Excel Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud (SQL Data Services)

I’ve made numerous references to “promised business intelligence (BI) features” for SQL Data Services (SDS) and its predecessor, SQL Server Data Services (SSDS), but overlooked the Microsoft’s Data Mining (DM) team’s Excel Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud preview, which include a full-featured add-in of the same name for Excel 2007 and a corresponding Web-based demonstration service that offers fewer analysis types.

The DM team demonstrated this feature for the first time on August 25, 2008 at the KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) 2008 conference in Las Vegas. Jamie MacLennan tells the whole story in his KDD 2008 and Incredibly Awesome SQL 2008 Data Mining Demos post of the same date.

The Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud Web Service

The Web application, which runs from data pre-stored by SQL Data Services and DM code executed under Windows Azure doesn’t require downloading add-ins or other code to demonstrate the following analyses:

• Analyze Key Influences
• Forecasting
• Prediction Calculator

Here’s the input data after clicking the Load Data button from the AdventureWorks.Sales.vIndividualDemographics view with an additional Purchased Bike bit (Boolean) column added:

(Click the image to display a full-size screen capture. Note that analyses marked with a barred red circle are unavailable in the current Web preview.)

Here are the major influencers on bicycle purchases by individual customers:

When you click one of the three active analysis buttons, the Windows Azure instance executes the data mining code to generate the Analysis Results table.

It’s easy to deduce Key influencers for purchasing a bicycle, such as lack of an automobile, unmarried status and location in the Asia-Pacific region where bicycle riding is more common than in North America. However, the Score column indicates the relative numerical importance of these factors for not purchasing and purchasing a bicycle.

Excel Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud Add-in

Uploading data from an Excel worksheet table, performing an analysis, and downloading the resulting Analysis Results worksheet requires downloading and installing the the Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007. The download page mentions SQL Server 2008, but you don’t need to install SQL Server 2008 to use the Table Analysis Tools (TAT) add-in.

The following screen capture shows the AdventureWorks DimCustomer.csv file that contains data that’s similar to the preceding example’s, except for the lack of the Purchased Bike column:

Clicking the Analyze (in the Cloud) button adds a analysis header to the worksheet. The Excel TAT add-in enables the following additional sample analyses:

Categorizer

Highlight Exceptions

Scenario Analysis

Market Basket Analysis

as you can see from the following screen capture:

Clicking one of the analysis buttons sends the data to an SDS table, performs the analysis, and returns the data to Excel for conversion to a worksheet’s table.

The Key Influencers analysis in this case analyzes the factors that favor increasing annual income rather than bicycle purchases.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Data ServicesServices,SDS,Cloud Computing,Data Mining,Table Analysis Tools for the Cloud,Table Analysis Tools for Office 2007,Excel 2007

Microsoft Postpones Construction of Iowa Data Center

The Building a Better Mousetrap a.k.a. Optimizing for Maximum Efficiency in an Economic Downturn post of 1/23/2009 by Arne Josefsberg and Mike Manos in the ms datacenters blog reports:

Thanks to the efficiencies we’ve gained through these ongoing efforts, we will be able to delay the construction and opening of some of our facilities, which will save Microsoft and its shareholders significant operating expenses, going a long way towards meeting the goals that Microsoft announced this week. For instance we’re postponing construction of the data center in Iowa that we recently purchased land for. We are still continuing construction of our facilities in Chicago and Dublin, and are planning to open them as customer demand warrants. [Emphasis added]

But given the current economic climate we’re going to do the right thing for our business and shareholders and revisit our plans on a quarter-by-quarter basis. On other fronts, we are expanding existing capacity and making improvements for our other co-location facilities, like Amsterdam, that strengthen our global footprint and help us meet growing demand for online services for businesses.

According to a comment to the Mini-Microsoft: Microsoft Layoff 2009 - Now What? post of 1/22/2009:

Debra Chrapaty's [Data Centers] org is going to have some cuts, per her email.

News of plans for the new data center, to be located near Des Moines, appeared in early July 2008.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Data Centers,Iowa,Cloud Computing

“Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework” Is in Stock at Amazon

Amazon lists my latest book for WROX/Wiley, Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework, as “In Stock” although it was originally scheduled for availability on 2/3/2009.

