in charge of Sepia Labs. He gave him some personnel, some office space as well as HR and accounting support from the parent company. He also gave him NewsGator’s legacy online services. Fenton continues to manage those under Sepia Labs and uses the revenue streams to partially fund new product development, like Glassboard. He makes it look easy. To learn more, follow the official Glassboard blog.

IFS 360 Scheduling – Always Optimal on Windows Azure

Himanshu_Singh — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:04:00 GMT

IFS has announced the immediate availability of IFS 360 Scheduling on Windows Azure as part of its strategy to leverage cloud computing, citing Windows Azure as a cost-efficient platform for innovative business solutions.

IFS 360 Scheduling empowers organizations to deliver on-site customer service excellence. Optimizing resource plans to minimize travel and maximize productive work time for hundreds, or even thousands, of technicians is a complex and compute-intensive task, and IFS 360 Scheduling’s ‘always optimizing’ approach means the schedule is constantly up-to-date no matter what is happening out in the field – for organizations with tight deadlines to meet, minutes matter.

Meeting tough customer expectations and providing consistent service demands a reliable and robust computing infrastructure. The speed of deployment on Windows Azure and on-demand scaling of resources echo the needs of these dynamic environments, for which resource scheduling is mission critical.

You can read more on the IFS announcement on their website, more about the work of IFS 360 Scheduling here, and a recent blog posting by IFS’ CTO Dan Matthews on cloud computing.

Real-World Windows Azure: Interview with Michael Ross, VP of Delivery at Aidmatrix

Himanshu_Singh — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:33:00 GMT

As part of the Real World Windows Azure interview series, I talked to Michael Ross, vice president for Delivery at Aidmatrix, about using Windows Azure to help power its humanitarian aid delivery solutions. Here’s what he had to say.

Himanshu Kumar Singh: Tell me about the Aidmatrix Foundation.

Michael Ross: Well, we create web-based supply-chain management (SCM) solutions that help our partners optimize distributing humanitarian relief. We started in 2001 and are headquartered in Dallas, with offices in Wisconsin, Washington D.C., Germany and India. More than 40,000 leading nonprofit, business, and government partners leverage our solutions to mobilize more than $1.5 billion in aid annually, worldwide. The donated goods, money and services impact the lives of more than 65 million people.

HKS: How does Aidmatrix leverage technology to deliver humanitarian aid?

MR: Increasingly, technology plays a vital role in enabling the rapid, targeted distribution of relief supplies to those in need. Our solutions help NGOs procure, manage and deliver humanitarian relief more efficiently by having real-time access to know what inventory is on hand and what unmet needs still exist. In this way, NGOs can save money in their purchasing, be more efficient in their distribution, and more responsive and transparent with their donors. .

HKS: Are there also technology challenges you face?

MR: To perform optimally both in daily humanitarian relief and unplanned disasters, we need to ensure that our applications can consistently deliver the highest levels of stability and throughput performance. And because we work with so many different kinds of partner organizations, our solutions need to synchronize with business systems that run on diverse operating system platforms. They also need to flexibly scale to handle massive bursts in demand. Following several recent natural disasters, our applications have experienced usage spikes on the order of 1,000 times the standard rate.

HKS: How much demand is there for technology for humanitarian aid from Aidmatrix?

MR: In 2010, we noted a 20 percent year-over-year increase in the number of people who used our applications. And as more NGOs adopt technology as a strategic part of their global operational success, the demand will continue to grow.

HKS: How has this increase in demand impacted your ability to meet global needs?

MR: This rapid growth has only compounded the challenges that we face in deploying, configuring, and scaling online relief management solutions. For example, for several years, we hosted our applications in data centers in the United States but in response to recent requests for services from humanitarian organizations in Europe, we’ve needed to locate additional server resources overseas. Setting up and maintaining data centers around the globe can be expensive and time-consuming. In a few cases, we’ve needed to pre-position assets and leave them turned off. Instead of paying for what we use, we’ve ended up investing up front for resources that we may or may not eventually need. But that’s all part of being ready for unplanned disasters.

We also found that the time required to source and deploy new hardware impacted our agility. In mid-2010, we began a partnership with a large food bank network that has locations spread across the United Kingdom. After a few weeks, we noticed that the distance between our servers and end users caused the application to run slowly and even time out before people could complete their donations.

HKS: What was the solution?

MR: To empower more partners to help more people around the world, we needed the ability to scale applications at a moment’s notice while maintaining reliable performance. With an eye on keeping operating costs as low as possible, we began to investigate the advantages of moving to the cloud. In considering this change, we wanted to minimize the time needed to migrate existing applications and placed a priority on a cloud technology platform that would support the agile development of new functionality, along with the creation of new solutions to meet the unforeseen demands of future humanitarian crises.

HKS: What led you to choose Windows Azure?

MR: After evaluating several cloud services technologies, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), we decided to adopt Windows Azure because, simply put, Windows Azure gives us all the tools we need to be more agile. It offers platform-as-a-service capabilities, so we don’t have to push out updates or worry about building out our own redundancy system. Plus, it incorporates a familiar development environment, so we can maximize productivity.

HKS: Which of your solutions did you move to Windows Azure first?

MR: The first solution we moved to Windows Azure was the Aidmatrix Program Metrics and Evaluation, which one of our U.S. partners uses to track the services delivered to clients at more than 1,000 locations. Moving the database component to Microsoft SQL Azure took five minutes, and we instantly gained high availability, along with reliable fault tolerance and security, at a fraction of what it would cost to build out those capabilities ourselves.

