Developer Platform Product Management - Development Unfiltered: From code, to cloud to comedy. : Cloud

Microsoft Keynoting at JavaOne...That Just Happened!

stevemar — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:25:00 GMT

While the idea of Microsoft giving a keynote address at JavaOne – the Java community’s biggest conference of the year – has probably raised a few eyebrows, it really shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise at this point. Not only have we been involved in JavaOne for the past few years, you’ve also heard me talk many, many times about the importance of interoperability: most recently in the context of cloud computing and often as it relates to Web services. The latter has been a heavy focus for my team – and Microsoft in general – for a number of years. In fact, sometimes folks are caught off guard at just how active Microsoft has been in driving better interoperability via Web services and through our work with W3C, WS-I, WS-*, OASIS (e.g., the recent announcement regarding WS-RX, WS-TX and WS-SX), DMTF and more.

As we look at our latest research numbers, we see that 73% of professional developers rely on .NET or a combination of .NET and Java. In that sense, both Java and .NET have won in the enterprise and it is incumbent on both Microsoft and Sun to ensure that interoperability for the platforms is real, available and as easy to implement as possible. It’s a responsibility that we both share and customers tell us loud and clear that they expect innovation to accompany interoperability. I’m proud to say that this is something we take seriously and are executing against.

Along these lines, some of you may recall that last November we announced our participation – and the contribution of our StockTrader 2.0 code – to the Apache “Stonehenge” project. Stonehenge was formed to deliver a set of sample applications that demonstrate interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols. This is helpful for a number of reasons. While industry efforts like WS-* define approaches to enable interoperability, products may still need to be configured by customers before the benefits of interoperability can be realized. In fact, we’ve had a number of customers tell us they need better examples and more guidance on how to realize the built-in interoperability of applications across multiple vendor platforms. Stonehenge addresses this by providing customers with best practice guidelines and actual code that illustrates precisely how to achieve this in real world scenarios. To put it a little more poetically, Stonehenge will help us complete the “last mile” of interoperability between today’s standards-based infrastructure and tomorrow’s service-based applications.

So what exactly does this have to do with Microsoft – and specifically me and Dan’l Lewin – keynoting at JavaOne? A great deal actually, since during our keynote, Sun Vice President Aisling MacRunnels, Dan’l and I will announce that Sun has also now agreed to participate in the Stonehenge project and will be contributing the Metro-based StockTrader application code. This is important for two reasons. First, it means that Stonehenge will deliver even more value by providing best practice guidelines and reference implementations across an even broader range of scenarios and platforms, including Java, .NET, PHP, etc. The more samples and real world guidance we can give the community the better since it gives customers the ability to choose the best ones for their specific business requirements. It also makes it easier to pinpoint potential interoperability problems.

In addition, it represents another step forward in our ongoing work with Sun. As we all know, today’s IT environments are heterogeneous; whether it’s a single organization that runs both.NET and Java apps or multiple organizations that seek to collaborate with each other. To that end, we’ve been working closely with Sun on a number of interoperability initiatives over the past five years to help customers leverage their existing investments in Sun and Microsoft technologies. Some of the best examples include our work on Web Single Sign On, the Interop Vendor Alliance, our collaboration on virtualization and, of course, our recent agreement to use the SAML federation standard in both the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise federation solution and the forthcoming Microsoft “Geneva” Server federation solution.

Looking ahead, our work with Sun (or perhaps I should say Oracle?) becomes even more important in the context of cloud computing. Success in the cloud for most enterprises will hinge on the ability to utilize a broad and diverse set of computational resources, some of which may be implemented very differently from others. Interoperability protocols are the key to this. Thus, it’s important for us to continue to work together to ensure platform interoperability through these protocols, especially as it relates to Web service interoperability standards. The work that we are announcing today with Sun around Stonehenge is a great step in the right direction since it helps demonstrate seamless interoperability across application platforms – whether those applications are implemented on premises and in the cloud – and whether those applications are implemented on J2, on .NET or on something else.

With that in mind, I’d encourage everyone to take a look at the Stonehenge project and download the StockTrader sample app on one of the many supported platforms such as .NET, Java, PHP, WSAS, Sun Metro, etc. If you are interested, you can also read more about what Microsoft is doing around interoperability in general or watch Dan’l’s and my full JavaOne keynote. The keynote focuses specifically on the work we are doing with Sun to deliver interoperable application platforms that span on-premises and cloud computing, and help our customers leverage their Java and .NET investments.

Azure Dev Challenge Questions Tackled

stevemar — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:33:00 GMT

Last month Microsoft announced its first-ever Azure Developer Challenge. Since then, we’ve received strong interest and several questions about the competition.

The question I most frequently receive is, “Why is the Azure Dev Challenge open to US residents only?”

I am pleased to announce that starting today the Azure Developer Challenge is open to developers outside of the US. Without starting to sound like a lawyer, there were legal and regulatory considerations that took us a little bit longer to resolve for international. We now have those worked out and can’t wait to see your applications. See my previous post for more info on getting registered.

Seperately, we received questions about interopoerability and the use of existing code. Specifically... “Can we use jQuery?” the answer is yes.

Experiment, have fun, and send us feedback about your experiences during the process of submitting an entry for the competition.

Remember, the deadline to submit contest app entries is June 18 for US developers. Developers outside the US have until July 9^th to submit their application. So hurry up and go to www.newcloudapp.com to get started today! To follow the contest chatter on Twitter, search for “#newCloudApp”.