Thanks to Julie Lerman for the heads-up; her Programming Entity Framework book goes to the printer today for availability on 2/2/2009.

Good news! I didn’t expect the book to be available until mid-February.

Julie writes: “Dave Sceppa's book, Programming the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework, still says ‘Dec 10, 2008’ although Amazon lists it as ‘not yet released’ so I'm not sure what's up with that.”

Microsoft Press says Dave’s book is scheduled to be published on 2/24/2009.

This earlier Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework: Table of Contents post of 11/8/2008 contains a chapter-level TOC.

Technorati Tags: Entity Framework,Entity Data Model,EDM,EDM Designer,Entity SQL,LINQ,LINQ to Entities,EntityDataSource,LINQ to SQL,LinqDataSource,LINQ to DataSets,LINQ to XML,LINQ to XSD,Object/Relational Mapping,O/RM

Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/12/2009+

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

•• Update 1/17/2009 12:00 PM PST
• Update 1/15/2009 2:00 PM PST

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

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

•• Jim Nakashima provides a more detailed description than Gus for Debugging Silverlight in a Web Role on the Development Fabric in this 1/16/2009 fully illustrated post.

•• Gus Perez explains how to enable Silverlight debugging with the January 2009 CTP of the Windows Azure SDK and Tools for VS 2008 in his Silverlight Debugging in Windows Azure Web Roles post of 1/16/2009. Silverlight debugging isn’t turned on by default, so here’s how to do it in Gus’s words:

1. In the Solution Explorer, right-click the Web role project node that has the Silverlight code.
2. Click on "Properties."
3. Click on the "Web" tab.
4. Towards the bottom, you'll find a "Debuggers" section (you may have to scroll down).
5. Click on the "Silverlight" checkbox.

• The Windows Azure team’s Updated SDK and Tools for Visual Studio Available Now post of 1/14/2009 announces a refresh to the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio.

1. Download Windows Azure SDK January 2009 CTP (v. 1.0.1.0 of 1/14/2009)
2. Download Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 January 2009 CTP (v. 1.0 of 1/14/2009)

According to the Azure team’s post, the new CTP offers:

• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role
• Bug and performance fixes based on customer feedback

Windows 7 Update 1/16/2009: David Lemphers reports in his Windows Azure SDK on Windows 7 Beta! post of 1/16/2009 that this SDK is incompatible with the current Windows 7 beta and there is no workaround available. The lack of incompatibility with the Azure Tools for VS 2008 is of little consequence if you can’t run the local Developer Fabric.

Read more about the CTP in my January 2009 Update to Windows Azure SDK and Visual Studio Tools CTPs Available for Download post and Jim Nakashima’s January 2009 CTP of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK released post of 1/15/2009.

SQL Data Services (SDS)

•• Dare Obasanjo’s Building Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Database Sharding Schemes post of 1/16/2009 describes how scaling out by partitioning tables often is a better approach than scaling up by increasing the relational database management system’s (RDBS’s) computing power and input/output efficiency. SDS manages sharding with Kind field and Azure Table Services uses Partition Key values. All entities (rows) having the same Type or Partition Key value are stored in the same RDBMS or Windows Azure instance.

•• Mike Amundsen comes up with a use for SDS’s new non-traditional JOIN feature in his SDS JOINS: i got one that works! post of 1/15/2009. Mike notes that:

[T]he SDS JOIN does not support projection (basically the ability to select fields for display from either table/collection in the JOIN). [I]nstead, you simply indicate which collection you wish SDS servers to return.

Azure Table Services doesn’t support claim to support JOINs, but you can return a collection that corresponds to the many side of a one:many or many:one association with the same WHERE clause restriction used by the JOIN’s ON clause constraint.

Mike’s example consists of three collections (tables): messages, words and indexes; indexes is a list of unique words in all messages. He “wanted to be able to use any member of the index collection to find all the messages that contained the word in the selected index entity.” And found a JOIN would do it.

