Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 3/31/2010+

Windows Azure, SQL Azure Database and related cloud computing topics now appear in this weekly series.

 
Update 4/1/2010: There will be no Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 4/1/2010+
• Indicates 3/31/2010 items added on 4/1/2010.

Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles in the following sections:

• Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services
• SQL Azure Database (SADB)
• AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus
• Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

To use the above links, first click the post’s title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform published 9/21/2009. Order today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (in stock.)

Read the detailed TOC here (PDF) and download the sample code here.

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

See a short-form TOC, get links to live Azure sample projects, and read a detailed TOC of electronic-only chapters 12 and 13 here.

Wrox’s Web site manager posted on 9/29/2009 a lengthy excerpt from Chapter 4, “Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage” here.

You can now download and save the following two online-only chapters in Microsoft Office Word 2003 *.doc format by FTP:

• Chapter 12: “Managing SQL Azure Accounts and Databases”
• Chapter 13: “Exploiting SQL Azure Database's Relational Features”

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page; these chapters will be updated for the January 4, 2010 commercial release in April 2010. 

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

Microsoft Research’s Extreme Computing Group (XCG) AzureScope: Benchmarking and Guidance for Windows Azure project’s Best Practices for Developing on Window Azure page recommends:

Azure Storage

1. Azure tables only index on the partition key and row key.

Queries against these fields will run quickly, but on large tables querying in other ways may be quite slow.

Sample Code : Querying on Azure table

2. Batch multiple small work items into a single queue message.

Queue and read/delete operations are designed for fault tolerance and thus operate with similar access times as blob and Xtable operations.Decompose per-node work into chunks with run-times larger than 1 second and preferably in the range of 2 to 90 minutes. For many small items, consider batching multiple requests into a single queue entry. Remember that queue entries are limited to 8 KB in size. It may be necessary to store further task information in another data store, such as XTable.

3. Follow the best practices for tuning Azure Tables to get the best performance from them.

Performance of Azure tables can be greatly affected by how they are configured. See this article at MSDN for more details. [Update 4/1/2010: This article (thread) covers a one-year time span. The updated performance tips, dated 3/2/2010, are at the end of the thread.]

Related Test Cases : Table Read Throughput Table Write Throughput

4. If performance is the main concern, design a blob storage hierarchy that spreads accesses to the blobs into as many storage partitions as possible.

Note: Designing for the manageability of security policy mechanisms leads one to instead have the fewest number of storage partitions.

Related Test Cases : Blob Read Throughput Blob Write Throughput

5. Make use of Azure Blob storage for quick data access to worker nodes.

Reading blob data from worker nodes normally comes at throughput rates similar to disk reads (30-40 MB/sec). When copying blob data to a local worker role through asynchronous I/O, we have found that you get the most benefit using a memory cache of around 10MB. Also be sure to distribute blob reads across workers, as requesting too many reads at a time from a single node can cause access contention.

Related Test Cases : Blob Read Throughput

6. Replicate data between tables rather than doing a ‘join’ type operation.

In the client this is often preferable as it minimizes calls to the Table Service.

7. Select the right type of blob to use for your application.

Windows Azure provides two different types of blob storage. Block blobs are a series of data blocks of potentially varying size, which are assembled sequentially. Block blobs are optimized for streaming data back to a worker or client. Page blobs represent a range of data that is loaded into chunks of data that fit into pages aligned to 512-byte boundaries. Page blobs are optimized for random read/write scenarios and allow one to write to a range of bytes within the blob. Page blobs are also used as the back end store for Azure Drives.

 

Storage Type	Optimal Use Scenario
Block Blob	Data which is streamed back to a worker or client.
Page Blob	Data accessed frequently by random reads and writes.
Azure Drive	Data that needs to interact with legacy applications.

8. Use batched updates in XTable.

This may require you to keep track of multiple TableContexts (one per partition) and keep count of entity updates within each TableContext.

9. Use snapshots of Azure data when you only need read access.

Snapshots provide a read only copy of your Azure blobs and can be used to make concurrent access from many compute nodes much more efficient. They do this by eliminating contention for the data amongst requestors. An added benefit is that snapshots do not count against your storage costs.

10. When creating temporary Azure Tables create tables with a new name instead of deleting existing tables and reusing the name.

Azure table cleanup can take some time between the request for deleting the table and when the resources for that table are finally cleaned up. During that wait time the name of the table will be unavailable and you will be blocked from creating the table again.

11. When writing to Blobs try to reuse equivalent blocks already stored in the cloud.

When writing a chunk of data to a blob, if you know that the data is already stored in the cloud it is much more efficient to copy that data from its cloud source than to upload it from a client. This case can frequently occur when copying data to a different location in the cloud or when modifying only a portion of the data inside the blob.

• Eugenio Pace recommends Windows Azure Guidance – Replacing the data tier with Azure Table Storage in this 3/31/2010 post:

This new release focuses primarily on replacing the data tier with Azure Table Storage. To make things more interesting, we changed the data model in a-Expense so it now requires two different related entities: the expense report “header” (or master) and the details (or line items) associated with it.

The implementation of this on SQL Azure is trivial and nothing out of the ordinary. We’ve been doing this kind of thing for years. However when using Azure Table Storage this small modification triggers a number of questions:

1. Will each of this entities correspond to its own “table”?
2. Given that Azure Tables don’t really require a “fixed schema”, should we just store everything in a single table?

#1 is the more intuitive solution if you come with a “relational” mindset. However, the biggest consideration here is that Azure Table Storage doesn’t support transactions across different tables.

Eugenio continues with a discussion of issues that arise when moving from SQL Azure to Windows Azure tables and how to overcome the problems.

Sachin Prakash Sancheti’s Table Storage Vs. SQL Azure post of 3/31/2010 to the Infosys Microsoft Alliance and Solutions blog begins:

At the time of application design decision on Azure, most of us get into this discussion at some point in time, “Table Storage OR SQL Azure”.

I thought of listing down the pros and cons for both of these storage options. Following comparison might be helpful to drive the decision.

List down the expectations from the desired storage from application point of view and compare those requirements with the help of following table.

Sachin continues with a detailed table.

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SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS) and OData

Microsoft Research’s Extreme Computing Group (XCG) AzureScope: Benchmarking and Guidance for Windows Azure project’s Best Practices for Developing on Window Azure page recommends:

1. Do not worry too much about planning for worst case performance behavior in SQL Azure.

In testing performance we found that performance over time was consistent, although there are rare occasions (less than 1% occurrence) where performance degraded significantly. Therefore, we have seen no reason to provision assuming a worst-case behavior in SQL Azure that is significantly worse than average-case behavior.

2. Expect a single Azure-based client accessing SQL Azure to take about twice as long as a single local-enterprise client accessing SQL Server within the enterprise (commodity hardware).

If speed is a chief concern and the number of concurrent clients is expected to be small, a local deployment (with local clients) will obtain the better performance. The opaque (and potentially changing) nature of the Cloud prevents us from determining exactly why there was a 2X slowdown.

3. Keep in mind the concurrency limits in SQL Azure.

We found that the throughput of a single large database instance (10GB max size) peaks at 30 concurrent clients running continuous transactions tested using OLTP-style TCPE database benchmark. (The corresponding peak was seen at 6 concurrent clients in our LAN testing). In that case we experience 50% transaction failure and the average transaction completion time, for those that did complete, was 65% longer than that of a single client. For 8 concurrent clients we found a reasonable 15% transaction completion time increase.

Stephen Walther explains Using jQuery and OData to Insert a Database Record on 3/30/2010:

In my previous blog entry, I explored two ways of inserting a database record using jQuery. We added a new Movie to the Movie database table by using a generic handler and by using a WCF service. In this blog entry, I want to take a brief look at how you can insert a database record using OData. …

When using the .NET framework, you can easily expose database data through the OData protocol by creating a WCF Data Service. In this blog entry, I will create a WCF Data Service that exposes the Movie database table. …

Marcelo Lopez Ruiz’s Sorting OData feeds by their title post of 3/30/2010 begins:

Let’s say you’re browsing the Netflix OData catalog, and you’d like to sort the feed entries by their title. You type http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Genres?$orderby=title into your browser, but you get this error message back.

What went wrong? If you look at the payload for all genres, you’ll see the title there. But that’s the title ATOM element; if you want to refer to a property of genres, you need to use the property name from the model. …

So if you run http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Genres?$orderby=Name, the response is successful.

Of course you don't have to look at data to figure this out. If you look at the metadata for the service, exposed at http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/$metadata, you'll see that the mapping is explicitly defined. …

• Pop Catalin started an Implement OData API for StackOverflow Meta StackOverflow question thread on 3/25/2010 with several comments and six answers. See the Scott Hanselman explains Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes post in Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 3/29/2010+.

• Nileesha Bojjawar demonstrates using Azure SQL with Spring Hibernate in this 3/25/2010 post to the EMC Consulting blogs:

I tried to set up an application to use SQL Azure as the database for a Spring based Web application.

PS: Remember to check that your network has access to the SQL Azure Server at port 1433. Some corporate networks block this completely or may allow it to the servers in one particular region for e.g. North Europe, in which case you should create the SQL Azure server in that region.

Firstly, I had to install an SQL server locally to create a Dev Database. I wanted to check how the SQL Azure Sync Framework works.

