Beyond | IT : windows azure

Windows Azure Service Managment API now in CTP

john.mullinax — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:16:17 GMT

The Windows Azure team released a Community Technology Preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API the other day. This API is REST-based, and currently supports the following operations (according to the Windows Azure team blog):

Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.

Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups

Also, x509 certificates are used for authentication, and there’s a small tool called csmanage.exe to help you manage deployments and use the API.

This is, of course, CTP – so be prepared for some changes along the way to RTW.

A couple resource links:

Get the csmanage utility.
Get Windows Azure Service Management API documentation.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,manage,API

Intro to Windows Azure in one slide

john.mullinax — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:27:00 GMT

NOTE: Microsoft just changed the branding a bit so this slide needs to be updated - basically, the Azure Service Platform becomes the Windows Azure Platform, SQL Data Services becomes SQL Azure. Live Services leaves the platform (does not go away, but will emphasize affinity with Windows). -JCM July 14, 2009

Here’s an intro to Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform in one slide that I put together for use at Cloud Camps or other forums where you need to get the basics across quickly. Depending on the speaker and time available, this slide could go from 5 minutes up to an hour or more. Feedback welcome and appreciated. Enjoy! :)

Windows Azure Intro In 1 Slide

View more documents from johnmullinax.

Note: I left the SharePoint Services and Dynamics CRM Services boxes off this slide as they are not available in the Community Technology Preview at this time. The “finished” software-as-a-service solutions SharePoint Online and Dynamics CRM Online continue to be available as supported production offerings, of course. :)

Technorati Tags: windows azure,azure service platform,cloud Computing,software-plus-services

From concept to delivery in 2 weeks with Windows Azure and Silverlight

john.mullinax — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:55:53 GMT

Suppose you were asked to design and host an interactive map for the Taste of Chicago, which gets about 3 million visitors. No problem.

Now, suppose you only had 2 weeks to deliver the whole thing – from first phone call to finished product. What would you do?

If you were West Monroe Partners, you would turn to Silverlight so your designers and developers could work together more efficiently, and to Windows Azure so you didn’t have to worry about provisioning 25 servers on top of the design and development work.

And what would the end result look like? Something like this.

From concept to live site, and ready to handle all 3 million visitors if needed – in 2 weeks. Hats off to the folks at West Monroe Partners!

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Silverlight

Ray Ozzie speaks on Google Wave

john.mullinax — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 01:20:07 GMT

Courtesy of Ina Fried, here’s Ray Ozzie speaking about Google Wave at Silicon Valley’s Churchhill Club.

In a nutshell, Ozzie compares Google Wave to Groove, and calls it anti-web because the ethos of the web is about open data formats, open protocols, and technologies that are simple enough for people to implement themselves.

He goes on to differentiate Live Mesh from Google Wave and Groove as being something built off the learnings from Groove… it’s web friendly, and simple enough for people to implement into their own solutions themselves.

Technorati Tags: Live Mesh,Cloud Computing,Azure,Google Wave,Groove

From Cloudy in Seattle: The Easy Way to Install the Windows Azure Tools and SDK Pre-Requisites

john.mullinax — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:46:56 GMT

Jim Nakashima has a handy little post here on an easy way to get all the Windows Azure tools and SDK pre-requites installed. The secret is to use the Web Platform Installer, which you can get here. But read Jim’s post for the step-by-step guidance, links to a few hot fixes to manually install, direct link to the Windows Azure tools, etc.

BTW, the Web Platform Installer also gives you ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, etc. If you’re setting up a new machine, Jim’s post should save you a nice chunk of time.

Technorati Tags: windows azure,web platform installer,cloud

Symmetry between SQL Server and SQL Data Services – video interview

john.mullinax — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:32:05 GMT

Patric McElroy, Group Program Manager of SQL Data Services team talks with Michael Cote of RedMonk about what’s coming with the new SDS, and where there will be symmetry with SQL Server. Really nice interview!

This was recorded a few weeks back at MIX09. A few nuggets that stood out to me:

SDS will support TDS protocol and T-SQL at v1 release. More in the SQL Data Services FAQ here.
For 80% of apps deployment to the cloud will simply mean pointing the deployment scripts to a new location. The same rich toolsets used by DBAs and data programmers will still be the best way to work.
Improve compliance/management of departmental apps and data without the deployment friction of creating and enforcing internal centralized database hosting operations.

Technorati Tags: Azure,SQL Data Services,cloud

Video – Zune on Windows Mobile 7 vs. The Greater Sum

john.mullinax — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:17:50 GMT

Just saw this fun video from a post over at Live Side… funny thing, they hone in on whether or not one of the device interfaces is a preview of Windows Mobile 7 with a Zune app. To me, the the far more interesting thing is the qualitatively new, boundary-spanning experience they paint using technologies that are here (or almost here) today.