• Scott Watermasysk will present the “Developing Applications Using Microsoft SQL Data Services” session at the NYC edition of the MSDN DevCon, which will focus on leveraging data services both remotely and with SDS:

In the near future, applications will be developed using a combination of custom application code and online building block services, including data-centric services. In this session we discuss advancements in the Microsoft development platform and online service interfaces to enable seamless interaction with data services both on-premises (e.g., ADO.NET Data Services Framework over on-premises SQL Server) and in the cloud (e.g., SQL Server Data Services). Learn how you can leverage existing know-how related to LINQ (Language Integrated Query), data access APIs, data-binding, and more when building applications using online data.

According to Scott’s MSDN DevCon – NYC post of 1/14/2009, the session will be held at 2:00 to 3:15 PM on 1/20/2009 at:

Marriott Marquis New York
1535 Broadway (Times Square)
New York, NY 10036
(212) 398-1900

and you can register here for $99. Other Azure-related sessions earlier in the day include “A Lap Around Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform”, “Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Service” and “A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services.”

.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

•• Aaron Skonnard’s Microsoft .NET Services Whitepapers by Pluralsight post of 1/16/2009 describes a series of whitepapers that Keith Brown, Matt Milner, and he recently wrote for Microsoft about their new .NET Services offering, which is part of the Azure Services Platform. The series consists of the following four whitepapers:

• An Introduction to Microsoft .NET Services for Developers (Aaron Skonnard)
  This overview paper introduces Microsoft® .NET Services, each of its building block services, and how they fit together.
• A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft® .NET Access Control Service (Keith Brown)
  This whitepaper shows developers how to use a claims-based identity model and the Microsoft® .NET Access Control Service to implement single sign-on, federated identity, and role based access control in Web applications and services.
• A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft® .NET Service Bus (Aaron Skonnard)
  This whitepaper shows developers how to use the .NET Service Bus to provide a secure, standards-based messaging fabric to connect applications across the Internet.
• A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft® .NET Workflow Service (Matt Milner)
  This whitepaper provides details about the Microsoft® .NET Workflow Service and what developers need to know to begin building workflows for the cloud. It not only explains the current tools and capabilities but also outlines the vision for future releases.

According to Aaron, “You can download the entire set of whitepapers here. And they currently have some easier links on the .NET Services Dev Center.”

•• Quest Software’s The Experts Conference for Directory & Identity, to be held in Las Vegas from 3/22 to 3/25/2009, will have several sessions devoted to federated identity with Active Directory in cloud computing. Here are a few highlights:

• This Cloud Has Roots: A Peek Into Microsoft's Global Foundation Services AD Infrastructure by Sean Deuby
• Federating with the Cloud by Randy Wiemer
• The Survivalists Guide to Identity Management by Pam Dingle
• Information Protection and Access Control with AD RMS and AD FS by Richard Harrison
• Implementing an Identity based solution using Microsoft’s new Cloud based infrastructure by Danny Kim
• Federation Gateways - The Key to Supporting Platform-Specific Applications in Heterogeneous Environments by Nick Nikols
• Deploy & Secure SSO by Dave Jones
• Two Factor Authentication Trends by Manny Vellon
• Identity Integration: Multiple Directories in the Cloud by Patrick Harding

Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

• Sergei Meleshchuk has fixed his Azure Storage Simple Viewer so it installs and runs under 32-bit Vista:

• Rick Strahl explains Monitoring HTTP Output with Fiddler in .NET HTTP Clients and WCF Proxies as well as with Fiddler alternative Charles in this 1/14/2009 post. You can use Fiddler2 to monitor traffic between an Azure Data Services client running in the local Development Fabric and Azure Table, Blob and/or Queue Services running on Staging or Production instances in the cloud. Rick says:

For plain Web development most of the time I actually use FireBug inside of FireFox, but when more detailed HTTP wire debugging is required I quickly revert to Fiddler, because it tends to provide more information and options on dealing with request data. But even more importantly, FireBug – cool and useful as it is as the Swiss Army knife for Web development debugging - is limited to life inside of FireFox, so it does nada when you need to look at content outside of the browser such as when a .NET application fires HTTP requests against a server.

David Pallman’s Azure Cloud Computing User Group - New Web Site post of 1/13/2009 announces that the master Azure user group has moved to http://www.AzureUserGroup.com (hosted by Ning). There were 11 members when I joined on 1/13/2008 at 11:00 AM. 