For this example, I have create a simple table in my local SQL Server Express called “UserTransaction” with just id and name, id being the primary key.

Nileesha continues with an illustrated tutorial and tips for handling login errors.

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AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team announces AppFabric LABS Now Available:

AppFabric Labs is a place for us to preview cool new AppFabric technologies for interested customers. We're very excited about the features we put up on Labs, so we want to get your feedback on them as soon as possible. Labs is a developer preview, not a full commercial release, so there is no formal support or SLA in place.

To see what features are currently available in AppFabric Labs, please review the release notes for our current Labs SDK.

From the release notes file:

The AppFabric Labs environment will be used showcase some early bits and get feedback from the community. Usage for this environment will not be billed.

In this release of the LABS environment, we’re shipping two features:

• Silverlight support: we’ve added the ability for Silverlight clients to make cross-domain calls to the Service Bus and Access Control Services.
• Multicast with Message Buffers: we’ve added the ability for Message Buffers to attach to a multicast group. A message send to the multicast group is delivered to every Message Buffer that is attached to it.

To get started with Labs:

• Go to https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/,
• Sign up using your Live ID,
• Create your Labs project and namespace, and
• Download Labs samples from here to learn more about these new features.

To provide feedback and to learn what the community is building using the Labs technology, please visit the Windows Azure platform AppFabric forum and connect with the AppFabric team.

Running AppFabric V1 Samples Against the Labs Environment

To run the AppFabric V1 SDK samples against the Labs environment, you'll have to rename the ServiceBus.config.txt file found at the AppFabric Labs SDK page to ServiceBus.config and place it in your  .NET Framework CONFIG directory. The CONFIG directory is located at:

1. C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG on x86 systems, and

2. C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG on x64 systems.

The AppFabric V1 SDKs Windows Azure sample will not work against the Labs environment. This is because to run V1 samples against Labs you need to place the ServiceBus.config file in your .NET Framework CONFIG directory and Windows Azure doesn't allow that.

Known Issues

1. When uploading CrossDomain.XML to the Service Bus root, please leave out the <!DOCTYPE> schema declaration.

2. Silverlight clients convert every Service Bus operation error to a generic HTTP NotFound error.

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Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses

Microsoft Research’s Extreme Computing Group (XCG) AzureScope: Benchmarking and Guidance for Windows Azure project’s Best Practices for Developing on Window Azure page recommends:

Network Communication

1. Increasing the size of the VM will also increase the size of network throughput.

Our tests show that a ‘large’ VM has roughly twice the network throughput of a ‘small’ VM. Large VMs are also very good for computation that utilizes multiple processing cores.

2. Use node-to-node communication to save on message latency costs.

Early versions of Azure required that all communication between nodes pass through one of the data storage mechanisms provided by Azure. This was an extremely robust form of communication but as a result it was not fast enough for the expectations of many application developers. Azure now provides direct network communication between nodes which allows much faster message passing, but does so at the cost of reliability. If a node fails the requests are not durable and will also be lost, possibly requiring the computation to restart.

Related Test Cases : Ping Pong

Testing & Development

1. In debugging an Azure application the use of ‘heartbeats’ can provide valuable information.

Using a controller worker role to track a heartbeat signal from other worker roles can provide useful tracking information when testing a distributed application. In general it is useful to keep the heartbeat reporting back to the controller at an interval of 10 seconds or less.

2. Include retry logic in applications in all instances where you are attempting to access data from SQL Azure or Azure Storage.

Sample Code : Use of retry policy provided by StorageClient to access Azure storage Custom retry logic to access Azure storage

3. Remember that Azure Queues limit queued items to a two hour processing time once they leave the queue.

All work on an item removed from the queue will need to be completed within the two hour window. If not, the item will be returned to the queue and your application may enter an infinite processing loop.

4. Use multiple worker nodes to add work items to the task queue.

Queue write throughput is approximately 20 items per second for one worker. Most applications creating a large number of jobs will create work items much faster than this. Distributing the placement of the items on the queue will speed this process up.

• The Windows Azure Team continues its case-study interview series with Real World Windows Azure: Interview with Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Kelley Blue Book of 4/1/2010:

As part of the Real World Windows Azure series, we talked to Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Kelley Blue Book about using the Windows Azure platform to create the company's premier Web site and the benefits that Windows Azure provides. Find out what he had to say:

MSDN: What services does Kelley Blue Book provide?

[Kelley Blue Book]: Kelley Blue Book is an automotive information and value exchange service that gives consumers, automotive dealers, government, and companies in the finance and insurance industries information they need to facilitate vehicle transactions.

MSDN: What was the biggest challenge your company faced prior to implementing Windows Azure?

[Kelley Blue Book]: Our Web site, www.kbb.com, which is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework, has more than 14 million visitors each month. To support traffic, we have two physical data centers where we rent server space. We can handle peak traffic, but we were also paying for underutilized computing resources during non-peak periods. Plus, we need the ability to scale up quickly. For example, when "Cash for Clunkers" was introduced, it was time-consuming for us to manage the physical servers.

MSDN: Describe the solution you built with Windows Azure to help you scale up quickly and cost-effectively?

[Kelley Blue Book]: Because our developers are familiar with .NET-based code, they were able to essentially migrate our site to the Windows Azure platform. We moved all 27 of our Web servers and nine instances of Microsoft SQL Server data management software to the cloud. We're also using Windows Azure Blob Storage and Windows Azure Tables to ensure data persistence.  …

Read the full story (case study) here.

• Sarim Khan’s Windows Azure Helps Startup sharpcloud Expand its Business post of 3/31/2010 to The Official Microsoft Blog begins:

Most businesses today use static spreadsheets and presentations that don’t allow for effective collaboration during planning processes. Yet in their personal lives people communicate and collaborate constantly, using dynamic social-networking tools such as Facebook.

Collaboration and real-time communication is critical to business success in today’s dynamic environment. That’s why I co-founded sharpcloud, a startup based in Guildford, England: To apply the principles of social networking to long-term business planning.

Our service combines a highly visual look and feel with common social-networking components to develop, define, and communicate long-term business road maps and strategy. sharpcloud is the first service of its kind to include visualization and social-networking as central ideas in automating strategic planning and road-mapping.

For many reasons it makes sense for sharpcloud to be a cloud-computing application. In particular, a cloud application helps us support the global companies that are our prime target market. The cloud also offers us the ability to quickly and easily scale and deploy to meet the needs of our customers. Finally, the cloud allows us to think and focus on improving our service, without losing development time and effort in managing server infrastructure.

We initially started sharpcloud using Amazon Web Services, but that required us to focus time on maintaining the Amazon cloud-based servers. So to get the results we wanted, we switched to a solution built with Windows Azure. Windows Azure allows us to develop a cost-effective solution and go to market quickly because Microsoft manages the underlying infrastructure for us. We already were creating an application based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Microsoft Silverlight browser plug-in, so we only had to rewrite a small amount of code to ensure that our service and storage would communicate properly with the Azure API. …

Sarim is sharpcloud’s CEO and CTO. Read the full story here.

William Vambenepe continues Dare Obasanjo’s automotive transmission analogy with a Smoothing a discrete world post of 3/31/2010:

For the short term (until we sell one) there are three cars in my household. A manual transmission, an automatic and a CVT (continuous variable transmission). This makes me uniquely qualified to write about Cloud Computing.

That’s because Cloud Computing is yet another area in which the manual/automatic transmission analogy can be put to good use. We can even stretch it to a 4-layer analogy (now that’s elasticity):

Manual transmission

That’s traditional IT. Scaling up or down is done manually, by a skilled operator. It’s usually not rocket science but it takes practice to do it well. At least if you want it to be reliable, smooth and mostly unnoticed by the passengers.

Manumatic transmission (a.k.a. Tiptronic)

The driver still decides when to shift up or down, but only gives the command. The actual process of shifting is automated. This is how many Cloud-hosted applications work. The scale-up/down action is automated but, still contingent on being triggered by an administrator. Which is what most IaaS-deployed apps should probably aspire to at this point in time despite the glossy brochures about everything being entirely automated.

Automatic transmission

That’s when the scale up/down process is not just automated in its execution but also triggered automatically, based on some metrics (e.g. load, response time) and some policies. The scenario described in the aforementioned glossy brochures.

Continuous variable transmission

That’s when the notion of discrete gears goes away. You don’t think in terms of what gear you’re in but how much torque you want. On the IT side, you’re in PaaS territory. You don’t measure the number of servers, but rather a continuously variable application capacity metric. At least in theory (most PaaS implementations often betray the underlying work, e.g. via a spike in application response time when the app is not-so-transparently deployed to a new node).

More?

OK, that’s the analogy. There are many more of the same kind. Would you like to hear how hybrid Cloud deployments (private+public) are like hybrid cars (gas+electric)? How virtualization is like carpooling (including how you can also be inconvenienced by the BO of a co-hosted VM)? Do you want to know why painting flames on the side of your servers doesn’t make them go faster?

Driving and IT management have a lot in common, including bringing out the foul-mouth in us when things go wrong.

Kaleidoscope’s EntLib for Windows Azure post of 3/29/2010 reports:

Enterprise Library popularly known as EntLib is a collection of Application Blocks targeted at managing oft needed redundant tasks in enterprise development, like Logging, Caching, Validation, Cryptography etc.