Take, for example, the guy playing a video game, getting pinged with an IM (XBOX Live and ties in Messenger contacts), and then using touch UI (coming in Windows 7) to switch over to a rich graphical interface (either WPF or Silverlight 3 running out-of-browser) monitoring his cloud app presumably hosted on Windows Azure (available now in CTP, with monitoring APIs), and using the UI to literally “dial up” the capacity for his app.

One place the video doesn’t go far enough… I’ll be surprised if someone in the future has to go in and manually turn up the capacity. Ok, maybe in the first release. But I think the direction of the thinking is that you will define rules that automagically keep response time under a certain threshold, up to a specific cost point… and then enforce new rules if the cost point is crossed. For example, “maintain less than 3 second response time, up to $500/month, and then keep a 4 second response time up to $1000/month”.

Of course, if the guy doesn’t get interrupted during his video game, then you don’t get to show the cool touch UI or capacity dial. :)

Video: Overnight Success

See more “vision” videos and info here.

Technorati Tags: software-plus-services,vision,video,windows azure,windows live,WPF,future

Learn the Azure Services Platform with these practical, free little videos

john.mullinax — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:53:00 GMT

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then at 30 fps, the “How Do I…” video series on the Azure Services Platform should be good for a library full of worth of Azure Services Platform goodness!

Indeed, that’s just the idea: to create a video library of free training on Windows Azure and the Services Platform that are:

Very practical and task-oriented – each video has a clear title so you know what you’re going to learn before you click it, and you can find exactly the one you want.
“Bite-sized” – most are around 10 minutes each, so it’s easy to find time to watch and easy to share with friends and colleagues

Additionally, even if you’re not yet in the CTP for Windows Azure yet (sign up here), the videos let you “see” what the actual online experience is like. True, you can do almost everything short of publishing your app to the cloud without being in the CTP – even including debugging against a simulated cloud environment – but if you also want to see the publishing and online management experience, these videos are nice way to do that.

So what are the videos? Well, today we published 6 more “How Do I” videos on the Azure Services Platform, bringing the total up to nine. The full list of Azure Service Platform videos available today are:

Additionally, more are on the way! We have plans to publish up to 40 “How Do I” videos on Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform this year. A sampling of future videos we’re thinking about include:

Service	Video Topic
Windows Azure	Using table partitions to increase storage performance
Windows Azure	Troubleshooting concurrency issues
Windows Azure	Implementing paging solutions in stateless environments
.NET Services	Extending the resource model in the Live Framework
.NET Services	Synchronize a media object (e.g, a picture)
Live Services	Assign permissions to a media object
Live Services	Manage workflow instances in the cloud
Live Services	Passive Federation (website and access control)

Many of you will be asking yourself, where are the SQL Data Services videos? Don’t worry, they’re coming – most likely in late Spring 2009.

Finally, if there’s a specific topic you’d really like to see a “How Do I” video on, let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Azure Services Platform,Free Training,Software-plus-Services

Get the Mesh Video Player

john.mullinax — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:49:31 GMT

Brian Gorbett has a good post about how he built a Meshified video player. What’s especially cool about this is that Brian also posted a screen cast video of him Meshifying the app, a link to the source code, AND a link to install the Meshified video player into your Mesh (CTP – developer version, not the Beta version) without having to touch the source code. Since the CTP-developer version of Mesh is still not widely available, I thought I’d post a couple screenshots of what adding an app to your Mesh actually looks like as you go through the process.

First, you have to allow access for the app into your Mesh.

Then, you get the Mesh Apps Screen. Notice that the first time you do this, you see the app but is says “You have zero instances” – you have to create an instance of the app (you can have multiple if you like).

Next, you name your instance of the Mesh Video Player, which I just called “First Mesh Video Player” here.

And, voila, you have your Mesh Video Player! A couple things to note – there’s a mesh news feed that acts as a log of your activities – what you added, new instances created, etc. Also, there’s a big orange button to browse for other apps. We’ll come back to that in a second.

Now that you have the Mesh Video Player in installed in your Mesh, you might want to run it. When you click the “First Mesh Video Player” Link, you get some information about the app, a filtered news feed about what you’ve done with the app, and a list of the permissions it has – what it can read and update via the Live Framework. As you can see, this app reads my Windows Live Profile, list of devices in Mesh, can read and update contacts, and has full rights to the news feed. After checking this out, you open the app by clicking “Open application”.

It loads into your Mesh, and you can see it on your Mesh desktop! (You need to supply your own video.)

One last thing – remember I mentioned the big orange button that lets you browse for other apps? Here’s what you get if you go there.

At this point in the CTP, the list includes some cool – and functional – little sample apps… a collaborative crossword, a shared list system, a way to leave notes for people, and CrowdVote – a simple utility for collaborative decision making. You can learn more about these at www.MicrosoftMeshPack.com.