Alin Irimie’s Weekly Cloud Application: Wikipedia Explorer post of 1/12/2009 describes Dot Net Solutions’ new version of its Wikipedia Explorer, which is built on top of Windows Azure. The project, which was built in partnership with Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, runs on a snapshot of Wikipedia’s entire English database that took 50 Azure server instances “a little over four days” to reformat from wikicode to XAML. [Copied from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+.]

David Pallman’s Azure Storage Explorer of 1/9/2009 is a three-pane Windows form for inspecting blobs,tables and queues in a specified Azure storage account. David updated his Explorer on 1/12/2009:

Azure Storage Explorer has been updated. Binaries and source code to "preview version 0.2" have been posted on CodePlex. This update adds some polish, has cleaned-up source code, and allows items in cloud storage to be deleted.

Click here to give the Windows Azure Blob Test Harness Project a test drive.

OakLeaf’s Azure Storage Services - StorageClient Library: Table Storage API Class Reference post of 1/7/2009 includes class diagrams for TableStorage, TableStorageDataServiceContext, TableStorageDataQuery and other .NET types with which developers must conversant to take full advantage of Azure Table and Blob Storage services.

The post has bee updated to include diagrams similar to class diagrams for the Details of TableStorage, TableStorage.DataServiceContext and TableStorage.DataServiceQuery classes from the System.Data.Services.Client namespace. Data for members of these classes was extracted with .NET Reflector.

OakLeaf’s Azure Storage Services - StorageClient Library: Blob Storage API Class Reference and Azure Storage Services - StorageClient Library: REST Blob Storage API Class Reference of 1/6/2009 provide class diagrams for the two primary components of the StorageClient library for processing blobs.

[Copied from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+.]

Azure Services Framework and Infrastructure

James Urquhart’s Workload mobility and the next Internet upgrade post of 1/16/2009 discusses the issue of Internet bandwidth requirement for moving compute workloads between Platform as a Service (PaaS) instances hosted on the internet.

James points to Doug Gourlay’s recent What Is NOT Networking for the Cloud post to the Cisco blog that notes:

[T]here will be a heck of a lot of data moving between servers, between data centers, and with cloud computing from enterprises to service providers.

Doug’s A look ahead: Some technology developments to expect in 2009 CTOvision post of 1/1/2009 expects large-scale migration to cloud computing by federal agencies.

•• Krishnan Subramanian begins a new Cloud Advantage series on Cloud Avenue with Cloud Advantage Series: Speed of Deployment of 1/16/2009. Krishnan argues:

One of the advantages I put forward in support of the On-Demand cloud based infrastructure is the speed with which one can deploy new computing resources. In the traditional On-Premise world, the whole process from the planning stage to the actual deployment will take anything from few weeks to few months depending on the need.

and cites InformationWeek’s Eli Lilly On What's Next In Cloud Computing Webcast (from the “Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services” section) as an example of a large-scale on-demand deployment by a large pharmaceuticals company.

•• David Linthicum’s Defining the Cloud Computing Framework post of 1/15/2009 for the Cloud Computing Journal begins:

As cloud computing emerges there is a lot of discussion about how to define cloud computing as a computing model. Maturity models have been published and debated, and providers clearly have a model for their own products.

In attempting to define this better to my clients, I came up with a "stack" of sorts, which I think makes logical sense, considering each component of cloud computing and how they interact. While clearly this could be much more complex, I don't think it needs to be. In essence, this is a model as to how one defines and refines the concept of cloud computing

and then lists 10 Whatever-as-a-Service items as major categories of cloud computing.

•• Aaron Skonnard is interviewed by developer evangelists Lynn Langit and Lindsay Rutter for his geekSpeak recording - Cloud Services 101 with Aaron Skonnard podcast of 1/7/2009. According to Channel9’s description:

In this geekSpeak, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Aaron Skonnard explains what Microsoft is doing with cloud computing and how you can start taking advantage of "the cloud" in your applications.

• Iron Mountain Digital’s Microsoft.com and Iron Mountain Digital Roll Out New Cloud Backup Service post of 1/15/2009 on the Software as a Service Directory announced:

Microsoft and Iron Mountain Digital rolled out a new cloud backup service today for customers of Microsoft's Data Protection Manager (DPM) Service Pack 1 (SP 1), released last month with new features including granular backups for Hyper-V.