In early 2011, working with Accenture and Avanade, we also moved our Online Warehouse solution, which provides end-to-end inventory management tools for tracking relief supplies, to Windows Azure. The conversion process for each of these applications took approximately six weeks to complete.

We also recently used Windows Azure to configure and deploy a web portal application built by Microsoft to assist Second Harvest Japan, the Japanese food banking network. I deployed the application to the Microsoft data center in Hong Kong from home following the tsunami and I didn’t need to worry about how many instances to deploy because I could quickly scale out server resources if needed.

HKS: Are you using any other Windows Azure technologies?

MR: We take advantage of several Windows Azure technologies to ensure reliable, scalable performance. For example, we will use Windows Azure Connect to enable data sharing between our Online Warehouse solution and the on-premises operational systems used by our partners, including Oracle and SAP enterprise resource planning systems. And we rely on Windows Azure storage services to collect data on session state management so our staff can monitor application performance and troubleshoot issues in near real time.

HKS: What are some of the benefits you’ve seen from your move to Windows Azure?

MR: One of the key benefits has been noticeable cost savings. Because we no longer need to purchase, set up, and maintain database management and web servers, we expect to save 20 percent on data center costs, which could mean up to $100,000 in savings. We will be able to redirect the time and money we save toward creating and enhancing applications that help save lives. And instead of spending valuable resources on server upkeep, we can redirect time and cost savings to higher-value tasks, like developing a new module for one of our applications.

Another benefit is the global availability of Microsoft data centers and the pay-as-you-go model, which enables us to ensure cost-efficient dynamic scalability for our solutions. Our applications need to handle usages spikes of 1,000 times the normal load. With Windows Azure, we can scale up or down in a very agile and efficient way, which is essential for the kind of work we do.

Finally, the growing ecosystem of ISVs that have adopted Windows Azure allows us to accelerate our own development lifecycle. Taking advantage of functionality from other ISVs speeds our development and ultimately increases the value of our solutions. This is a major benefit of working with a cloud provider like Microsoft that has a large and growing network of partners.

Read the full case study. Learn how others are using Windows Azure.

Microsoft BizSpark to Offer Startups $60,000 in Cloud Services on Windows Azure

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:47:00 GMT

Today Microsoft announced BizSpark Plus, an extension of the BizSpark program, which provides higher value offers to startup accelerators around the globe.

BizSpark Plus will provide up to $60,000 in Windows Azure compute and storage to select startup accelerators and their startups at no cost. TechStars, recently recognized as the number one accelerator in the world, is one of the first to receive this offering. TechStars will be able to empower each of its startups with this Windows Azure offering over a 24-month period, at no cost.

In addition to TechStars, Microsoft is making this Windows Azure offer available to all founders whose accelerators are part of the Global Accelerator Network.

Tech startups around the world are building products and services in the cloud. Cloud applications and smart devices are driving the new startup ecosystem, affording startups the ability to drive user adoption, scale their company and generate financial returns with far less capital, at a faster pace than ever before. Windows Azure offers a simple, comprehensive and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.

Supporting entrepreneurship is the crux of Microsoft BizSpark’s mission and the Windows Azure team is excited to be a part of this effort.

Please visit the BizSpark blog and the Microsoft News Center for more details.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #4)

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:58:00 GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

Guthrie Talks Node.js and Windows Azure at Cloud Event by John K. Waters, ADT Magazine (posted Jan. 27.)

EU Seeks Joint National Cloud-Computing Purchases for Growth, Marthe Fourcade and Robert Vapuesta editors, BusinessWeek (posted Jan. 26.)

States Allow Voting Via Cloud for Citizens Overseas by Elizabeth Montalbano, InformationWeek (posted Jan. 25.)

Windows Azure on Cloud9, IDE by Adrian Bridgewater, Dr. Dobbs (posted Jan. 24.)

State Clouds Have Local Linings by Justin Kern, Information Management (posted Jan. 23.)

UK Windows Azure User Group Event Feb. 7, Parallel Processing with Windows Azure and HPC Server (thanks to @lwaug for the tweet.)

Webcast: How to Transform Your Dynamics Business with Windows Azure Feb. 8 at 9:00 am ET (posted Jan. 29.)

Windows Azure Camp in Toronto, Ontario, Canada March 3 (thanks to @chrduf for the tweet.)

8 Essential Best Practices in Windows Azure Blog Storage by Nuno Godinho, A Cloudy Place (posted Jan. 27.)

Cannot Create Database ‘DevelopmentStorageDb20110816’ for the Windows Azure Storage Emulator blog post by Wade Wegner, Windows Azure Technical Evangelist at Microsoft (posted Jan. 25.)

How Much Overcapacity Are You Running with Today? I Bet SQL Azure Federations Can Trim That! blog post by Cihan Biyikoglu, SQL Azure program manager at Microsoft (posted Jan. 26.)

Register for the Upcoming Windows Azure Discovery Events on the West Coast blog post by Wes Yanaga, Microsoft evangelist (posted Jan. 24.)

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

Windows Azure Powers Winning Solutions at Imagine Cup

Himanshu_Singh — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:39:00 GMT

We are thrilled to announce that two of the four grants program for Imagine Cup will be deploying their programs on Windows Azure. The program is focused on providing opportunities for young people by helping competitors create a business or non-profit that will help solve some of the world’s toughest problems, with the aid of technology. The packages include $75,000 for each team, as well as software, cloud computing services, solution provider support, premium BizSpark account benefits and access to local resources such as the Microsoft Innovation Center.

