Hanuk's Microsoft Platform Strategy Blog

Windows Azure case studies launched at PDC 2009

Microsoft announced the production version of Windows Azure today at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles.  Numerous customers and partners debuted their solutions during the Azure launch. Following are the case studies that prove the viability of Cloud Computing as cure to the IT agility issues:

More information about Windows Azure can be found at http://www.windowsazure.com.

-Hanu

Windows Azure now supports various OS image types

More details on the composition of the Compute image types will come.

-Hanu

Dominos Azure eCommerce application blogged by Jon Box

The Dominos system announced at pdc09 uses TomCat on Azure: http://blogs.msdn.com/jonbox/archive/2009/11/17/domino-s-demonstrates-tomcat-site-on-windows-azure.aspx

iStore is creating a Windows Azure based Digital Oilfield solution - PetroTrek Online

iStore (The Information Store) is developing the petroleum industry's first public cloud offering on Microsoft Azure Services platform. The independent software vendor is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner who blazed trails with a SharePoint 2007 based digital oilfield solution called PetroTrek^®,  that is being used by supermajor oil companies in their on-premise systems.

iStore understood the implications of the paradigm shift occurring in the computing space through Cloud and would like to be part of this radical change early in the process. The company wanted to level the playing field between the small independent oil producers and the supermajors by creating a multi-tenant Cloud based solution for managing the production assets. iStore refactored their existing PetroTrek^® solution with minimal effort to deploy it to Azure platform. This is a testament to the application compatibility of Azure Services Platform with its popular Windows counterparts on-premise.

Azure Services Platform allowed iStore to leverage the existing on-premise databases and directory services and combine them with Azure Compute layer in creating a multi-tenant solution that is accessible to the Long Tail of oil producers. The PetroTrek OnlineT solution leveraged the existing IT assets from their on-premise PetroTrek^® solution for a faster time-to-market delivery. One of the core strength of iStore is their proven abilities towards creation of solutions based on federated data stores and this solution exploits that capability to the fullest extent as shown by the architecture diagram in Figure 1.

Figure 1: PetroTrek OnlineT architecture

This Azure based solution allows the integration of the existing IT infrastructure (e.g. security systems) of a customer thereby allowing them extract value from the existing IT investments. The log in screen shown in Figure 2 can authenticate users through an on-premise system (large companies may prefer this for security reasons) or through an Azure self contained security infrastructure for small IT shops who don't have huge on-premise IT resources.

Figure 2: Authentication can be federated with on-premise security systems

Interoperability Azure application server platform (ASP.NET based) allows the mash up of various Cloud hosted and/or on-premise services in creating user experiences that keep the user's mental model in the center. Figure 3 shows well pad sites on Bing maps. Not shown here is various information layered on top related to the wells and well sites.

Figure 3: Bing map delivered from Azure with various layer selections shown in the left nav bar

PetroTrek OnlineT also uses Silverlight in delivering right user experience for various oil and gas well production KPIs as shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4: Silverlight based well KPIs delivered from Azure

The case study of the PetroTrek OnlineT solution is published at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005762.

The following quote from Oscar Teoh, VP of Operations says all about the IT agility brought in by Azure Services Platform:

"Our PetroTrek on-premise Digital Oilfield solution caters for supermajors and national oil companies; Window Azure enabled us to level the playing field between large companies and independent oil producers by helping us deliver similar IT capabilities across diverse customer base!"   - Oscar Teoh, VP of Operations

A few other quotes from their development staff and marketing are below:

"If we could give independent operators access to Digital Oilfield solutions with the same functionality as the ones we've developed for the supermajors and national oil companies, we could revolutionize exploration and production in the United States." Ben Parker, Director of Marketing.

"We'll be able to provide value to our customers right away because Windows Azure helps us eliminate a lot of operational hurdles." - Tod Magstadt, Strategic Planning and Project Manager.

"If we compare the upfront cost of the two deployment models, I would estimate that using Windows Azure could save customers as much as 90 percent in some cases." - Thinh Pham, Senior Architect.

PetroTrek OnlineT cloud offering is a proof that IT agility can be enabled for large and small companies alike through Cloud Computing. Azure Services Platform and Cloud Computing in general is a fix to the perpetual business and IT misalignment issues exacerbated by the lack of agility in IT operations.

iStore is partnering with CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation) in taking the cloud solution to market.

More information on iStore can be found at PetroTrek Online or by calling (713) 787-6798.

To learn more about Windows Azure please visit www.windowsazure.com.

-Hanu

Cost Oriented Architecture of Cloud Applications

As I was speaking to a group of customers few days ago, one question kept coming back - the impact of the architecture decisions on the monthly charges. The operational expenses of an application deployed to Cloud can be significantly impacted by the architecture decisions. Typical Cloud storage costs around $0.15/GB/month. Imagine if one decides to store all the web logs (for behavior tracking) in such a storage. one can pay huge monthly bill because of this decision.

Similarly, if an eCommerce  application uses huge product catalog like that of a consumer retail web site, the merchandizing process can leave lot of retired products in the storage; unless data archival strategy is part of the core architecture, the opex of the application can dramatically increase as the time progresses.

Same principle can be applied to the growth of the transactional information in Cloud based applications. The event streams (system, application, business) generated through the instrumentation can start adding to the monthly opex if the architecture does not take into the account the cost implications. One may be better off by streaming those events out to an on-premise BI and problem management systems so that you may be better off by paying one time egress charges than the perpetual monthly storage costs.

The above is quite different for on-premise operations as there are no usage based fees. The data archival strategy is often an afterthought than the core part of the architecture.

So an architect transforming from an on-premise system space to the Cloud environment, need to be aware of the impact of the architecture decisions on the monthly bill.