Entlib currently exposes 9 application blocks:

• Caching Application Block
• Cryptography Application Block
• Data Access Application Block
• Exception Handling Application Block
• Logging Application Block
• Policy Injection Application Block
• Security Application Block
• Validation Application Block
• Unity Dependency Injection and Interception Mechanism

Ever since the Honeymoon period of PoCs and tryouts is over and Azure started to mainstream and more precisely started to go “Enterprise”, Azure developers have been demanding EntLib for Azure.

The demands seems to have finally been heard and the powers that be have bestowed us with the current beta release EntLib 5.0 which supports Windows Azure.

The application blocks tailored for Azure are:

• Data Access Application Block (Think SQL Azure)
• Exception Handling Application Block (Windows Azure Diagnostics)
• Logging Application Block (Windows Azure Diagnostics)
• Validation Application Block
• Unity Dependency Injection Mechanism

The EntLib 5.0 beta is now available for download.

• Ben Riga interviews Danny Riddell and Luigi Rosso, CEO and CTO of Archetype in his Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Archetype Channel9 video of 3/26/2010:

… Archetype is a rich internet application (RIA) development and design shop.  They provide both products and development/design services using Silverlight and Flash with .NET and SQL Server back-ends. 

Archetype saw the trend around video and media related solutions moving to the cloud and took the initiative to build out their end-to-end solution.  They had a couple of projects where they had to be able to handle large scale very quickly.  In general they had trouble scaling up quickly and then back down once the project was over. Windows Azure gave them that capability in both their services and product businesses.

One of their products is a media content management system called Archetype Media Platform (AMP) that allows enterprises to control all their media assets.  Danny and Luigi spent some time here showing off some of the video content management and editing capabilities of the AMP solution running on Windows Azure.

Towards the end of the video Luigi shares some of his experiences porting to Windows Azure (first cut working in less than a week).  The solution architecture use web roles for the front end and web services as well as worker roles for various activities in the background (e.g. encoding or analyzing media).  SQL Azure is used for content metadata and Windows Azure blob storage for the video files.

Steven Nagy’s Windows Azure Development Deep Dive: Working With Configuration post of 3/14/2010 to The Code Project begins:

… One of the things you have to consider in any application is configuration. In windows and web forms we have *.config files to help configure our application prior to start. They are a useful place to store things like provider configuration, IOC container configuration, connection strings, service end points, etc. Let’s face it – we use configuration files a lot.

In this article I will discuss the different types of configuration available to you in Windows Azure, how they can be leveraged in your application, and how configuration items can be changed at runtime without causing your application roles to restart.

The Problems With Configuration in the Cloud

In Windows Azure applications, configuration can work exactly the same as standard .Net applications. If you have a web role, then you have a web.config. And if you have a worker role, you get an app.config. This allows you to provide configuration information to your role when it starts.

But what about configuration values you want to change after your app is deployed and running? It certainly is a lot harder to get in and change a few angle brackets in your web.config after it is deployed to production in the cloud. Do you really want to have to upload a whole new version of the app package with the new web.config file in it?

Or what about being able to change configuration aspects of all your running instances in one go, and not having to stop them from running to do so? Why should a configuration change necessitate a restart, such as is needed with web.config and app.config files?

In Windows Azure we have a new method of configuring our roles that gives us flexibility and consistency in our applications. …

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

Microsoft Research’s Extreme Computing Group (XCG) hosts a live AzureScope: Benchmarking and Guidance for Windows Azure project. From the Home page:

Welcome to XCG’s AzureScope site.

The purpose of this site is to present the results of regularly running benchmarks on the Windows Azure platform. These benchmarks are intended to assist you in architecting and deploying your research applications and services on Azure. Included in the benchmark suite are tests of data throughput rates, response times, and capacity. Each benchmark is run against a variety of test cases designed to reflect common use scenarios for Azure development.

A series of micro-benchmarks measure the basic operations in Azure such as reading and writing to the various data stores the platform provides and sending communications from one node to another. In addition to these, a set of macro-benchmarks are also provided that illustrate performance for common end-to-end application patterns. We provide the source code for each, which you can use as examples for your development efforts.

Each benchmark test case can be configured to test a wide variety of parameters, such as varying data blob sizes or the number of nodes running a particular job. The benchmarks are run regularly across our various data centers and the results constantly updated here. Further details on what select benchmarks measure and how they are run can be found by following the links to the individual benchmark test case. In addition, for each benchmark we provide our analysis of what the results mean and how this could impact your development against the Windows Azure Platform. If you have feedback or wish to see additional benchmarks included in this suite, please send email to xcgngage@microsoft.com

Please Note: AzureScope is in the final stages of preparation for public viewing and the results should appear here soon.

• Best Practices for Best Results
• Link to All Benchmark Results
• All Code Samples

Learn more about Microsoft Research’s Azure Research Engagement.

• tbtechnet asks and answers How Can Companies that Provide Hosted Services Leverage Windows Azure? in this 3/31/2010 post to the Windows Azure Platform, Web Hosting and Web Services blog:

When hosters partner with the Windows Azure Platform, they have access to the three primary elements that allow developers to increase their time to market and enhance scalability.

• Windows Azure operating system as an online service.
• Microsoft SQL Azure as a fully relational cloud database solution.
• Windows Azure platform AppFabric as a way to connect cloud services and on-premises applications.

Hosters have the ability to develop, integrate, and utilize the flexibility and scalability of the Windows Azure Platform cloud hosting solutions while running and maintaining applications within their own data center or network infrastructure.

He continues with brief expansions of these topics:

• Hosters Can Deploy New Offerings Quickly
• Hosters Can Build Tools
• Hosters Can Package Platform-based Services

• Robert MacNeill reports Cloud Computing Tsunami On The Horizon: Service Providers Strategize On Concerns in this three-page 3/31/2010 Saugatuck Research Report (site registration required):

Moving to cloud computing and SaaS will not be smooth sailing for IT services providers. Consider the following: By year-end 2012, 75 percent or more of SMBs, large enterprises and public sector organizations will be using one or more Cloud IT instances to enable and support ongoing business operations and by year end 2014, 40 percent or more of NEW enterprise IT investment spend will be Cloud-based (See Strategic Research Report SSR-706, Lead, Follow, and Get Out of the Way: A Working Model for Cloud IT through 2014, published 25 Feb. 2010).

Through multiple inquiries, briefings and consulting projects that Saugatuck has engaged in over the past six months, this Research Alert highlights three of ten key cloud computing concerns and trends that are forcing service providers to rethink and strategize around for the future – a market segment that has the potential to contract in size as the customer opportunity shifts and evolves. …

• Vinnie Mirchandani’s Private (Cloud) Phantasies post of 3/31/2010 to the Enterprise Irregulars blog debunks the economic benefits of private clouds:

I am hearing plenty of conversations around private clouds. The basic theme is “we will virtualize our processing and storage and get many of the benefits of public clouds”.  And, of course, “we will have none of the security and service level issues with public clouds.”

Incumbent application vendors encourage that thinking as a way of deflecting attention from their own bloated piece of the budget. Outsourcers see that as a way to sell VM services. Life goes on.

But here is what clients are signing up for with private clouds:

Few tax or energy or other scale efficiencies

In my upcoming book, Mike Manos who helped Microsoft build out its Azure cloud data centers says

“Thirty-five to 70 individual factors, like proximity to power, local talent pool, are considered (as location factors) for most centers. But three factors typically dominate: energy, telecommunications, and taxes. In the past, cost of the physical location was a primary consideration in data center design.”

So the locations that [A]mazon, and Google, and Yahoo! and other cloud vendors have chosen for their data centers reflect aggressive tax and telecommunication negotiations. Their global networks of data centers also allows them to do what Mike calls “follow the moon” – scouring locations every so often for cheapest locations to process energy intensive computing.

Additionally these new data centers have massive machine to man efficiency ratios – 3,000 to 5,000 servers for every data center staff.

Few clients will get any of these efficiencies from their own data center or even from their “private cloud” outsourcing or hosting provider.

Little AM leverage

The last significant productivity in application management most companies saw was through offshore labor arbitrage. Companies have gradually seen that dwindle with wage inflation, younger offshore staff and related turnover. And the irony is even in massive campuses in Bangalore and elsewhere, there is no real management “scale”. If you walk into one of those buildings you see fortified floors which cordon off each customer’s outsourced team. There is very little sharing of staff or tasks across clients. Compared to cloud AM models, that is hugely “unshared” and inefficient.

Persistence of broken application software maintenance and BPO models…

Murray Gordon announces VM Support in Windows Azure in this 3/29/2010 post to Microsoft’s ISV Community blog:

Many of my customers and partners have raised questions around Windows Azure and the pilot program that Microsoft announced with Amazon Web Services.

While Windows Azure is not participating in this pilot, Microsoft is actively monitoring the feedback and will leverage the results this pilot to shape their future offerings. 

Microsoft has committed to enabling customers to purchase Windows Azure through a combination of existing and new licensing agreements. Additionally they will also ensure that they support a centralized seamless and consistent purchasing experience that existing multi-year commercial customers enjoy. Microsoft will have more specific details on this process later in the year.