Team Apptenders (Based in Croatia)- is working on developing a Kinect-based solution system for on-premise and remote physical therapy for children (especially those with Cerebral Palsy). The team will be using Windows Azure to deploy software that will monitor a child’s exercises and provide statistical analysis to their therapist.
Lifelens (Based in the US)– will be producing a point-of-care tool to diagnose malaria using an augmented Windows Phone 7 application, which will be hosted on Windows Azure. The project addresses the high child mortality rates caused by the lack of detection and availability of treatment of malarial diseases.

The winning teams were selected from a pool of more than 50 applicants that competed in the Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals. To learn more about the program, the winning teams, and to see photos, please check out Imagine Cup blog.

Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Refresh

GregoryLeake — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:00:00 GMT

It has been just over three months since we made the SQL Azure Data Sync Preview release available in the Windows Azure portal. We are thrilled with the adoption of the service and are pleased to make available an updated preview release with some requested features and fixes. SQL Azure Data Sync allows organizations to easily synchronize between multiple on-premises databases and SQL Azure cloud databases—a key hybrid IT scenario. If you have not used the Data Sync service and want to learn about it, there is a new video demonstration available that provides an overview of the service capabilities, target scenarios and shows the service in use. There is also a series of videos available on Channel 9 here.

This release addresses several pieces of feedback we’ve heard from customers and brings us a step closer to General Availability. This is the third update to the Preview service since October and contains the following updates:

Data Sync servers can now be created in all Windows Azure data centers, enabling Data Sync servers to be created close to the SQL Azure databases for the best possible performance.
The Data Sync section of the Windows Azure portal is now localized in ten languages.
Miscellaneous fixes and numerous usability improvements including:
- Progress indicators are now available in the log for long running synchronizations.
- Error messages have been improved to better help you troubleshoot problems.
- Synchronization of self-referencing tables is now supported.
- A new version of the Data Sync Agent is available in the Download Center and it is highly recommended that existing agents are updated to the new version (available here).

Here’s a brief summary of the changes we made in the first two service updates:

Addressed the issue that sometimes led to failed syncs for narrow tables with a small number of columns.
Allow logins when either username@server or just username are specified.
Column names with spaces are now supported.
Columns with a NewSequentialID constraint are converted to NewID for SQL Azure databases in the sync group.
Both Administrators and non-Administrators are able to install the Data Sync Agent.
A new version of the Data Sync Agent was made available on the Download Center.

The team is hard at work on future updates as we approach General Availability and we really appreciate your feedback to date! Please keep the feedback coming and use the SQL Azure Forum to ask questions or get assistance with issues. Have a feature you’d like to see in SQL Azure Data Sync? Be sure to vote on features you’d like to see added or updated using the Feature Voting Forum.

New Management API for Windows Azure Traffic Manager

Michael WashamMS — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:15:00 GMT

As you may have noticed in the Windows Azure developer portal, we recently released a new management API for Windows Azure Traffic Manager. The new API improves Traffic Manager by allowing developers and IT professionals to script interactions with the service and to interface with the service programmatically.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Windows Azure Traffic Manager, it gives you control of how traffic is distributed between hosted services in different datacenters. Traffic Manager increases the perceived performance of your application by sending customer traffic to the closest datacenter, and it improves reliability by not sending traffic to hosted services that are down.

With the release of the new API, developers now have full access to the management and creation of Traffic Manager policies, including the creation of a profile from scratch. In this post, we’ll walk through how to create, update, and manage profiles using the new API. Documentation for the new Traffic Manager REST APIs can be found here.

Let's look at a typical configuration in the portal to see how we could accomplish the same configuration using the APIs. Before we get started, if you are new to Windows Azure Traffic Manager, I highly recommend reading an overview of how the service works before continuing.

For reference, I have included a screenshot of a configuration I have setup that uses the performance load balancing method to distribute traffic between an application endpoint setup in the North Central US datacenter and the North Europe datacenter.

Figure 1: Traffic Manager Policy Page

The Edit Traffic Manager Policy dialog allows you to configure a Windows Azure Traffic Manager policy in one screen. Behind the scenes there are multiple API calls that create multiple entities on your behalf that represent this policy configuration that you as a developer will need to be aware of.

So how can you accomplish the same configuration programmatically?

Understanding the entities is the first step. The policy represented above consists of a profile with a domain name specified, at least one definition, which in turn consists of the following configuration: load balancing method, DNS TTL, endpoints and a monitoring configuration among other things.

Figure 2: Traffic Manager Entities

Each profile can have multiple definitions associated with it. However, only one definition can be active at a time. Creating multiple definitions is not currently exposed in the portal. It is entirely possible to define multiple distinct definitions and provide the ability to switch between them without rebuilding them.

Create Profile API

POST	https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/WATM/profiles

Figure 3: Create Profile Request Parameters

The Create Profile API requires you to specify a profile name and the Traffic Manager Domain name. The domain name consists of a DNS prefix (host name) and .trafficmanager.net. In the management portal there is not a location for a profile name; this is generated for you when you use the portal. This is not the case when you create the profile programmatically. How the profile name is generated is something important to understand as a developer. When you create a profile from the portal the name is generated by taking the hostname of the domain name you are specifying and appending -trafficmanager-net to it. For example if the domain name you specified was: woodgrove.trafficmanager.net the internal name of the profile would be woodgrove-trafficmanager-net. When creating a profile programmatically the profile name is whatever you pass into the Create Profile API.

Create Definition API

POST	https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/WATM/profiles/<profile-name>/definitions

Figure 4: Create Definition Request Parameters

Once a profile is created, you can then create a definition using the Create Definition API to specify the rest of your Windows Azure Traffic Manager configuration.