Cloud Recovery for Data Protection Manager is sold by Iron Mountain, and is accessed through DPM's GUI as a checkbox for a user to select when choosing an offsite backup method (DPM also backs up to disk and tape.) Iron Mountain will then collect, encrypt and transport data according to a user-selected schedule from DPM. The service is priced by capacity and retention period for the amount of storage used.

• Dion Hinchcliffe includes cloud computing in two of his 8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009 of his 1/13/2009 ZDNet Enterprise Web 2.0 post.

• David Pallman will present four SoCal Code Camp – Fullerton sessions on on 1/24/2009  about Widows Azure:

1. Sat 11:15 AM: Azure Cloud Application Mode
2. Sat 1:15 PM: Azure Cloud Storage
3. Sat 2:30 PM: Azure Cloud Security
4. Sat 3:45 PM: Azure Cloud App Demo: Social Networking Web Site

• Kathleen Richards and Ed Scanlon expanded on an earlier interview with Bob Muglia in their Hey You, Get onto My Cloud cover story for the 1/15/2009 issue of Redmond Developer News.

My “Retire Your Datacenter” article about the Azure Services Platform’s Table Storage Services will be the cover story for Visual Studio Magazine’s February 2009 issue.

• Justin Etheredge’s Windows Azure - Breaking It Down post of 1/14/2009 is a whimsical analysis of Windows Azure’s four primary components:

1. Hosted Services (ASP.NET [Web] Roles and and Windows Service [Worker] Roles) that execute .NET code and Storage Services [Tables, Blobs and Queues] to persist Hosted Services’ state while maintaining scalability.
2. Live Services (Live Operating Environment)
3. .NET Services (Access Control, Service Bus, and Workflow)
4. SQL Services (only SQL Data Services at present)

• Geva Perry provides a brief cloud-computing lexicon in his The Vocabulary of Cloud Computing post of 1/13/2009 to Cloud Computing Journal. Geva defines terms such as cloudburst[ing], cloudstorming, vertical cloud, private cloud, internal cloud, hybrid cloud, et al. In most cases, he cites the initial user of the term as the authority for the definition.

Scott Watermasysk’s Two Tips On Preparing For The Cloud post of 1/12/2009 suggests that architects and developers contemplating use of cloud computing:

1. Assume they (the cloud providers) are right.
2. Decouple your current applications as much as possible.

Scott offered these tips to attendees of his first talk on cloud computing at the NYC Code Camp. [Copied from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+.]

Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

•• Sam Charrington at Appistry posted a Top Appistry Blog Posts of 2008 which includes links to and brief descriptions of their top ten cloud posts of 2008 based on readership:

1. The Blind Men and the Cloud
2. Amazon S3 Still Limping & the Limits of Clouds
3. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part 1): Introduction
4. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part  4): Idempotence
5. Parallelism : Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part 5)
6. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part 3): Statelessness
7. Is Your Code Cloud-Ready and Multi-Core Friendly? (Part  2): Atomicity
8. Cloud Taxonomy: Applications, Platform, Infrastructure
9. Meltdown 2008, Part 1 - How I Learned to Love Chaos
10. You Can’t Draw a Box Around a Cloud

Surprisingly, all are worth reading.

•• Roger Smith asks Will 'Cobol In The Cloud' Lead To Unplugging Your Mainframe? in this 1/16/2009 InformationWeek article about Micro Focus’s support for enterprise-grade Cobol apps running on Amazon EC2 (as well as under Windows Azure.) Smith quotes Micro Focus’s CTO Mark Haynie:

"We are 100% committed to being cloud agnostic and supporting customers who want to take advantage of Amazon EC2 to cut substantial costs in the coming year," said Mark Haynie, CTO for Application Modernization at Micro Focus. "To innovate in today's tough economic climate, enterprises must embrace flexibility and cost-effective modernization strategies. We will be alongside every customer as they navigate the cloud with tighter IT budgets and an increased focus on fast results."

•• Maureen O’Gara reports Google’s attempt to build a reseller channel for Google Apps in her Google Apps Resale “Easy Intro” to Cloud Computing post of 1/17/2009 to the Cloud Computing Journal. Resellers, such as Cloud Sherpa, receive a 20% discount on the $50 per year charge for premium services, which are targeted at corporate users.