Below you will find the FAQ for questions related to the pilot program. If you have additional questions please let feel free to comment on this post. I can answer those individually.

1. Will Windows Azure offer VM support?

Yes, Microsoft will add Virtual Machine functionality to Windows Azure to expand the set of existing applications that can be run on it. This Virtual Machine deployment functionality will enable developers to run a wide range of Windows applications in Windows Azure, while taking full advantage of the built in automated service management.

2. What is the pricing for this proposed VM functionality in Windows Azure?

We are not announcing pricing for the proposed Windows Azure VM functionality right now. However, this pricing will be consistent with our current Windows Azure pricing model.

3. How does this proposed VM functionality in Windows Azure differ from Amazon hosting Windows Server VMs?

While Windows Azure is a cloud service that uses (and charges via) computation resources that are analogous to physical computers, it differs in important ways from platforms such as AWS that offer VMs on demand. With a purely VM-based platform, the situation is much like hosting: You bear full responsibility for configuring and managing the VMs and the software they contain. With the proposed VM functionality in Windows Azure, while developers have the flexibility to customize the Windows Azure VM and incorporate it in service models, the platform itself takes care of everything else.

4. When will Windows Azure offer VM capability/support?

We are still engaged in the planning and prioritization for additional functionality in Windows Azure based on customer feedback. As we announced at PDC we will enable customers to migrate existing Windows Server applications through the managed virtual machine (VM) functionality in 2010.

5. Will Windows Azure enable similar Windows Server-license mobility in the future?

The Windows Azure team regularly evaluates new licensing models that could better serve customer needs. We look forward to customer and partner feedback on the Windows Server License Mobility pilot. We will take this feedback into consideration as we structure future licensing models.

6. When will Windows Azure be available in the Enterprise customer programs like the Enterprise Agreement & Select?

In the future, Microsoft will provide the ability for Windows Azure licensing agreements to be integrated into Enterprise customer programs such as Enterprise Agreement and Select.  We will provide specifics about the licensing model and pricing details in calendar year 2010. 

7. When will Windows Azure platform volume licensing pricing details be available?

We will provide volume licensing details in calendar year 2010.  We don’t have specifics to share at this time.

Murray continues with a copy of the original Amazon email.

Mary Jo Foley covers the same topic in her Microsoft: Yes, customers, we will have VM support for Windows Azure post of 3/31/2010.

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Cloud Security and Governance

• Kathleen Lau describes Cloud security's seven deadly sins in this 3/31/2010 article for Computerworld Canada:

A security expert warns organizations making a foray into cloud computing may know familiar terms like multi-tenancy and virtualization, but that doesn't mean they understand everything about putting applications in the cloud.

In the world of cloud computing, those technologies are thrown together to create a new class of applications with their own unique set of governance rules, said Jim Reavis, executive director with the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

"This is a new epoch in computing," said Reavis. Even if it all sounds familiar, digging a little deeper will uncover a whole set of new risks.

Organizations will often adopt cloud computing at a much faster rate than that with which security professionals are comfortable, said Reavis. A pragmatic approach is necessary. "Take a risk-based approach to understanding the real risks and mitigating practices, we can leverage to securely adopt the cloud," he said.

CSA, in collaboration with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co., listed what they called the seven deadly sins of cloud security. The research is based on input from security experts across 29 enterprises, technology providers and consulting firms.

Following are abbreviated versions of the seven deadly sins:

1. Data Loss/Leakage …
2. Shared Technology Vulnerabilities …
3. Malicious Insiders …
4. Account, Service and Traffic Hijacking …
5. Insecure Application Programming Interfaces …
6. Abuse and Nefarious Use of Cloud Computing …
7. Unknown Risk Profile …

Archie Reed, chief technology officer for cloud security with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard, is careful to note that the list of seven deadly sins in cloud security is not all-encompassing, but high-level. "It should guide your approach, not define it," said Reed. …

• Jonathan Siegel’s User Ignorance Causes Cloud Security Leak; Accounts, Passwords Revealed post of 3/31/2010 reports:

At 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning I was doing routine maintenance on my personal Amazon Web Services account and instead found myself looking at something I had no right to be seeing: A database with 800,000 user accounts to the e-card site CardMaster.com. Along with that were the database passwords and back end of a major U.S. Public Broadcasting Service news show website (Gwen Ifill's Washington Week), including daily updates from panelists on the stories they cover.

I wish I wasn't the person to find this. I founded one of Amazon's earliest dashboards. My consultancy is on Amazon's European Customer Advisory Board. But this highlights a significant issue in the cloud today: There is a whole new user profile acting as developer and administrator. We are becoming empowered with amazing tools - and being given enough rope to really hang ourselves.

Jonathan continues with more details of his discovery and its ramifications.

Doug Barney reports in his Third-Party Report: Lieberman Software article for the Redmond Report newsletter and post to Barney’s Blog of 3/31/2010:

Lieberman Software, headed by super smart Phil Lieberman, has long been in the Windows admin market. Now Phil is eying the cloud with Enterprise Random Password Manager, which now brings its identity management features to cloud providers.

According to Lieberman (the company and the man), IT interest in the cloud is growing, but so are fears that data will be stolen or spied upon.
We at Redmond are working a cloud security story, so a recent e-mail exchange with Phil was timed perfectly. Here's the gist of Phil's thoughts:

"The entire nature of  how insecure the cloud is and how cloud vendors are not taking ownership or providing services for cloud security is a big story that the cloud vendors don't want exposed. Any auditor that allows critical information to reside on these cloud platforms without being able to fully audit the access and security is simply not doing their job.  Or if the auditor tells the client that cloud adoption is a mistake and the client moves forward anyway, some companies have better management and direction than others.

Unfortunately, the auditors may find their client companies jumping in to the pool (cloud cesspool), committing their companies 100 percent between audit cycles, then having to give these companies the bad news that their 'findings' show that they did something really risky and stupid just to save a few bucks.

Very few companies are doing their due diligence about cloud security.  The cloud vendors are telling us they have no interest in implementing security until customers demand it.  It is going to get ugly."

Doug is Editor in Chief, Redmond Magazine. See Phil Lieberman’s The Cloud Challenge: Security essay of 3/29/2010 from Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 3/29/2010+.

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Cloud Computing Events

• ebizQ will present Cloud QCamp [on] April 7, 2010:

ebizQ has been covering Cloud Computing for the last three years. Last June, ebizQ organized a Cloud QCamp virtual conference, where leading industry experts and practitioners explored the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) in supporting cloud-computing initiatives. This April, ebizQ will help enterprises cut through the hype and focus on issues surrounding cloud computing, covering Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). This year's QCamp will also focus on development of Private Clouds in Enterprises.

Some of the topics and issues we will be focusing on are:

• Virtualization and Cloud Computing interconnection
• Platform lock-In issues with Cloud providers.
• Application development for cloud.
• Migration of existing applications to Cloud.
• The Economics of Cloud Computing
• Best practices in moving services, processes and data to the Clouds

Cloud QCamp will be an informative and educational program for senior IT Architects, Development Managers, Data Center Managers and CIOs to take advantage of private and public cloud technologies within and external to their enterprises. …

Speakers include Joe McKendrick, David Linthicum, and Phil Wainwright. Register to attend here.

• SGEntrepreneurs announces MSDN Presents Windows Azure Platform on 13 Apr at Microsoft Auditorium, Level 21, NTUC Centre, One Marina Boulevard, Microsoft Singapore:

Schedule

---

9.00am: Registration + Breakfast
9.45am: Opening
10.00am: The Windows Azure Platform: A Perspective
11.30am: The Windows Azure Platform: A Technical Drill Down
1.00pm: Lunch
2.00pm: Visual Studio 2010: A Perspective
3.00pm: A Partner’s View on the Microsoft Cloud: Accenture and Avanade
4.00pm: Break
4.15pm: A Partner’s View on the Microsoft Cloud: NCS
5.15pm: Closing
5.30pm: End

Details here.

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

• Lydia Leong (@cloudpundit) announces Gartner’s forthcoming “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure Services and Web Hosting” in her And so it begins post of 3/31/2010:

We’re about to start the process for the next Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure Services and Web Hosting, along with the Critical Capabilities for Cloud Infrastructure Services (titles tentative and very much subject to change). Our hope is to publish in late July. These documents are typically a multi-month ordeal of vendor cat-herding; the evaluations themselves tend to be pretty quick, but getting all the briefings scheduled, references called, and paperwork done tends to eat up an inordinate amount of time. (This time, I’ve begged one of our admin assistants for help.)

What’s the difference? The MQ positions vendors in an overall broad market. CC, on the other hand, rates individual vendor products on how well they meet the requirements for a set of defined use cases. You get use-case by use-case ratings, which means that this year we’ll be doing things like “how well do these specific self-managed cloud offerings support a particular type of test-and-development environment need”. The MQ tends to favor vendors who do a broad set of things well; a CC rating, on the other hand, is essentially a narrow, specific evaluation based on specific requirements, and a product’s current ability to meet those needs (and therefore tends to favor vendors that have great product features).

Also, we’ve decided the CC note is going to be strictly focused on self-managed cloud — Amazon EC2 and its competitors, Terremark Enterprise Cloud and its competitors, and so on. This is a fairly pure features-and-functionality thing, in other words.