Ever wondered how Windows Azure works?

john.mullinax — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:28:07 GMT

David Lemphers has a post here that digs into a few of the details, and is worth a look. And thanks to Steve Clayton for pointing it out.

See David’s post for pretty pictures and more details on how the VMs are apportioned, how much effective compute capacity each Guest VM has, etc. For more details on how to running apps against roles, see the Windows Azure site here.

Set Up:

New machines boot to network, and get a maintenance OS
Maintenance OS talks to Fabric Controller
Fabric Controller tells the Maintenance OS to create a Host Virtual Machine
Host VM talks to Fabric Controller
Fabric Controller tells Host VM to create a guest VM. There can be many Guest VMs
Once a Guest VM is set up, a Role can can be added. A Role is the virtual server that executes a customers’ application logic.

VM Coordination and Isolation:

All application logic exists within Guest VMs, with the Guest VMs keeping applications isolated from each other
To ensure one customer VM doesn’t overwhelm another, all VMs are balanced to keep network, CPU, etc., evenly apportioned
All Guest VMs communicate with the outside world through a VMBus on the Host VM, as only the Host VM can talk to the outside world.

Running an App:

Guest VMs host Roles
Roles today can be a Web Role or a Worker Role. Additional roles are likely to be available in the future
Web Roles are essentially like IIS
Worker Roles do other computational tasks, as instructed by the Web Role, but do not communicate with outside world
Web Role hands tasks off for Worker Role to execute by adding them to a Queue

Live Blogging at PDC 2008 – Ray Ozzie’s keynote: Introduce Windows Azure

john.mullinax — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:32:00 GMT

Headline: Windows Azure, Windows in the Cloud, released as CTP

See the video stream here: www.microsoftpdc.com

Key theme: Transformation toward services, and enabling a new generation of apps that span the pc, web, and phone

Today: focusing on back end of that – data centers in the cloud

Some have recently asked, “Is the cloud overblown?” In a sense the concepts of utility computing was pioneered by service bureaus in the 1960s, as well as virtualization in the same period. But today, even in the best virtualized data centers, we’re serving and delivering inwardly facing solutions. they’ve been specifically built to target solutions for employees and in some cases partners. All scoped out, audited, and controlled by an IT organization skilled in management.

Now, every organization, school, government witnessing the externalization of IT. People are expecting more interactions with each other – community elements like wikis, ranking and rating, reviews, etc. The web a critical part of every company’s demand generation. Additionally, the previous separate world of software development and operations are more and more closely related.

For some customers, they see huge spikes in demand for computing capacity. Today, people ensure they have ample capacity for each application that has spikes in traffic. Spare power, cooling, compute, storage, network. And business continuity requires people to build multiple data centers in different locations. Far away customers have network latency issues that impact their experience and satisfaction. And to serve those far away, people build data centers all around the world which creates a host of other issues around tax and regulations.

So is the cloud different? Resoundingly yes. A system to serve the web is vastly different.

Over the years, we accumulated lots of knowledge on how to run high scale, robust technology infrastructure – but it has not been packaged in a form that is useful to developers or partners or customers.

And MS realized that we were seeing a new tier in computing architecture. Experience tier, data center tier, web tier. The web tier scale is the size of the web – apparently infinite capacity with available anywhere whenever needed. As we started planning for this, Amazon released EC2. Props to Amazon.

Windows Azure – a new windows offering at the web tier of computing. Vista, mobile at experience tier, windows server at server tier, and Windows Azure at web tier. Provides core capabilities: virtualized computing, storage, a fabric controller for handling geo distribution and management.

Balancing opposing goals:

On the one hand, help Windows developers reuse/leverage existing code and skills and tools and runtimes. It’s Windows, so you would expect a world of options for tools and runtimes. Being Windows, that’s the type of familiarity we intend to foster and grow.

We also need to help developers recognize that the cloud tier is fundamentally different. Most apps today and deeply rooted in a scale up past. The systems we’re building are setting the stage for next 50 years of computing. Windows Azure enables new deployment and app models, built for horizontal scale.

Windows Azure is not software you run on your own service. It’s a service that runs on MS machines. It’s released today as a CTP, and features are only a fraction of what you will eventually see. It’s designed for dynamic, rapid improvement.

Were betting on Azure ourselves. IT will be our highest scale, highest availability, most economically, and most environmentally sensitive way to host services in the cloud.

A few other services complement Windows Azure:

Live Services – extend services outward to any pc, browser, phone in synchronized way
.Net Services – service bus, workflow services, authorization services, identity federation services
SQL Services – database services in cloud – reporting, business intelligence
SharePoint Services – more coming
Dynamics CRM services- more coming
Windows Azure- includes compute, storage (tables, blobs, streams), and management

Technorati Tags: PDC 2008,Ray Ozzie,Windows Azure,cloud computing