To discourage free Google Apps usage by corporate accounts, O’Gara note that:

[F]rom here on out Google will limit the use of its freebie version of the software to 50 people per company. Current users, schools and non-profits will be exempt [from the limit].

•• John Foley’s Million-Dollar Private Clouds post of 1/16/2009 to InformationWeek’s Plug Into the Cloud Blog describes Cassatt’s Active Response software as intended to:

[O]ptimize data center resources by capturing the object code of applications, pooling servers, and distributing workloads based on IT policies. It's not the same thing as virtualization, though virtual machines are involved. [Cassatt CEO Bill] Coleman says Cassatt can help IT departments get server utilization into the 80% range, compared with 20% to 40% when just virtualization is employed.

Creating private clouds in terrestrial data centers involves multi-million dollar investments, so Foley asks “How many small and medium-sized businesses can afford to deploy private clouds (Cassatt calls them internal clouds) at those prices? Answer: none.”

• Roger Smith describes how Engine Yard extended the company’s Ruby and Rails stack to run on Amazon Web Services, in addition to its own internal cloud, in his Engine Yard Switches Rails To Mainline Cloud article of 1/14/2009 for InformationWeek’s Analytics blog.

• Michael Fitzgerald’s Technology: When the Forecast Calls for Clouds article for Inc. magazine’s January 2009 issue offers two case studies for Amazon EC3:

1. FlyMiwok, a Southern California on-demand charter flight reservation service handles large traffic surges.
2. TC3 Health's cost containment software periodically checks millions of records for fraudulent or duplicate health insurance claims.

Fitzgerald writes:

Last fall, over the course of a few weeks, Amazon moved its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service from beta testing into full production; Salesforce.com announced it would expand its cloud-computing platform; and Microsoft unveiled its cloud operating system, Windows Azure.

Microsoft's foray into the market is of particular note, because it's a big shift for the world's dominant traditional software company. "That Microsoft has wholeheartedly embraced the cloud is an indication that it's here," says Dave Girouard, president of Google Enterprise.

• Bill Staples describes How to Run Windows [2003] & IIS [6.0] in the Cloud on Amazon EC2 (in 15 mins) in a lengthy, fully illustrated post of 1/13/2009. This is the process I went through to compare Amazon EC2 with Windows Azure for my Test Harnesses Compare Amazon EC2 with SQL Server and SimpleDB Performance post of 12/14/2008.

• John Foley describes InformationWeek’s Eli Lilly On What's Next In Cloud Computing Webcast in this 1/14/2009 post:

In late 2007, [Lilly associate information consultant David Powers] said, the mindset among Eli Lilly's IT team was to take a wait-and-see approach to the emerging cloud services model. By early 2008, however, pressure was growing to reduce fixed IT costs without compromising on IT services, and cloud computing proved to be the answer.

Eli Lilly uses Amazon Web Services and other cloud services to provide high-performance computing, as needed, to hundreds of its scientists. With AWS, Powers said, a new server can be up and running in three minutes (it used to take Eli Lilly seven and a half weeks to deploy a server internally) and a 64-node Linux cluster can be online in five minutes (compared with three months internally). "The deployment time is really what impressed us," Powers said. "It's just shy of instantaneous." …

To hear more about what Eli Lilly is doing with cloud computing and where it goes from here, log in to our recent Webcast, which is available for replay. In addition to Dave, I give an overview of cloud services in the Webcast, and Amazon VP Adam Selipsky describes Amazon Web Services. You can sign in here

• Alin Irimie reports in his Open-Source Clouds post of 1/14/2009 that Sausalito, CA-based Joyent Inc. has announced the signing of an agreement to acquire Reasonably Smart, an open-source, auto-scaling competitor to Azure Services Platform and Google App Engine. You can read the full news release PDF here.

John Foley’s Launching InformationWeek’s Startup 50 post of 1/13/2008 for Information Week:

[I]ntroduce[s] InformationWeek's "Startup 50," a new editorial project that will culminate in our highlighting 50 technology startups a few months from now in InformationWeek magazine and on InformationWeek.com. We're opening the selection process to the IT community. It will involve three steps: nominating startups, voting on those startups, and, finally, vetting them; more on that below.