The definition configuration is not as complex as it looks. Defining the monitor consists of specifying the relative path to an HTTP/HTTPS resource that will tell Traffic Manager the health of your application via the returned status code. You may change the port, protocol and the relative path but the remaining settings have to be set to the default values.

Each endpoint consists of the URL to one of the Windows Azure applications that you want managed in the Windows Azure Traffic Manager and a flag indicating whether it is currently enabled or disabled.

The URL specified when creating the Traffic Manager profile (<dnsprefix>.trafficmanager.net) will be mapped to one of the specified endpoints when a DNS name is resolved. Which endpoint is resolved is based on the load balancing method specified (Performance, Failover or RoundRobin).

For Example:
WoodGroveUS.cloudapp.net could reside in the North Central data center.
WoodGroveEU.cloudapp.net could reside in the North Europe data center.

WoodGrove.trafficmanager.net would be the parent domain name that when resolved would be mapped to one of the data center endpoints.

Update Profile

PUT	https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/WATM/profiles/<profile-name>

Figure 5: Update Profile Request Parameters

There can be multiple definitions associated with a profile but only at most one can be active at a time. For a Traffic Manager profile to be active you must enable one of the definitions associated with the profile. You enable a definition by calling the Update Profile API passing in the version that was returned when you called the Create Definition API.

Managing Existing Profiles and Definitions
Beyond the core operations of creating a profile and its associated definitions, the Traffic Manager REST API also supports List Profiles, Get Profile, List Definitions, Get Definition and Delete Profile. These APIs provide full functionality for building an application to manage Windows Azure Traffic Manager configurations.

If you would like to automate the management of your Windows Azure Traffic Manager profiles but you do not want to write code against the REST API to do it we also have an answer for you. We have updated the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (now version 2.2) to have full support for the Windows Azure Traffic Manager.

Windows Azure Traffic Manager Cmdlets

New-TrafficManagerProfile
Get-TrafficManagerProfile
Remove-TrafficManagerProfile
Set-TrafficManagerProfile
Get-TrafficManagerDefinition
New-TrafficManagerDefinition
Add-TrafficManagerEndpoint
New-TrafficManagerEndpoint
Set-TrafficManagerEndpoint
Remove-TrafficManagerEndpoint
New-TrafficManagerMonitor

Here is an example of how you can use PowerShell to create a new profile and definition:

Windows Azure Traffic Manager is a key technology for enabling global and highly available applications. The new REST APIs will allow application developers to build applications that make the management of Traffic Manager a native part of their application. We have also opened the door for automating deployments to Windows Azure customers by exposing this functionality in the new release of the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.2.

Happy Coding!

Announcing Native Windows Azure Libraries and Special Free Pricing Using SendGrid for Windows Azure Customers

Brian GoldfarbMS — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Last week our friends over at SendGrid shipped new native libraries on GitHub (C#, Node.JS) for Windows Azure developers that make it extremely easy to integrate their mail service into any application built and running in Windows Azure. In addition, SendGrid launched a new offer for Windows Azure customers that provides 25,000 free emails a month! We’ve heard from customers consistently that sending email was too hard and we listened! See detailed, step by step tutorials written by us on how to use SendGrid with Windows Azure in the Developer Center (C#, Node, PHP, Java).

Sending email from Windows Azure has never been so easy. For example, with C#:

Add the SendGrid NuGet package to your Visual Studio project by entering the following command in the NuGet Package Manager Console window:

PM > Install-Package SendGrid

Add the following namespace declarations:

using System.Net;

using System.Net.Mail;

using SendGridMail;

using SendGridMail.Transport;

It can be this easy

// Create an email message and set the properties.

SendGrid message = SendGrid.GenerateInstance();

message.AddTo("anna@contoso.com");

message.From = new MailAddress("john@contoso.com", "John Smith");

message.Subject = "Testing the SendGrid Library";

message.Text = "Hello World!";

// Create an SMTP transport for sending email.

var transport = SMTP.GenerateInstance(new NetworkCredential("username", "password"));

// Send the email.

transport.Deliver(message);

Signup for 25,000 free emails a month today!

Windows Azure and Cloud9 IDE at Node Summit

Glenn Block MS — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:45:00 GMT

Last month we launched our new Windows Azure SDK for Node.js. The release came after months of hard work between Microsoft and Joyent. Since that time we’ve seen a lot of excitement in the Node community around the support for Node.js in Windows Azure. We’re thankful for all the support!

Today at the Node Summit in San Franciso, Scott Guthrie demonstrated the SDK, which provides a streamlined experience for Windows developers to build and deploy Node.js apps to Windows Azure using PowerShell cmdlets and their editor of choice. Scott also showed the “Azure” npm module, which enables developers hosting Node apps in any environment to utilize Windows Azure Storage services like table, queues and blob. You can find out more about the PowerShell tools and the npm package at our dev center.

Additionally, Scott showed a new way to deploy to Azure, Cloud9 IDE!

Cloud9 IDE offers a cross-platform, browser-based development environment for Node.js. It is one of the de-facto tools for Node developers today. Cloud9 runs completely in the browser, and it’s available to developers working on any OS. In the second part of his keynote, Scott demonstrated using Cloud9 IDE on a Mac to build and deploy an application to Azure.

With Cloud9 IDE you can easily create a new Node application, connect it to your Windows Azure account, and deploy. Cloud9 makes it easier for you by packaging up source, creating your hosted service, and publishing the package. It supports publishing to Staging and Production and offers Windows Azure portal integration. Combining that with Cloud9’s integration with distributed version control providers like GitHub and BitBucket offers a fantastic experience!