Anyone thinking about participation should check out my past posts on Magic Quadrants.

CloudTweaks reports in its IBM to provide start-ups cloud-computing technology post of 3/31/2010 that Big Blue is stepping up to compete with Microsoft’s BizSpark on the cloud-computing front:

Information technology and consulting multinational IBM Wednesday unveiled a global entrepreneur initiative to provide start-up companies industry-specific cloud-computing technologies.

‘The initiative will provide start-ups free access to cloud-computing technology to capture emerging business opportunities in fast-growing industries such as energy and utilities, health care, telecom and government,’ IBM Venture Capital group managing director Claudin Fan Munce told reporters here.

Next-generation entrepreneurs will also have access to IBM’s research community, sales, marketing and technical skills under the new programme.

Explaining why the company was opening its resources to start-ups, Munce said businesses the world over were applying new technologies to address industry-specific needs and start-ups were looking for new ways to capitalise on the new trend.

‘We invest over $6 billion per year in research, with about 3,000 people in eight labs across the world. With 4,914 new patents in 2009, we bring innovative technologies to market,’ Munce said.

With its smarter planet strategy and years of investments in research, IBM is skilled in building product and services offerings for businesses based on new ideas. Its industry frameworks are software platforms targeted to industry specific market opportunities such as smarter water, smarter buildings and smarter health care. …

Mike Kirkwood’s Rulers of the Cloud: A Multi-Tenant Semantic Cloud is Forming & EMC Knows that Data Matters post of 3/31/2010 begins:

EMC is a large company focused on high performance storage for enterprises. It's offerings are closely aligned with the idea of extending infrastructure from virtualization to private cloud infrastructure. The company wants to help IT data provisioning services are as easy as Amazon and as secure as Fort Knox.

To get a handle of where enterprise data storage meets the web, we looked for inspiration from architects of the web and Internet, including web pioneer Sir Tim Berner-Lee and Vint Cerf. We take a look at EMC as positioned as the closet, physically, to the core assets of the enterprise.

In this report, we also spoke with Ted Newman, CTO of the Cloud Infrastructure Group of EMC Consulting, which is part of EMC Global Services to find out what is really happening in the enterprise sales and delivery engines.

We mashed his thoughts up with some big-thinkers in the core of computing to get perspective on the company's future as a map to enterprise information assets. …

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Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Windows Azure Platform,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Azure Database,SADB,Windows Azure AppFabric,Cloud Computing,IBM,Amazon Web Services,EMC

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 12/28/2009+

Windows Azure, SQL Azure Database and related cloud computing topics now appear in this weekly series.

• Update 12/30/2009: Lorraine Lawson: Judith Hurwitz Cloud Computing Interview parts I and II: M. Kramer: Gentlemen, Start Your Cloud Predictions; Hovhannes Avoyan: The Mass Adoption of Cloud Computing Is Coming; Neil MacKenzie: Entities in Azure Tables; Jayaram Krishnaswamy: Windows Azure Platform Training Kit; Mamoon Yunus: The Guillotine Effect of Cloud Computing; Mike Leach: Coding With Azure: "Up or Down" Service Monitor App; Ben Riga: Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Active Web Solutions; and more.

Note: This post is updated daily or more frequently, depending on the availability of new articles in the following sections:

• Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services
• SQL Azure Database (SADB)
• AppFabric: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow
• Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

To use the above links, first click the post’s title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform published 9/21/2009. Order today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble (in stock.)

Read the detailed TOC here (PDF) and download the sample code here.

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

See a short-form TOC, get links to live Azure sample projects, and read a detailed TOC of electronic-only chapters 12 and 13 here.

Wrox’s Web site manager posted on 9/29/2009 a lengthy excerpt from Chapter 4, “Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage” here.

You can now download and save the following two online-only chapters in Microsoft Office Word 2003 *.doc format by FTP:

• Chapter 12: “Managing SQL Azure Accounts, Databases, and DataHubs*”
• Chapter 13: “Exploiting SQL Azure Database's Relational Features”

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page; these chapters will be updated for the November CTP in January 2010. 
* Content for managing DataHubs will be added as Microsoft releases more details on data synchronization services for SQL Azure and Windows Azure.

Off-Topic: AOL Greets 48-Hour CompuServe Classic POP3 and Webmail Outage with Silence on 12/28/2009; OakLeaf Blog Joins Technorati’s “Top 100 InfoTech” List on 10/24/2009.

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

• Neil MacKenzie explains how to work with the the WritingEntity and ReadingEntity events exposed by the DataServiceContext class in his Entities in Azure Tables post of 12/30/2009. Neil provides extensive source code for the following operations:

• Writing Data to an Azure Storage Table
• Handling WritingEntity Events
• Removing a Property from an Atom Entry
• Reading Data from an Azure Storage Table
• Initializing a Property
• Serializing Generic Properties

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SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

• Stephen Forte’s PowerPivot Demo Part II post of 12/28/2009 demonstrates how to build a more advanced pivot table against the Northwind sample database’s Orders, Order Details, Products, Categories and Employees tables:

About a week ago, I showed a simple demo on my blog of SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel, or just PowerPivot for short. I used SQL Azure as my backend and just did a mapping to a few Northwind tables and then built a pivot table using the Order Details table.

Today I will take that example one small step further and write a custom TSQL query and build a more advanced pivot table against that data source.  In a future post I will build a PowerPivot example against a true OLAP Cube, but that will have to wait for the new year. …

This gives the user an extremely powerful pivot table and the ability to do some pretty sophisticated drill downs and filters. In addition, it is pretty easy to add/remove even more data (Customers and Employees for example) to this pivot table.

[George] Huey and [Wade] Wegner will “Migrate Us to SQL Azure!” on 12/31/2009 when .NET Rocks releases Show #512:

George Huey and Wade Wegner from Microsoft talk to Carl and Richard about George's creation, the SQL Azure Migration Wizard, a free tool that will save you countless hours when migrating SQL Server databases to SQL Azure.

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AppFabric: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

• Scott Gellock reports Windows Azure AppFabric Java and Ruby SDK’s updated for v1 in this 12/28/2009 post:

Over the past couple of days updated versions of the Java and Ruby SDK’s for AppFabric have been posted.  These updated SDK’s account for the changes made in the v1 service release of Service Bus and Access Control.  You can get the updated Java SDK here and the updated Ruby SDK here.

Bruce Kyle announces a new “guide that provides step-by-step instructions on how to use Windows Identity Foundation in Windows Azure solutions” in his Guide Explains How to Build On-Premises, Cloud Identity Aware Apps post of 12/29/2009:

Windows Identity Foundation (previously known as “Geneva” Framework) makes federation and claims-based identity first-class citizens in the .NET Framework. Developers can now rely upon a single, consistent model for creating identity-aware applications on ASP.NET and WCF.

We just published a guide that provides step-by-step instructions on how to use Windows Identity Foundation in Windows Azure solutions, so that on-premises or partner identities can be seamlessly used regardless of where your resources are hosted, on-premises or in the cloud.

The guide also provides explanations of the tradeoffs that are necessary at this point for making the two pre-releases to work together, highlighting the attention points and the workarounds, and will be updated regularly as we move toward commercial availability. We invite you to download the guide and experiment with the simple but powerful scenario it enables: stay tuned for updates and for more scenarios of claims-based identity in the cloud.

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Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

• The Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announce CMS and ONC Issue Regulations Proposing a Definition of ‘Meaningful Use’ and Setting Standards for Electronic Health Record Incentive Program in a 12/30/2009 press release:

The Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) encourage public comment on two regulations issued today that lay a foundation for improving quality, efficiency and safety through meaningful use of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology. The regulations will help implement the EHR incentive programs enacted under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act).

A proposed rule issued by CMS outlines proposed provisions governing the EHR incentive programs, including defining the central concept of “meaningful use” of EHR technology. An interim final regulation (IFR) issued by ONC sets initial standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria for EHR technology.  Both regulations are open to public comment. …

The IFR issued by ONC describes the standards that must be met by certified EHR technology to exchange healthcare information among providers and between providers and patients. This initial set of standards begins to define a common language to ensure accurate and secure health information exchange across different EHR systems.  The IFR describes standard formats for clinical summaries and prescriptions; standard terms to describe clinical problems, procedures, laboratory tests, medications and allergies; and standards for the secure transportation of this information using the Internet.

The IFR calls for the industry to standardize the way in which EHR information is exchanged between organizations, and sets forth criteria required for an EHR technology to be certified. These standards will support meaningful use and data exchange among providers who must use certified EHR technology to qualify for the Medicare and Medicaid incentives.

Under the statute, HHS is required to adopt an initial set of standards for EHR technology by Dec. 31, 2009.  The IFR will go into effect 30 days after publication, with an opportunity for public comment and refinement over the next 60 days.  A final rule will be issued in 2010.  “We strongly encourage stakeholders to provide comments on these standards and specifications,” Dr. Blumenthal said.

The Recovery Act established programs to provide incentive payments to eligible professionals and eligible hospitals participating in Medicare and Medicaid that adopt and make “meaningful use” of certified EHR technology.  Incentive payments may begin as soon as October 2010 to eligible hospitals.  Incentive payments to other eligible providers may begin in January 2011. …

The CMS proposed rule and fact sheets, may be viewed at http://www.cms.hhs.gov/Recovery/11_HealthIT.asp

ONC’s interim final rule may be viewed at http://healthit.hhs.gov/standardsandcertification. In early 2010 ONC intends to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking related to the certification of health information technology.