TechEd USA 2009 wrap up

stevemar — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:13:00 GMT

Friday concluded this year’s TechED: North America. We were delighted to have thousands of developers, IT professionals and technology decision makers in attendance, gaining insights into how to make their applications, infrastructures and businesses more innovative and cost effective. Both continue to be core priorities in today’s economy.

Bill Veghte announced the availability of the Windows Server 2008 R2 release candidate, which includes some great new features for improved web experiences, scalability, hardware utilization and virtualization. We also continued to talk about the recent WebSphere Loves Windows campaign emphasizing significant cost savings, better efficiency and improved performance when customers run Websphere on Windows Server or take advantage of the .NET Framework for application development. Last, we demonstrated ways in which our customers could unlock the hidden potential in their existing technologies today by leveraging current versions of Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, BizTalk Server and Visual Studio together.

So where do we go from here? Well, whether you’re a developer, an IT Pro or a decision maker within your organization you should be thinking about a few key things. Darryl Taft put it perfectly in this article when he called out the fact that IT can be a competitive differentiator in today’s economy. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need new features or technology. Think about harnessing the power that lives within your infrastructure today by taking advantage of tools that make it easier to spin up a new web presence, like the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) . Second, keep your skills fresh by leveraging resources like the Ramp Up program at MSDN. And last but not least, speak up! Engage in community dialogue and as always, tell us what you think!

Two flavors of cloud computing – Public and Private

stevemar — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:27:00 GMT

Six years ago we announced a multi-year, multi-product vision for the Enterprise which we called Dynamic IT. The principles were simple - virtualization, model driven, services oriented and user centric. Shortly thereafter, we began to conceptualize a services-based offering in the cloud which culminated in our Azure Services Platform announcement last October. These two initiatives might seem distinct, but they are in fact highly related. Simply put, this is the continued evolution from physical to logical to virtual.

In addition to the interest in cloud computing, there is even more interest in the application of cloud computing principles in the enterprise data center. As I have mentioned previously, at some point in the future, the Azure Services Platform and an enterprise data center will be, technically speaking, largely indistinguishable. Both will:

· Be highly virtualized and elastic

· Be managed in a consistent manner within and across the firewall

· Hide the complexities of hardware infrastructure from the applications they serve

We are learning a lot from the investments that we are making in Azure and will use these learnings to drive additional benefits for customers not just in the cloud but also with our premises technologies. One of our primary objectives is to deliver the technology that empowers Enterprises to build private clouds within their existing datacenters.

While there are a lot of vendors talking about private clouds, let’s think this through a bit. Would you buy beef from a vegetarian? I digress… here’s the point – the knowledge that we gain from running a public cloud will yield better technology for the private ones that we help customers deliver.

How does Microsoft deliver this today?

· Hardware Abstraction: Delivered in Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V

· Logical Pooling of Compute: Delivered through management tools like VMM, you can connect the compute power from your servers into a single, logical resource

· Automated Provisioning of Resources: Delivered this with tools like Intelligent Placement in VMM allowing you to expand and contract workloads across your fabric

With Windows Server 2008 R2 our fabric capabilities become even stronger. In this release, we deliver enhancements to the native virtualization capabilities:

· Live Migration

· Larger VM Support: 32 and 64-bit VMs, with up to 64GB memory per VM

· Boot from VHD & Clustered Shared Volumes (core enhancements from Windows Azure)

To net this out, we’re bringing the lessons learned from our public cloud to the places where they will likely deliver the most benefit in the near term – right in your data center. As we evolve the technology that drives Azure, you can count on continued innovation and evolution of our premises technology that will make private cloud computing a reality.

Walking the Walk – the Cloud and Standards

stevemar — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:50:00 GMT

Earlier today, the DMTF announced the creation of the “Open Standards Cloud Incubator” group which will specifically focus on developing a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management. This is one of what will probably be a number of important efforts to drive additional value and choice for customers. This particular effort may catch the eye of folks on the enterprise side, as managing applications and infrastructure that spans premises and cloud is a very real topic of conversation. In the end, success in the cloud for most enterprises will include the ability to utilize a broad and diverse set of computational resources, some of which may be implemented very differently from others. A sensible goal of the DMTF is to reduce the friction across different vendor offerings in these datacenter scenarios.

As we have said previously, Microsoft will approach cloud standardization from multiple angles:

· Practical interoperability – Microsoft-based services should be easily interoperable in practice with a diverse set of applications, platforms, and other clouds. We envision that our customers will integrate applications across multiple data centers, for example, having some of the component services running on Microsoft technology while other components run on Amazon, Google, Salesforce, or other data centers. Microsoft will work with other cloud vendors to produce guidance on building applications, to define the interoperability protocols, and to test real-world interoperability.

· Standards--Microsoft will continue to invest in organizations, like DMTF, that help push the interoperability state of the art forward. Management is a great example of this, as there will likely need to be further evolution of the management protocols, such as WS-Management, to add cloud-specific extensions.

· Data portability -- Microsoft believes that our customers own the data that they have entrusted to our applications and platforms, and the applications they build on our platforms. Microsoft will work with other datacenter and cloud vendors to make this bi-directional, customer-centric approach a more common industry practice.

While it's still very early to talk about elaborate technical standards for cloud computing, establishing the conduits for the conversations and outlining a collaborative approach is critical. Projects like the DMTF incubator will develop requirements and use case scenarios to allow all the participants to better understand where standards for communication with cloud services can create the most value.

As always, we pledge to be open, collaborative and transparent about our efforts in the cloud standards space. If you have thoughts on where we should focus additional attention, please let us know!