Below you can see a screenshot of the new Cloud9 experience.

Along with the announcement, we’ve published a brand new tutorial on our Node.js dev center to show you how easy it is to get started developing for Windows Azure in Cloud9. In addition, check out these resources from Cloud9 about their Windows Azure support.

We are very excited about the collaboration with Cloud9 and the opportunity to offer both Windows and non-Windows developers an awesome experience developing for Windows Azure.

Read more about this announcement in the most recent posts on the Cloud9 and Interoperability @ Microsoft blogs.

Get started today.

Announcing SQL Azure Import/Export Service Now in Production

GregoryLeake — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:31:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the general availability of SQL Azure Import/Export! Now available as a production service, SQL Azure Import/Export helps organizations deploy on-premises databases to SQL Azure, and archive SQL Azure and SQL Server databases to Windows Azure Storage. Key improvements in the new production release include:

Increased performance & resiliency
Progress reporting
Selective Export
Production support
New usage sample EXE

This service is provided free of charge to customers using SQL Azure and Windows Azure Storage. For more information and video tutorials visit the DAC blog.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #3)

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:14:00 GMT

Welcome to the third edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

The Rise of the Cloud CIO: A Silver Lining for IT and Business by Eric Berg, CloudZone (posted Jan. 19)

Why CES 2012 Should Have Been Called the Cloud Electronics Show by David Linthicum, InfoWorld (posted Jan. 18)

Cloud Server Shipments to Skyrocket in 2012 by Barb Darrow, Gigaom (posted Jan. 16)

Why we like Windows Azure in PaaS World by Sachin Sancheti, Aditi Technologies Blog (posted Jan. 18)

Delhi Police Launch “Know Your Police Station” tool on Windows Azure with Bing Maps (posted Jan. 19) (thanks to @MicrosoftPSNS for the tweet)

Intermediate Windows Azure Storage: Parallel Blog Uploads blog post by Tyler Doerksen, .NET developer (posted Jan. 16) (thanks to @cdnazure for the tweet)

Windows Azure blog post by Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Server and Tools Business (posted Jan. 16)

One Windows Azure Role, Multiple Websites blog post by Brian Hitney, developer evangelist at Microsoft (posted Jan. 17)

Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (v2.2) blog post by Michael Washam, technical evangelist at Microsoft (posted Jan. 16)

Cloud Numerics Example: Distributed Numerics on Windows Azure with F# blog post by Ronnie Hoogerwerf, program manager at Microsoft (posted Jan. 16)

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

New Article: Windows Azure Queues and Windows Azure Service Bus Queues - Compared and Contrasted

ValeryMizonov — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:35:00 GMT

We have been getting requests from customers for guidance when to use each of the two cloud-based queuing services offered today on Windows Azure: Windows Azure Queues and Windows Azure Service Bus Queues.

To address this, we have put together an article that analyzes the differences and similarities between the two services. By using this information, you can compare and contrast the respective queuing services and be able to make a more informed decision about which solution best meets your needs.

Following is the high-level technology selection considerations section from the full article on MSDN.

Technology Selection Considerations

Both Windows Azure Queues and Service Bus Queues are implementations of the message queuing service currently offered on Windows Azure. Each has a slightly different feature set, which means you can choose one or the other, or use both, depending on the needs of your particular solution or business/technical problem you are solving.

When determining which queuing technology fits the purpose for a given solution, solution architects and developers should consider the recommendations below. Further details can be found in the next section.

As a solution architect/developer, you should consider using Windows Azure Queues when:

Your application needs to store over 5 GB worth of messages in a queue, where the messages have a lifetime shorter than 7 days.
Your application requires flexible leasing to process its messages. This allows messages to have a very short lease time, so that if a worker crashes, the message can be processed again quickly. It also allows a worker to extend the lease on a message if it needs more time to process it, which helps deal with non-deterministic processing time of messages.
Your application wants to track progress for processing a message inside of the message. This is useful if the worker processing a message crashes. A subsequent worker can then use that information to continue where the prior worker left off.
You require server side logs of all of the transactions executed against your queues.

As a solution architect/developer, you should consider using queues in the Windows Azure Service Bus when:

You require full integration with the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) communication stack in the .NET Framework.
Your solution needs to be able to support automatic duplicate detection.
You need to be able to process related messages as a single logical group.
Your solution requires transactional behavior and atomicity when sending or receiving multiple messages from a queue.
The time-to-live (TTL) characteristic of the application-specific workload can exceed the 7-day period.
Your application handles messages that can exceed 64 KB but will not likely approach the 256 KB limit.
Your solution requires the queue to provide a guaranteed first-in-first-out (FIFO) ordered delivery.
Your solution must be able to receive messages without having to poll the queue. With the Service Bus, this can be achieved through the use of the long-polling receive operation.
You deal with a requirement to provide a role-based access model to the queues, and different rights/permissions for senders and receivers.
Your queue size will not grow larger than 5 GB.
You can envision an eventual migration from queue-based point-to-point communication to a message exchange pattern that allows seamless integration of additional receivers (subscribers), each of which receives independent copies of either some or all messages sent to the queue. The latter refers to the publish/subscribe capability natively provided by the Service Bus.
Your messaging solution needs to be able to support the “At-Most-Once” delivery guarantee without the need for you to build the additional infrastructure components.
You would like to be able to publish and consume message batches.

Read the full article on MSDN.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #2)

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:19:00 GMT

Welcome to the second edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. Here are the highlights from last week.