The 556-page PDF of the proposed “Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Electronic Health Record Incentive Program” rule (CMS-0033-P, RIN 0938-AP78), which affects 42 CFR Parts 412, 413, 422, and 495, as it appears in the Federal Register is available for online review here. Following is a summary:

This proposed rule would implement the provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) (Pub. L. 111-5) that provide incentive payments to eligible professionals (EPs) and eligible hospitals participating in Medicare and Medicaid programs that adopt and meaningfully use certified electronic health record (EHR) technology. The proposed rule would specify the-- initial criteria an EP and eligible hospital must meet in order to qualify for the incentive payment; calculation of the incentive payment amounts; payment adjustments under Medicare for covered professional services and inpatient hospital services provided by EPs and eligible hospitals failing to meaningfully use certified EHR technology; and other program participation requirements. Also, as required by ARRA the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will be issuing a closely related interim final rule that specifies the Secretary’s adoption of an initial set of standards, implementation, specifications, and certification criteria for electronic health records. ONC will also be issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking on the process for organizations to conduct the certification of EHR technology.

According to a tweet from Practice Fusion’s Glenn Laffel, MD, “Proposed measures for each of the Meaningful Use criteria begin on page 65.” Dr. Laffell’s earlier posts detail elements of the telephonic briefing described below.

Emily at Practice Fusion posted an ALERT: Meaningful Use Announcement Today on 12/30/2009:

ONC and CMS are holding a press conference this afternoon and will likely announce revisions to the “Meaningful Use” criteria for electronic health record (EHR) systems. To learn more about Meaningful Use and the HITECH Act, visit our Stimulus Center.

The briefing will be at 5:15 p.m. ET , Toll-Free Dial: (800) 837-1935, Conference ID: 49047605, Pass Code: HITECH

Practice Fusion’s physicians and EHR experts will be available for immediate comment on the announcement. Follow along with Dr. Laffel’s thoughts on Twitter or contact Practice Fusion's press team for more details.

Practice Fusion’s blog post continues with the full text of HHS’s CMS and ONC to Discuss Next Steps in Electronic Health Records Programs press release.

• The Azure Support Team’s Tom posted Getting SSL certificates to work on 12/30/2009. His article observes:

There are a number of useful informational articles out on the web on how to deal with SSL Certificates with Windows Azure.  The first few places to start are:

http://blogs.msdn.com/davethompson/archive/2009/11/24/add-ssl-security-to-your-azure-webrole.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/12/01/how-to-add-an-https-endpoint-to-a-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/davethompson/archive/2009/11/24/add-ssl-security-to-your-azure-webrole.aspx

There may be times, depending on the certificate you are trying to use that these steps won’t be enough.  You may see an error like:

At least one certificate specified in your service definition is not found.
Please upload these certificate(s), and then upload your application package again.
 - Dr. Watson Diagnostic ID: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

Tom suggests this resolution:

If you see something like this, and you are using a certificate from a 3rd party, you may need to get the intermediate certificates installed as well.  One problem that happens with some 3rd parties is that they will not give you a .pfx file.  Since that is the only file type you can upload to Azure for certificates, you have to convert them.  All that is needed is to create a .NET application with the following code:

// The path to the certificate.
string certificate = @"c:\test.cer";
 
// Load the certificate into an X509Certificate object.
X509Certificate cert = new X509Certificate(certificate);
byte[] certData = cert.Export(X509ContentType.Pkcs12, "Password");
 
System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes(@"c:\test.pfx", certData);

Or you can do the same in powershell:

$c = New-Object System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2("c:\test.cer")
$bytes = $c.Export("Pfx", "Password")
[System.IO.File]::WriteAllBytes("c:\test.pfx", $bytes)

Running this will allow you to create .pfx files for each certificate and then import them into Azure.  Just be sure to change the “Password” and put the same one in on the dashboard for Azure.

• Jayaram Krishnaswamy questions why Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 were omitted as operating systems and prerequisites for the latest Windows Azure Platform Training Kit in this 12/30/2009 post.

Just an oversight?

• Mike Leach provides the source code and a video walkthrough of his Coding With Azure: "Up or Down" Service Monitor App in this 12/29/2009 post:

Every year during the holiday break I look forward to digging into a fun software project and learning something new. This year I developed a simple application called "Up or Down" using the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform. Windows Azure represents a huge bottom-up R&D effort by Microsoft to support highly scalable Internet-connected applications across a number of devices and platforms.

Jump to the 5 minute video walkthrough or Download the source code from Codeplex.

Mike continues with a detailed description of Up or Down’s architecture.

• Ben Riga describes the move of CCH’s sales tax calculation service from an in-house to cloud application in his Windows Azure Lessons Learned: CCH post of 12/30/2009:

In this episode of Lessons Learned we talk with Jones Pavan and Gurleen Randhawa of CCH [formerly Commerce Clearing House] about tax and accounting!  No wait stick around, that stuff can be exciting too.  Yes, really!  :)

The good folks at CCH (a Wolters Kluwer company) have built an interesting service on Windows Azure.  The solution we discuss here is a sales tax calculation service which they offer to other accounting firms.  This is an existing on-premises product that they are now moving to the cloud.

Channel 9: Windows Azure Lessons Learned: CCH

The existing product was a stateless web service that was designed to live behind the firewall.  The service is meant to be called directly via a plug-in in an accounting firm’s ERP system (for example, Dynamics AX).  To move that to the cloud CCH wrapped the web services in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

They had been using another third party RAD development tool called CA Plex.  The Plex runtime was added to the project and copied out to the cloud.  One of the things they quickly learned is that the nature of the cloud app is to be stateless and that required special consideration when moving on-premises apps (for example the Plex tool was caching db connections behind the scenes).

Anther important consideration was security.  They were not ready to move to ACS so for the initial release they used X.509 cert[ificate]s, ADFS and message-based security to establish trust relationships with the server.

BTW, the Windows Azure marketing folks have already published a case study on the CCH solution (available here).

• Ben Riga’s Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Active Web Solutions post of 12/29/2009 links to a Channel9 video, with describes an Azure-based tracking system for fishing vessels:

There are not many solutions that can claim to have saved lives.  In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Richard Prodger of Active Web Solutions about the Windows Azure project they’ve been working on that tracks fishermen in real time. It monitors not only their location but also their status so as to immediately raise the alarm if help is needed (e.g. fallen off the side of a boat or pressed a panic button). This solution is already credited with saving the lives of 9 fishermen.

Channel 9: Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Active Web Solutions

Electronics on the fishing vessels communicate directly via satellite to the Windows Azure solution. Those messages are processed via Windows Azure worker roles and routed using the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus to various on-premises systems for review and action. The desktop client overlay marine charts onto Bing maps so that the coast guard gets a visual representation of the exact location of boats that have raised alarms.

The good folks at Active Web Solutions have published some of the source code that they developed to “automatically bridge arbitrary TCP endpoints, handling any intermediate firewall traversal.”  The code is available on CodePlex as the SocketShifter project:

http://socketshifter.codeplex.com/

If this is interesting, you should also have a look at Port Bridge published by Clemens Vasters on his blog.  Clemens describes it as “Socketshifter’s older brother”

http://blogs.msdn.com/clemensv/archive/2009/11/18/port-bridge.aspx

Robert Rowley, MD’s 2009 – the Year in Review for Health IT post of 12/29/2009 describes the primary impediments to implementing fully functional Electronic Health Records (EHRs) as envisioned by “ARRA and its HITECH section, which earmarked $19.2 billion intended to increase the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems by physicians and hospitals, unprecedented attention has been focused on EHR systems.” Dr. Rowley continues:

The “hook” to try to incentivize physicians to adopt EHRs (given that the adoption rate as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine was 4% for fully-functional EHRs and 13% for basic systems) revolved around offering bonus incentives through Medicare and Medicaid payments for demonstrating “meaningful use” of “certified” EHRs. Such payments would begin in 2011 and extend through 2015, and thereafter the “stick” of payment reductions for failure to adopt EHRs would start to kick in.

As a result, the topic of EHR adoption has been on the minds and lips of physicians all year. And the state of things might best be summed up by an anecdotal comment I heard recently: “we finally adopted an EHR in our clinic, and it’s ok I guess, but the real problem is that they all need to talk to each other.”

The difficulty in making that happen – in getting EHR systems to talk to each other – has been a much harder nut to crack than one might have imagined. While the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) has been working furiously all year developing a framework for defining “meaningful use” and is still detailing how to define “certification”, one of the big areas of attention has been on exactly this concern – interoperability between systems. …

Microsoft’s Public Sector DPE Team describes a Government Mapping solution built with Silverlight 3 and Windows Azure + SQL Azure in this detailed 12/28/2009 post:

Almost every single government entity is looking to deliver contextual information on maps, so this reusable framework built by our partner iLink Systems can help deliver a great experience to the end-users.

Reusable Framework for GIS Mapping Applications/Solutions

Partner iLink Systems has come up with a great framework and solution built with Silverlight 3 hosted on Windows Azure platform, consumes data stored in SQL Azure (cloud database) and uses Bing Maps for the visualization.

