c'Urling on SSDS with Jeff

kellyalt — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:06:00 GMT

Jeff Currier just posted this blog post where he talks about using cURL with SSDS. This illustrates why we are taking an incremental approach. Using cURL with SSDS was not even on our radar till one of the first customers to go on the "restricted beta" wanted to use this. Jeff dug into it and helped them along. Now he is sharing this out with everyone else. When we started down this path, we were willing to be surprised. This is one of them. I am sure many more are on the way.

Invitation to Startups using Open Source to SSDS Design Review

kellyalt — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:17:00 GMT

Ryan has sent out an invitation to companies, individuals and startups in the Silicon Valley to attend a Strategic Design Review (SDR) for SSDS through his blog. Since this invitation is going out to people who are not our traditional customers and have not attended a Microsoft SDR before, I thought we should point out that the product / service team shares the current offering and their plans in detail to get feedback from the audience at these events. These reviews are fairly interactive with the product team presenting, holding hands on lab and panel discussions around all the aspects of building a great service. To make it easier for technical and business decision makers from startups to attend, the SSDS team will be conducting these reviews without any NDA. We are really interested in hearing from people who do not use any Microsoft technologies today. Seats are limited so if you are interested, please get in touch with Ryan as soon as you can. The event will be held at our Silicon Valley campus. Hope to see you there.

In the spirit of open discussions . . .

kellyalt — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:19:00 GMT

We are reading the blogs, press reports and feedback with interest. So here are a few questions and comments I have:

a. Should we post our technical and service interface documentation on the SSDS site? What benefit would that provide to developers who are not yet part of the "invitation only" beta?

b. Yes, the Jason and Jeff video which had lot of good technical information is not very good quality. It was taped in the Open Space area. Sorry about that. We will work on re-doing this and posting it soon.

c. I have seen writings that indicate Microsoft will have to deal with cannibalizing their existing customer base when moving to the services paradigm and therefore we are hopelessly hamstrung (I am paraphrasing here).  While it is true that our strength is in software and we are the upstart or the laggard (depending on your perspective) in services, we have been doing services for quite some time and at very large scale as well. There are scenarios that software alone cannot enable efficiently and there are scenarios that services alone cannot enable. There are workloads and data that will never move outside the boundaries of the business that owns it, and there are workloads and data that is best serviced in the cloud.  We will continue to address software scenarios with SQL Server and our existing Data Platform as we are doing now. By extending our Data Platform to the cloud through SSDS, we can now enable whole new scenarios that we could not enable before. We will also enrich existing scenarios in exciting new ways. And this is where the next comment comes in.

d. I have been around technology industry for over 20 years and I have been through several disruptions. While it is true that disruptions can and has caused some companies to fall behind, it is also true that from an overall market standpoint, each big disruption has always created new value and expanded the overall market. In other words, technology disruptions are seldom zero sum games. This is good for incumbents who can adapt (and I am hoping that we at Microsoft will be nimble enough to adapt) and new entrants as well. There is room for all of us and cannibalizing our existing business is not what we are worried about at this time. We are betting that the services transformation will be net positive for us and the software technology market overall. I believe Ray Ozzie said something similar in an interview recently and I totally agree with him.

e. The last question is around open source. By Microsoft standards, I am fairly new here. I have been with Microsoft only 5 years and before that was an avid OSS proponent both at my startup and Corio.  So I am looking for some feedback from people I have lot of respect for. In our team we are totally committed to open protocols and standards. And you see that in SSDS today. If you see us do something that violates this in the future, feel free to send me a note at soumitrs at microsoft dot com. If you are an open source developer building applications using Java, Ruby or PHP on Linux, what would make SSDS interesting to you? Should we release code samples to help you along or should we release libraries and support those libraries? How does it matter that the service is built using Microsoft products like Windows Server and SQL Server?

This is important as service is different from software and I believe that the services stack will evolve differently than the software stack. I do not use different handsets when I switch landline carrier and we should not have to do the equivalent of switching handsets for software and services.  The cell phone carriers seem to be an exception here. We really want to make sure that our service has as broad a reach as possible.

I would like this blog to be a dialog to help us build the best data service we can build. Thank you for your time.

Namashkar,
Soumitra Sengupta

SQL Azure Team Blog : Open source

c'Urling on SSDS with Jeff

Invitation to Startups using Open Source to SSDS Design Review

In the spirit of open discussions . . .