Cover Story: Steve Ballmer Reboots by Ashlee Vance, BusinessWeek (posted Jan. 12)

Bond University Offers Cloud Computing Course to Students by Charlie Osborne, ZDNet (posted Jan. 11)

Feds Refine Cloud Security Standards by Elizabeth Montalbano, InformationWeek (posted Jan. 10)

Cloud Computing in Healthcare: The Question is Not if But When by Ken Terry, FierceHealthIT (posted Jan. 9)

“I Gotta Get Me Some of That” Windows Azure event Jan. 26 in Alpharetta, GA (thanks to @BitWizards for the tweet)

Live Meeting Event Jan. 31: Simplifying distributed application development with Service Bus and Windows Azure

Windows Azure Spotlight: Agilys myShopi Combines Mobile and Cloud (posted Jan. 9) (thanks to @MSFTBelux_ISV for the tweet)

The Which, the When, and the How of Windows Azure Services: Websites by Jonathan Rozenblit, Developer Connection (posted Jan. 11)

Node.JS on Windows Azure Part 1: Setting Up Your Environment blog post by @Aaronontheweb, developer evangelist for Microsoft BizSpark (posted Jan. 9)

Accessing Federations in SQL Azure using Entity Framework blog post by Cihan Biyikoglu, SQL Azure program manager at Microsoft (posted Jan. 11)

Windows Azure Libraries for Java Available, including support for Service Bus blog post by Ram Jeyaraman, senior standards professional at Microsoft (posted Jan. 9)

I hope these weekly roundups help you stay on top of the latest community-driven content about Windows Azure, and related topics. We want to make these roundups as useful as possible, so tell us what type of content would you like to see here that would be interesting for you.

Have you come across articles we should highlight here, or content of your own to share? Tell us by using the comments section below, or talk to us on Twitter @WindowsAzure.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

Book Excerpt: "To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise"

Pankaj_AroraMS — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:59:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Pankaj Arora, a senior manager in the Microsoft IT Global Strategic Initiatives team.

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer publicly declared “We’re all in” on cloud computing in March 2010, he wasn’t just referring to Microsoft’s products. He also was giving his IT organization a mandate to move to cloud computing. Since that declaration, my colleagues and I have learned a lot about what it takes to adopt cloud computing at a global enterprise. We now have cloud deployments of all the common models—SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS—and we’re starting to use Data-as-a-Service.

With numerous deployment experiences under our belt—and industry predictions of even greater cloud adoption in 2012 as a backdrop—I want this community to know about a book I’ve co-authored with two colleagues titled, To the Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise. In summary, the book addresses the Why, What and How of enterprise cloud adoption. It’s based on our own experiences and best practices adopting cloud computing, while also drawing on industry and customers experiences.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of the pre-production version of the book, which is available in print and eBook through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and McGraw-Hill amongst other outlets. You can see more on the book website here.

Feel free to ask questions, and I hope these excerpts (and the book) help you with your cloud computing strategy and deployments.

Pankaj

Architectural Principles

Moving applications and data out of the corporate data center does not eliminate the risk of hardware failures, unexpected demand for an application, or unforeseen problems that arise in production. Designed well, however, a service running in the cloud should be more scalable and fault-tolerant, and perform better than an on-premises solution.

Virtualization and cloud fabric technologies, as used by cloud providers, make it possible to scale out to a theoretically unlimited capacity. This means that application architecture and the level of automaton, not physical capacity, constrain scalability. In this section, we introduce several design principles that application engineers and operations personnel need to understand to properly architect a highly scalable and reliable application for the cloud.

Resiliency

A properly designed application will not go down just because something happens to a single scale unit. A poorly designed application, in contrast, may experience performance problems, data loss, or an outage when a single component fails. This is why cloud-centric software engineers cultivate a certain level of pessimism. By thinking of all the worst-case scenarios, they can design applications that are fault tolerant and resilient when something goes wrong.

Monolithic software design, in which the presentation layer and functional logic are tightly integrated into one application component, may not scale effectively or handle failure gracefully. To optimize an application for the cloud, developers need to eliminate tight dependencies and break the business logic and tasks into loosely-coupled modular components so that they can function independently. Ideally, application functionality will consist of autonomous roles that function regardless of the state of other application components. To minimize enterprise complexity, developers should also leverage reusable services where possible.

We talked about the Microsoft online auction tool earlier. One way to design such an application would be to split it into three components, as each service has a different demand pattern and is relatively asynchronous from the others: a UI layer responsible for presenting information to the user, an image resizer, and a business logic component that applies the bidding rules and makes the appropriate database updates. At the start of the auction, a lot of image resizing occurs as people upload pictures of items they add to the catalog. Toward the end of the auction, as people try to outbid each other, the bidding engine is in higher demand. Each component adds scale units as needed based on system load. If, for example, the image resizer component fails, the entire functionality of the tool is not lost.

Pessimism aside, the redundancy and automation built into cloud models make cloud services more reliable, in general. Often, cloud providers have multiple “availability zones” in which they segment network infrastructure, hardware, and even power from one another. Operating multiple scale units of a single application across these zones can further reduce risk; some providers require this before they will guarantee a higher SLA. Therefore, the real question when considering failure is, what happens if an instance of an application is abruptly rebooted, goes down, or is moved?

How will IT know the failure happened?
What application functionality, if any, will still be available?
Which steps will be required to recover data and functionality for users?

Removing unnecessary dependencies makes applications more stable. If a service that the application relies upon for one usage scenario goes down, other application scenarios should remain available.

For the back-end, because some cloud providers may throttle requests or terminate long-running queries on SQL PaaS and other storage platforms, engineers should include retry logic. For example, a component that requests data from another source could include logic that asks for the data a specified number of times within a specified time period before it throws an exception.