I don't mean to introduce a new term but I think "Cost Oriented Architecture" is a fitting term that can be described through a collection of principles that will help architects create better Cloud based systems optimized for opex.

Here are a few random thoughts about the Cost Oriented Architecture for the Cloud:

• Archive your data to a less expensive storage
• Check the temporal growth of the reference and transactional data
• Weigh the impact of perpetual storage costs versus one time egress charges to stream the data out
• Events streams (system, application, business) resulting form the operations can be piped back to the less expensive storage
• For large eCommerce sites, the generated behavioral tracking data can have a huge impact on the monthly opex.
• Compression of text payloads wherever possible
• Trim the number of active web servers in a web farm based on the heuristics of the operations
• Use batch transactions if the underlying storage supports such a feature

- Hanu

Silverlight ad publishing resources

Just come across a couple of nice resources for the creation and publishing of ads on Silverlight platform:

Download: Silverlight Advertising Creation Kit

Download: Silverlight Ad Publishing and Serving Guide

- Hanu

Advertising terminology on the Internet

Just found a great resource while doing a bit of research on the advertising terminology:

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci211535,00.html#io

I am hoping to find this one day when I need it.

-Hanu

Windows Azure product team blogs

Here are the official Microsoft product team blogs for Windows Azure:

Window Azure: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazue

.NET Services: http://blogs.msdn.com/netservices

SQL Azure: http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds

- Hanu

Windows Azure Management API and .NET Services Update

Couple of new announcement from the Windows Azure team:

Windows Azure Management API: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/09/17/introducing-the-windows-azure-service-management-api.aspx

What will be in the .NET Services October CTP (which may closely resemble the production release): http://blogs.msdn.com/netservices/archive/2009/09/18/update-on-the-next-microsoft-net-services-ctp.aspx

- Hanu

Windows 7 legacy scanner support by VueScan

If you have an old scanner you can't let go, I recently come across this application VueScan that supports of loads old scanners.

- Hanu

How to do Silverlight push notifications?

Here is a nice  blog post on Silverlight PolingHttpPushBinding usage:

-Hanu

Video card testing tools

I was on the phone with tech support for a laptop display issue and they pointed me to a nice set of tools to test the video card:

• hwmonitor  http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php
• VideoCardStabilityTestSetup.exe http://freestone-group.com/
• TechPowerUp http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1379/TechPowerUp_GPU-Z_v0.3.4.html

The video card temperature initially should be around 75 degrees Celsius and after 5 min of VideoCardStabilityTest.exe use,  it should not be above 95 degrees Celsius.

-Hanu

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Web Slice, Accelerator, Search Provider resources

I constantly receive questions about IE8 resources and thought that it is useful to aggregate them in a blog post:

IE8 Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/

Personalize IE8 through web services: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/02/03/personalize-ie8-through-services.aspx

Visual Search Providers

i. Extend IE8 through Visual Search Providers  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc891507(VS.85).aspx

ii. Search Suggestions Format: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc891508(VS.85).aspx

Accelerators

i. IE 8 Search Accelerator Developer Guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc289775(VS.85).aspx

ii. Open Service format specification for IE8 Accelerators: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304163(VS.85).aspx

Web Slices

i. Web Slice format specification: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304073(VS.85).aspx

ii. All about Web Slices: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956158(VS.85).aspx

iii. IE8 Web Slice guide: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc848871(VS.85).aspx 

iv. Authenticated web slices: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565670(VS.85).aspx

v. How do I build a web slice (video): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/cc304683.aspx

vi. Step by step guide to create a web slice: http://blogs.msdn.com/giorgio/archive/2009/05/01/h1n1-flu-swine-flu-web-slice-step-by-step.aspx

IE8 Case studies

i. Popular IE8 services: http://www.ieaddons.com/en/popular/

ii. eBay IE8 services: http://ie8.ebay.com

iii. Amazon IE8 services: http://www.ieaddons.com/en/search/?search=amazon

iv. Wal-Mart IE8 services: http://www.ieaddons.com/en/search/?search=walmart

Hope this helps.

-Hanu

JDBC Driver for SQL Server 2008

I was researching on the availability of JDBC driver for SQL Server 2008 and found the following information:

• JDBC Driver for SQL Server V 1.1 and 2.0 are the versions supported by Microsoft
• JDBC driver for SQL Server 2008 runs on any JVM but is only supported by Microsoft on Sun Solaris, SUSE Linux, and Windows XP or later versions of Windows OS (it probably means Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista). Not sure if it includes Windows 7 yet though.
• The Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver has been tested against various major JEE application servers including BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and JBoss. Note that the version 1.2 of the JDBC driver is certified with IBM WebSphere 6.1.
• The Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver is freely redistributable under a separate Redistribution License that requires registration. For more information, see Register for Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver Redistribution Rights.

The above are the excerpts of the JDBC Driver FAQ located at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/cc325721.aspx

For detailed documentation visit:  Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver Documentation.

-Hanu

SQL Azure CTP announced

SQL Azure Community Technology Preview (CTP) was announced on 8/18/2009; SQL Azure is a database in the Cloud that helps easy provisioning of relational databases to be used by Azure as well as on premise applications. Here is the excerpt from the SQL Azure blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/default.aspx) that mentions the editions and the respective price points:

"SQL Azure Database will be available as a free trial until the service goes live in November. SQL Azure Database will be available in two editions: Web Edition, which will include up to 1 GB of relational data, priced at $9.99 per month, and Business Edition, which will include up to 10 GB of data, priced at $99.99 per month."

Additional information on SQL Azure can be found at : http://www.microsoft.com/azure/sql.mspx.

Other SQL Azure resources: