Cloud Computing Conference 2009 – Overview of the Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform
Luis Martins, Architect Advisor from Microsoft Portugal
Buzz Words
- Cloud Computing
- Cloud Services
- IaaS – Infrastructure as a Services
- PaaS – Platform as a Service
Microsoft’s Strategy in this case is “Software + Services” that can be more prepared here http://www.davidchappell.com/blog/2008/06/what-is-software-services.html by David Chappell and in this whitepaper paper.
Why do we need the Cloud Computing?
Increase happiness by easing the IT problems
Sample:
Think about an Expense Reporting processing system in the Cloud
Challenges Building Applications
- How can I handle peak loads?
- How do I provide high availability?
- What are the upfront investment capital needed?
Platform Choices
- On-Premises Servers
- Hosted Servers
- Cloud Platform
- We need an OS for the cloud
What’s in the Cloud OS?
- Creates a layer on top of the Cloud computing elements used
- Increase the Utility Computing
- 24/7 availability
- High availability
- Peak Loads
Windows Azure
- Utility Computing
- Think of several computers with Virtual Machines inside of each one (This is called Fabric)
- Applications
- Will be place across several machines in the fabric
- Fabric controller is responsible for the management of the fabric and if some machine fails just calls another one
- Defining your service
- What are the components(roles) ?
- How do they interact?
- At what scale?
- Basically:
- LB
- Load Balancer in order to have the availability being managed and balanced to all the available machines that support our application
- Web Role
- Application that will be on the cloud that will be made available
- Worker Role
- Asynchronous processing
- Windows Azure is made to Scale out
- Stateless compute + durable Storage = Scalable Application
- Data Centers Microsoft
- 5 known data centers
- 4 in the US
- 1 in Ireland
- more to come, after the regulatory and legal problems that exist now with Cloud Computing have been solved
- Something like 20.000 machines in there
- All our data are placed on 3 different fault domains that will make almost impossible to lose data
- What’s being used with this structure
- Live ID
- Live Messenger
- Live Search
- Live Meeting (in the next version)
- Storage
- Window Azure Storage
- Durable Storage
- Blob
- Data Blocks like a file
- Table
- Not relational databases
- Queue
- Used to create asynchronous processing
- REST API available
Promises of Azure
- Microsoft runs your application
- Don’t think about management costs
- Grow the server as we need
Azure Vision
- Windows Azure
- SQL Services
- Services
- Data Services
- Data Sync
- Familiar SQL Server relational Database model
- Support for existing APIs and tools
- .NET Services
- Services
- Service Bus
- Access Control
- Workflow Services
- Live Services
- Services
- Directory
- Identity
- Storage
- Communications & Presence
- Search & Geospatial
- Live Mesh is the center of this Live Services vision
- SharePoint Services
- Dynamics CRM Services
Azure Services Platform Roadmap
- Fall 2008
- First CTP – Developer CTP for Services SDKs and Tools
- Spring 2009
- Updated CTPS
- Enabled Full trust & Fast CGI
- Geo-localization
- Summer 2009
- Making the business model available
- Winter 2009
- RTM version
How can we start?
- Download SDKs and Tools
- Get Invitation code
- Review the hands-on labs and videos