For the occasional reboot of a cloud instance, application design should include a persistent cache so that another scale unit or the original instance that reboots can recover transactions. Using persistent state requires taking a closer look at statelessness—another design principle for cloud-based applications.

Statelessness

Designing for statelessness is crucial for scalability and fault tolerance in the cloud. Whether an outage is unexpected or planned (as with an operating system update), as one scale unit goes down, another picks up the work. An application user should not notice that anything happened. It is important to deploy more than one scale unit for each critical cloud service, if not for scaling purposes, simply for redundancy and availability.

Cloud providers generally necessitate that applications be stateless. During a single session, users of an application can interact with one or more scale unit instances that operate independently in what is known as “stateless load balancing” or “lack of session affinity.” Developers should not hold application or session state in the working memory of a scale unit because there is no guarantee the user will exclusively interact with that particular scale unit. Therefore, without stateless design, many applications will not be able to scale out properly in the cloud. Most cloud providers offer persistent storage to address this issue, allowing the application to store session state in a way that any scale unit can retrieve.

Parallelization

Taking advantage of parallelization and multithreaded application design improves performance and is a core cloud design principle. Load balancing and other services inherent in cloud platforms can help distribute load with relative ease. With low-cost rapid provisioning in the cloud, scale units are available on-demand for parallel processing within a few API calls and are decommissioned just as easily.

Massive parallelization can also be used for high performance computing scenarios, such as for real-time enterprise data analytics. Many cloud providers directly or indirectly support frameworks that enable splitting up massive tasks for parallel processing. For example, Microsoft partnered with the University of Washington to demonstrate the power of Windows Azure for performing scientific research. The result was 2.5 million points of calculation performed by the equivalent of 2,000 servers in less than one week,[1] a compute job that otherwise may have taken months.

Latency

Software engineers can apply the following general design principles to reduce the potential that network latency will interfere with availability and performance.

Use caching, especially for data retrieved from higher latency systems, as would be the case with cross-premises systems.
Reduce chattiness and/or payloads between components, especially when cross-premises integration is involved.
Geo-distribute and replicate content globally. As previously mentioned, enabling the content delivery network in Windows Azure, for example, allows end users to receive BLOB storage content from the closest geographical location.

Automated Scaling

For cloud offerings that support auto-scaling features, engineers can poll existing monitoring APIs and use service management APIs to build self-scaling capabilities into their applications. For example, consider utilization-based logic that automatically adds an application instance when traffic randomly spikes or reaches certain CPU consumption thresholds. The same routine might listen for messages, instructing instances to shut down once demand has fallen to more typical levels.

Some logic might be finance-based. For example, developers can add cost control logic to prevent noncritical applications from auto-scaling under specified conditions or to trigger alerts in case of usage spikes.

Scaling of data is as important as application scaling, and once again, it is a matter of proper design. Rethinking the architecture of an application’s data layer for use in the cloud, while potentially cumbersome, can also lead to performance and availability improvements. For example, if no cloud data storage service offers a solution large enough to contain the data in an existing database, consider breaking the dataset into partitions and storing it across multiple instances. This practice, known as “sharding,” has become standard for many cloud platforms and is built into several, including SQL Azure. Even if this is not necessary initially, it may become so over time as data requirements grow.

[1] “Scientists Unfolding Protein Mystery, Fighting Disease with Windows Azure.” Microsoft.

Techila Taps Windows Azure to Speed Groundbreaking Cancer Research at University of Helsinki

Himanshu_Singh — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:14:00 GMT

Breast cancer is the most common cancer type for women. While the prognosis of many subtypes of breast cancers in general is good, certain types of breast cancer pose high risk for metastases, which account for 95% of the deaths of breast cancer patients. In the treatment of breast cancer, it’s important to be able to assess the likelihood that a primary tumor develops metastases and this is a non-trivial task, as there’s an ocean of genes and their combinations that may contribute to metastasis progression.

For the first time, a research team at the University of Helsinki has utilized the enormous computing capacity of Windows Azure with the help of Finnish HPC solutions provider, Techila, to dramatically speed genetic research that will improve breast cancer treatment. As University of Helsinki docent Sampsa Hautaniemi explains, “currently, many breast cancer patients are treated with aggressive regimens. When we are able to predict which primary tumors are more prone to result metastasis, we can suggest the level of treatment on a more individual basis already at the time of diagnosis.”

The greatest challenge the research project faces is finding just the right combination of genes from among 25,000 genes. There are an enormous number of different possibilities, which means that high computational power is required. Windows Azure has dramatically speeded up the process by enabling researchers to complete computational tasks in four and a half days that would normally take around 15 years to complete. Rainer Wehkamp from Techila is pleased that the pilot project specifically concerned cancer research. “One in four people in the world gets cancer and although we do not possess the skills to carry out the actual research, it’s nice to be able to contribute to it through our own expertise.”

Computation was performed in a cloud with the help of the autonomic computing technology developed by Techila, using 1,200 processor cores. As Hautaniemi explains, “These kinds of pilot projects are important, as computation is a very essential part of modern medical research, and the data sets are growing all the time. The fact that computational resources provided by the cloud are available increases prospects to conduct really demanding projects that were not possible few years ago.”

Notes, Wehkamp, “An average of 95 % of the capacity is wasted at universities. Windows Azure harnessed for computational use has a high utilization rate of up to 99%. The speed, efficiency and ease of use of the computation are competitive edges in both the research and business worlds.”