You can access the sample solution built using their framework at http://mapapp.cloudapp.net. Sample may be available only for a month or so, but feel free to send a note to info@ilink-systems.com to learn more about their framework and discuss how your state/agency can utilize it to deliver ton of GIS mapping based solutions for one or multiple departments.

Sample mapping solution http://mapapp.cloudapp.net is about fictitious county/city showing contextual information (e.g. offices/locations where govt services are offered, etc) on Bing Maps, but their framework can be used to create any GIS mapping application pretty easily. Solution not only has a rich user-experience and accessible on all modern browsers (via the Silverlight plug-in), but the cool thing is that the end-user can install shortcut of the application on their desktop and/or start menu of Windows OS (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) by simply using right-click on the application’s canvas/surface.

Partner chose Windows Azure platform simply because the data shown on the maps is for the public, however your solution/application built using their framework can be hosted on your on-premise infrastructure too.  Once you get hold of the framework, you will be pleased that the application can talk to on-premise SQL Server database or cloud-resident SQL Azure database with simple change in the database connection string (stored in the web configuration file).

 

Bob Familiar describes how he ported his personal music Web site to Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3 with the beta of Visual Studio 2010 in his Migrating Applications to Windows Azure post of 12/28/2009:

… Over the past three years I have been using my personal music website as a sandbox for experimenting with the latest Microsoft Application Platform features for building service oriented web applications. The last version of the site featured WCF SOAP services and a Silverlight 2 UI. The site was hosted at DiscountASP and leveraged SQL Server 2005 for the data store. I posted the details of this development effort back in August of 2008.

It has been a year and a half since I have done any work on the site. With the recent release of Silverlight 3, Expression Blend 3, Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the beta of Visual Studio 2010 I felt it was time. One of my primary goals with this migration effort was to reuse as much of my existing code as possible. Hopefully you will find my experience useful as you embark on your own migration efforts. …

The details of the Windows Azure migration project can be found in the following six posts

1. The Architecture of a Service Oriented Rich Internet Application
2. Setting up your Azure Account and Development Environment
3. Migrating your SQL Server database to SQL Azure
4. Configuring your Visual Studio 2010 Windows Azure Project
5. Migrating WCF SOAP services to WCF RESTful services
6. Using Silverlight 3 to create a rich user interface that can run in or out of the browser

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

• Matt Asay claims An application war is brewing in the cloud in this 12/30/2009 post to C|Net’s Open Road blog:

Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.

It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.

Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don't have the luxury of waiting. …

Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. His earlier 2010 the year of cloud-computing...M&A post of 12/29/2009 points out that:

… Gartner expects the cloud-related SaaS market to top $8 billion in 2009, which suggests that real customers paying real money.

They may not be paying enough, however, to support the mushrooming cloud vendor marketplace. Not yet.

Industry insiders are predicting a shakeout as pre-recession venture funding runs out for many of the early cloud vendors, forcing them into the arms of buyers or bankruptcy courts. …

• Ted Schadler anoints Consumer broadband [a]s the workforce technology of the decade in his 12/30/2009 post to ZDNet’s “The View from Forrester Research” blog:

That call may surprise you. You might have put storage or Gigabit ethernet or the Internet itself at the top of the list. But when I think about what’s different in the life of your average information worker as the decade comes to a close, it’s the instant-on access to just about everything that the adoption of consumer broadband has fueled.

From our Consumer Technographics(r) survey of over 50,000 consumers every year for the last 12 years, between 2000 and 2009, consumer broadband soared from 2% to 63% of US households. For context, home PC adoption grew from 51% to 77%.

But why is consumer broadband the workforce technology of the decade? …

Ted details three main reasons:

• Telecommuting has become a way of life for millions of information workers …
• Broadband-enabled markets have triggered massive IT innovation …
• Consumers master new technologies at home — and expect the same at work …

• Hovhannes Avoyan asserts The Mass Adoption of Cloud Computing Is Coming in this 12/30/2009 post, which quotes Bob Rudy, CIO of Avago, about moving its internal applications to the cloud:

I’m really loving a phrase that I read recently about cloud computing. It came from the CIO of Avago Technologies, a San Jose, CA-based semiconductor maker, which is gradually migrating its data and apps to the cloud from its internal servers – including recruiting, human resources, e-mail and web security.

According to Bob Rudy, CIO at Avago, migration has saved the company millions of dollars by eliminating hardware needs and software licenses and improving security, speed and storage.

Moving to the cloud has also freed up employees from annoying and trivial tasks like managing their e-mail, enabling them to focus more on their core jobs.

But Bob phrased a simple description about the pull of cloud computing that I’d like to share: “The days of owning software are coming to an end.”

Bob was featured in a recent story in the San Francisco Gate about the rise of cloud computing, which called Bob’s statement “an increasingly common sentiment. …

• M. Kramer’s Gentlemen, Start Your Cloud Predictions post of 12/29/2009 offers brief, tongue-in-cheek prognostications from B and L Associates about:

• Consolidation of cloud computing vendors
• Adoption of cloud interoperability standards
• Cloud insurance and cloud brokers
• “Cloud” becoming a verb

in 2010. Definitely worth reading.

• Mamoon Yunus suggests “Try asking your SaaS partner to put an agent in their container - good luck!” in his The Guillotine Effect of Cloud Computing post of 12/30/2009, which seconds Dave Linthicum’s assertion that cloud computing will kill design-time service governance (see below.)

David Linthicum asserts “Every technology wave drowns something” in his Cloud computing will kill these 3 technologies post of 12/29/2009 to his InfoWorld Cloud Computing blog. According to Dave, the three technologies awaiting their demise are:

1. Design-time service governance
2. Older and smaller clouds
3. Tier 2 enterprise software

Of course, Dave elaborates on his choices.

Arthur Cole recommends WAN Optimization for a Better Cloud in this 12/29/2009 post to ITBusinessEdge:

Amid all the predictions about 2010 being a banner year for virtualization and cloud computing, there is little consideration given to the impact these technologies will have on wide area networking.

But as the enterprise begins to port more applications and data onto both public and private cloud infrastructures, it will become increasingly obvious that optimizing the WAN will be a key factor in ensuring the kinds of performance levels that users have come to expect from enterprise IT.

That's part of the reason market analysts are expecting WAN optimization to kick into high gear in the coming year, along with the rest of the networking segment. Infonetics Research noted that sales of optimization equipment jumped a healthy 12 percent in the third quarter, breaking a string of poor results. Top vendors like Blue Coat, Cisco and Riverbed led the rebound, which coincided with single-digit growth in both the router and Ethernet switch markets.

According to a recent survey by Expand Networks, virtualization and cloud computing will be the key drivers for WAN optimization in the coming year. The company reports that a recent survey of IT executives found that 75 percent are planning new virtualization deployments next year, with two-thirds of those saying WAN optimization would improve system performance. A slightly smaller figure was planning on cloud deployments, but the vast majority would combine it with WAN optimization services if the price was right. …

Patrick Thibodeau lists 10 big cloud trends for 2010 in this 12/29/2009 ComputerWorld article posted to ITWorld:

1. Commodity cloud price slashing continues
2. A move to simpler cloud pricing models
3. Enterprise application vendors embrace metering
4. Cloud providers increasingly offer enterprise-caliber SLAs
5. New technologies will improve cloud use and performance
6. Cloud providers address security concerns
7. Performance monitoring will become ubiquitous
8. Open standards for cloud computing advance
9. Politics will drive decisions
10. The cloud will decentralize IT decision-making

Phil Wainwright describes Cloud delusions at the turn of the decade with an emphasis on Windows Azure in his 12/28/2009 post to ZDNet’s Software as Services blog:

Continuing my series of posts about the big themes on this blog over the past year, I now turn to the topic of cloud computing. My views on how to implement cloud and SaaS have hardened considerably over the course of 2009. Halfway through the year, I took a conscious decision to promote multi-tenancy as the only acceptable architecture for cloud and SaaS infrastructures. You might expect that from someone who makes a living consulting for multi-tenant vendors. But I’ve deliberately chosen a hardline and controversial stance, intended as a counterpoint to the many siren voices that argue for a more hybrid approach.

I still see migration to the cloud as a journey, but I’m concerned that too many people, especially with the advent of platforms like Windows Azure, have decided they can achieve all the benefits by going just some of the distance. This is a risky self-delusion, and the more people fool themselves this way, the more the cloud model will be discredited, not because of inherent weaknesses, but through implicit association with the disasters and disappointments these half-hearted implementations will bring in their wake. There are several different cloud delusions to beware of. [Emphasis added.] …

Phil continues with links to earlier articles about “cloud delusions.”

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Cloud Security and Governance

• Lorraine Lawson interviews Judith Hurwitz in her The Best Cloud Case: What Functions You Should – and Shouldn't – Consider Moving (Part II) post of 12/30/2009:

Loraine Lawson recently interviewed Judith Hurwitz, president of business consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates and co-author of the recently released Cloud Computing for Dummies. In part one of the interview, Hurwitz explained why an integration strategy is important for moving to the cloud. In this second half, she discusses integration with the cloud, what you should and shouldn't move to the cloud and a prediction for 2010.

Part I of the interview is Baby Steps and Integration Strategy Key When Moving to the Cloud of 12/23/2009.