Check out the full blog post and videos on the Microsoft UK Faculty Connection blog and download the case study. Learn how other customers are using Windows Azure.

NEW! Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #1)

Himanshu_Singh — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:23:00 GMT

Sometimes it can be a challenge to stay on top of the latest news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure. That’s why we’re launching the Windows Azure Community News Roundup series on this blog. Every week, I will post a snapshot of the freshest community-driven content and resources from the previous week. In this first post, I’ve covered the past two weeks worth of interesting articles, posts and tweets.

Windows Azure Gets Node.js Update by Mathew Weinberger, talkincloud.com, (posted Jan. 6).

Traffic Manager, SQL Azure and BizSpark: Next Vancouver Windows Azure Meetup Group on Jan. 18, (thanks to @jbueza for the tweet).

Windows Azure Discover Event in New York on Jan. 24, (thanks to @SanjayJain369 for the tweet).

Microsoft Codename "SQL Azure Compatibility Assessment" Tutorial, (updated Jan. 5). (thanks to @benjguin for the tweet).

Mobile & Global in 7 Steps with HTML5, MVC & Windows Azure blog post by David Pallmann, Windows Azure MVP and Practice General Manager at Neudesic, (posted Dec. 26).

What you need to know today about Windows Azure: Free Seminar in Basingstoke, UK on Feb. 7, presented by Microsoft Gold Partner, @ICSSolutionsLtd.

Solving Access Control in the Cloud – from WIF to ACS: Next Boston Azure Cloud User Group Meeting on Feb. 23, with @BrockLAllen (thanks to @DevelopMentor for the tweet).

How Cloud Computing is Changing Many Jobs by @joemckendrick, Forbes.com, (posted Dec. 27)

Forecast: Cloudy Windows Azure Caching Strategies by Joseph Fultz, MSDN Magazine, (Jan. 2012 edition).

Automating PHP Unit Tests in Windows Azure by Brian Swan, Senior Programmer at Microsoft (posted Jan. 3).

Windows Azure Trial Account Spending Limit by Jim O’Neil, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft - Northeast US (posted Dec. 28).

Geographically Distributed High Availability by Jack Greenfield, Principal Architect at Microsoft (posted Dec. 26).

How can we make this series of posts more useful to you?
What types of content do you want to see in these posts?
Have you come across articles we should highlight here, or content of your own to share? Tell us by using the comments section below, or talk to us on Twitter @WindowsAzure.
Any other feedback, criticism or suggestions about this Community News Roundup series?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Himanshu Kumar Singh

Windows Azure and Bing Maps Bring the History of Speilberg’s “War Horse” to Life Through Interactive Website

Himanshu_Singh — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:31:00 GMT

The latest Steven Spielberg film, War Horse tells the story of a horse’s journey to the World War 1 battlefields of Flanders. To help promote the film and bring its history to life, UK-based developers at Shoothill have developed the website, The War Horse Journey. Using Deep Zoom technology, Bing Maps, and Windows Azure, the War Horse Journey provides users with an interactive exploration of the world they will view when watching the film.

The website is split in two parts: a Gallery, which uses Deep Zoom technology to let the user explore a patchwork of historical images, maps and shots from the film; and a TimeMap, which uses Bing Maps to overlay today’s map of the WWI battle area with historical maps and photos. The site also enables users can also explore videos and exclusive content from the British Imperial War Museum.

“It’s a labour of love,” says Shoothill’s Rod Plummer, “We’re creating a real journey for the user around the fictional horse’s story from the film.”

From a technical perspective, hosting the site on Windows Azure is a “fabulous alternative to conventional hosting,” according to Plummer. “With Windows Azure,” says Plummer, “Microsoft takes care of all the back-end software so we can concentrate on code performance, usability and the visitor’s total experience.”

Visit The War Horse Journey. Read more about this story in this post on the MSDN UK team blog and this post on Shoothill’s company blog.

At CodeMash Next Week? Don’t Miss The Training On Social Games using Windows Azure and HTML5

Himanshu_Singh — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:51:00 GMT

If you plan to attend CodeMash next week in Sandusky, Ohio, don’t miss the full-day pre-compiler session, Building Social Games using HTML5 with Windows 8, Windows Azure, and .NET, which will cover the development of social games and feature Windows Azure.

In the morning, Nathan Totten along with members of the Windows Azure engineering and evangelism teams will be delivering short presentations on how to get started with building social games using Windows Azure, Windows 8 and leveraging .NET, Node.JS and HTML5. You’ll hear from experts Nathan Totten, Nick Harris, Jennifer Marsman, Wade Wegner, Brian Prince, and Glenn Block.

In the afternoon, we’ll let you get hands-on with these technologies building your own social game while having experts in the room to help you make your ideas real. We’ll have resources available, including a walkthrough of building your first social game with Windows Azure.

If you plan to join us for the hands-on portion, it will be helpful to have the prerequisite software listed below installed on your laptop. Happy coding!

Prerequisite

Windows Azure Camps Kit: The Windows Azure Camps Training Kit uses the new Content Installer to install all prerequisites, hands-on labs and presentations that are used for the Windows Azure Camp events.

Optional

If you’d like to work on any of the following scenarios, you will want to download the appropriate Toolkit ahead of time.

Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games: The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games is a set of guidance, samples, and tools that helps developers quickly get started building a casual or social game on Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone is designed to make it easier for you to build mobile applications that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8: This toolkit includes Visual Studio project templates for a sample Metro style app and a Windows Azure cloud project.

Manual Install

If you’d like to manually install the tools and SDKs, you can use the following links:

Click here to learn more about this session.