Mamoon Yunus’s Understanding Cloud Taxonomies and Security post of 12/29/2009 reports:

OWASP AppSec DC 2009 had a compelling session that defined cloud taxonomies and the security implications associated with the cloud computing.  The three taxonomies that have become part of our vernacular are:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)

Mamoon’s post includes a link to Dennis Hurst’s Cloud Security and its Affect on Application Security presentation. Dennis is a Security Engineer for HP and a Founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance.

He predicted Cloud Reliability Will Be Bigger than Cloud Security for 2010-11 in this earlier (12/23/2009) post:

We have all the tools for securing information in a Cloud: establishing trust through identity, data privacy through encryption, and content integrity through signatures. We are overly focused on Cloud Security issues and less on reliability.  This is all about to change. Following the outages experience[d] by Amazon EC2 in 2009, another premiere cloud provide[r], Rackspace, suffered an outage on December 18. Using technology such as Forum Systems XML/ Cloud gateways is essential for establishing multi-cloud reliability and fault tolerance. …

• Mamoon is the CEO of Forum Systems, which manufactures the Forum Sentry, a cloud gateway that he describes in his Why is a Cloud Gateway Required? post of 12/30/2009.

Mike Vizard analyzes Mamoon’s XML security appliance approach in a Reducing the Complexity of Application Security post of 12/21/2009:

As business-to-business interactions over the Web become more pervasive, so too does the complexity associated with securing those transactions.

Unfortunately, all that complexity serves only to dissuade businesses from integrating business processes across the Web at a time when we want to encourage that behavior. So the challenge facing chief technologists is to find a way to make it simpler to integrate business processes without having to introduce complex layers of security.

Forum Systems CEO Mamoon Yunus thinks his company has the answer in the form of an identity broker appliance that sits at the edge of the corporate network. Instead of trying to layer security software into every application, Yunus is arguing that all the security related to XML schemas associated with service oriented architecture (SOA) applications should be handled via an appliance. …

Michael Krigsman quotes Dana Gardner in his SOA adoption: The human face of governance post of 12/28/2009 to the Enterprise Irregulars blog:

Human and organizational factors such as politics, information silos, and change management generally underlie IT success and failure.

During a recent conversation, IT analyst and fellow ZDNet blogger, Dana Gardner, affirmed the extent to which this view applies to service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects.

I asked Dana to elaborate on the importance of organizational dynamics with respect to SOA governance and adoption:

“In the many discussions we’ve had with analysts, users and suppliers over the advancement of SOA and governance, we always came back to the human element as a weak or missing link. Successful adoption and efficiency of SOA hinges on acceptance, trust, collaboration and news ways for people to work together. SOA also depends on people and groups that had not in the past worked closely to begin doing so.

“When I heard more about Asuret and Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 [my professional involvements], I saw a unique way to bring the human element of SOA into focus. The process of gathering perceptions across teams and any affected people — with trend lines over time for those — really strikes me as essential to understand how and why SOA is working — or not.

“I think that SOA efforts will gain significant tools for how to gauge and assuage the progress of SOA adoption, and the best means of governance over long periods of time once SOA activities gain traction.” …

Dana also highlighted the gap between technical and human governance issues:

“SOA governance goes a great job at tracking artifacts and defining and automating rules and policies for artifacts. The role of IT infrastructure can be managed via SOA governance, and the composition and business process alignment of services are also well served by governance. But how people really feel about how the processes are development, implemented and refined is a bit of a block hole when SOA governance is employed. Without a strong view of the perceptions and their change patterns, SOA and governance are obtuse rather then precise instruments.”

Following our discussion, Dana brought together a group of top SOA analysts to examine these issues in depth.

This post reprints, in its entirety, Dana’s article on that analyst session. You can listen to the podcast by clicking the player at top of this post. …

Hovhannes Avoyan claims “Think giants of commerce and names like Amazon, Walmart and Expedia come up” in his Commercial Giants Held Hostage to Denial of Service post of 12/28/2009:

Think giants of commerce and names like Amazon, Walmart and Expedia come up.

Now, think how much those giants depend on the huge cloud computing infrastructure to be secure and reliable to keep their businesses running and in shape.

So, if you’re an IT person, you can imagine how serious a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is to online commerce.

Now, add the fact that it happened on the day before Christmas eve to those giants of commerce.

It appears that the attack was aimed at the servers of Neustar, which offers DNS services to many major companies under the name UltraDNS.

The attack started at 4:45 p.m. PST and lasted for about an hour. It was compounded by the fact that it also affected Amazon’s S3 and EC2 cloud services. A lot of web services rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

To Neustar’s credit, it reacted quickly and contained the damage to the Northern California area. …

“Forrester Research SOA expert Randy Heffner discusses how to establish an iterative design process for evolving your SOA security architecture that considers your current and future security requirements, emerging industry specifications, overlaps in product functionality for SOA security, and possibilities for custom security integration” in his SOA Security: Good Enough and Getting Better post of 8/18/2009 to the CIO blog:

Security is not a reason to stay away from SOA. Although full SOA security maturity is yet to come, 30 percent of organizations now use SOA for external integration with customers and partners. For standard Web services using SOAP, WS-Security has achieved critical mass as a foundational standard. On the other hand, advanced SOA security — involving federation among partners, nonrepudiation, and propagation of user identities across multiple layers of service implementations — is in its early days. To navigate the path from what's practical today to the future of advanced SOA security, establish an iterative design process for evolving your SOA security architecture that considers your current and future security requirements, emerging industry specifications, overlaps in product functionality for SOA security, and possibilities for custom security integration.

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Cloud Computing Events

Ben Day’s Beantown .NET Meeting on Thursday, 1/7/2010: Jason Haley, Windows Azure SDK post of 12/29/2009 announces:

Beantown .NET is going to be meeting on Thursday, 1/7/2010. This month we have Jason Haley presenting “Get Started with the Windows Azure SDK”.

As always, our meeting is open to everyone so bring your friends and co-workers – better yet, bring your boss. It is not required to RSVP for our meetings but if you know you’re coming, please RSVP by 3pm on the day of the meeting to help speed your way through building security and to give us an idea how much pizza to order. Click here to RSVP.

See [George] Huey and Wade [Wegner] will “Migrate Us to SQL Azure!” on 12/31/2009 when .NET Rocks releases Show #512 in the SQL Azure Database (SADB) section.

Bruce Kyle recommends that you Mark Your Calendars for Microsoft BI Conference, which is colocated with Microsoft Tech*Ed North America in New Orleans during the week of 6/7/2010:

The conference will focus on the following categories:

• Empower Your Users – Microsoft Excel (including PowerPivot for Excel), SSRS (Report Builder), Microsoft Visio, Search/FAST
• Improve Organizational Effectiveness - SharePoint Server 2010 (including PerformancePoint Services, Excel Services, Visio Services)
• Increase IT and Developer Efficiency - SSAS, SSRS, SSIS (including best practices for implementation), MDS, PowerPivot for SharePoint
• Partner Services and Solutions Delivery – Partner and ISV methodology and solution offerings that augment our BI solution, Integration with other products (e.g., CRM)
• Customer Business Value – Learn how customers are using our products in the field with in-depth sit downs with a TDM angle

Registration and demand generation efforts will kick-off in early January.

Hopefully, SQL Azure users will finally learn what BI features will be offered in the cloud. However, Eric Lai reports “Business intelligence as a service remains too scary for most enterprises, analyst says” in his Startups keep on-demand BI faith, but big vendors wait and see article of 12/22/2009 for InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing blog:

When a tech vendor fails, rivals usually rejoice. Not in the nascent BI (business intelligence)-on-demand space, after well-funded startup LucidEra folded in June.

The company had raised almost $21 million in funding from high-profile venture capitalists. Though competitors immediately began wooing LucidEra's customers, they also felt compelled to put out public statements saying that its failure was an outlier, not the beginning of a trend. …

Not only have customers failed to adopt BI-on-demand the way they have other kinds of apps such as CRM (Salesforce.com, for example) or productivity ( Google Apps), but it has also received little validation from the big players.

IBM, for one, is only starting to "research" a Web version of its Cognos BI software.

"The data model differs from company to company, which is why you just can't put it into a multi-tenant environment," said Rob Ashe, general manager for IBM's BI and performance management division.

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

Randy Bias describes his Infrastructure-as-a-Service Builder's Guide v1.0 white paper of 12/2009:

This paper is targeted at anyone building public or private clouds who want to understand clouds, cloud computing, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It highlights some of the important areas to think about when planning and designing your infrastructure cloud.

His earlier Cloud Standards are Misunderstood and Subscription Modeling & Cloud Performance white papers, as well as a brief biography are available here. 

Daniel Roth summarizes his Time Your Attack: Oracle’s Lost Revolution feature article for Wired Magazine’s December 2009 issue: “In 1995, Larry Ellison began his network computer crusade. The effort failed, but the concept would spark what became cloud computing.” I would add “… and netbooks, too.” Roth continues on page 3:

“Ellison is often time-dyslexic — right about the fundamental trend but wrong on timing, ” says David Roux, a partner at private equity firm Silver Lake and a former Oracle executive vice president. “It’s hard to look at a $299 netbook and not see the NC vision come to life.”

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