Evans Data’s claim that Half of Developers to Develop SaaS Software in Next Year was reported in Cloud Computing Journal’s 1/13/2009 issue:

According to the latest Evans Data Global Development Survey, over half of all developers (51.9% averaged over all regions) expect to work on programs delivered in the SaaS model during the next 12 months. 

Adoption expectation is strongest in the Asia-Pacific region, although the number of developers currently working on SaaS implementations is highest in North America, where 30% say this is part of their current development efforts. 

In the EMEA region, fewer developers are currently developing SaaS but 53% expect to be doing so within 12 months.

• Kathleen Richards offers more details of the Evans Data report in her Half of Developers Report Hosted Software Projects story of 1/11/2009 for Redmond Developer News.

Jeremy Geelan’s The Cloud Computing Ecosystem: The Top 100 Cloud Players post of 1/13/2009 to the Cloud Computing Journal is an alphabetic list of early participants in the cloud computing services and platforms markets. Most entries have brief descriptions of the organization’s offerings.

Zoli Erdos’ Under the Radar: Call for Startups in Cloud Computing & Business Applications post of 1/12/2009 describes Dealmaker Media’s Under the Radar, a Silicon Valley conference series that covers business applications, social media, entertainment, and mobility with an emphasis on Web-based offerings.

James Urquhart’s Finding distinction in 'infrastructure as a service' post of 1/12/2009 discusses ‘cloud centers,’ a term coined by Randy Bias, chief technology officer of ServePath, who offer GoGrid, to describe hosting companies-turned-cloud providers. [Copied from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+.]

Cloud Computing Journal reports Adobe Takes LiveCycle into the Cloud on 1/12/2009:

Kumar Vora, vice president and general manager for LiveCycle at Adobe today announced the availability of Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express software - a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment.

“Adobe continues to push the boundaries when supporting its enterprise developer community,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services. "We are excited to see Adobe extend to its customers the vast potential for unlocking productivity by providing access to enterprise-scale environments in the cloud by offering developer access to its comprehensive LiveCycle ES solution via Amazon Web Services," he added.

[Copied from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+.] 

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Data Services,SDS,.NET Services,Cloud Computing,Silverlight 2,Cobol,Amazon EC2,SimpleDB,Amazon S3

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 1/12/2009+

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

•• Update 1/16/2009 2:00 PM PST Substantial additions
• Update 1/15/2009 1:00 PM PST Several additions

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

•• Tony Sneed explains how to use Visual Studio 2008’s built in Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) to generate POCO entity code for Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) in his T4 POCO Templates for L2S and EF. Tony’s T4 templates continue the trend started by Damien Guard and Danny Simmons toward code-generation with T4 templates for data-driven projects.

•• Jim Wooley’s Changing the Namespace on generated Entity Framework classes of 1/15/2009 explains how changing the namespace of Entity Framework entities differs from the same operation with LINQ to SQL.

Jim also reported a Windows 7 bug with the EF and LINQ to SQL graphic designers in his Win7 and the LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entity designers post of 1/15/2009.

• David McCarter will present the Building nTier Applications with Entity Framework Services session to SoCal Code Camp – Fullerton on 1/24/2009 at 11:15 AM in room H 123 on the Cal State Fullerton campus. Here’s the description:

Learn how to build real world nTier applications with the new Entity Framework and related services introduced in .NET 3.5 SP1. With this new technology built into .NET, you can easily wrap an object model around your database and have all the data access automatically generated or use your own stored procedures and views. Then learn how to easily and securely expose your object model using WCF with just a few line of code using ADO.NET Data Services. The session will demonstrate how to create and consume these new technologies from the ground up. Lots of code!

• David Pallman will present four Code Camp - Fullerton sessions on Widows Azure:

1. Sat 11:15 AM: Azure Cloud Application Mode
2. Sat 1:15 PM: Azure Cloud Storage
3. Sat 2:30 PM: Azure Cloud Security
4. Sat 3:45 PM: Azure Cloud App Demo: Social Networking Web Site

• Alkampfer’s Entity Framework first steps post of 1/8/2009 attempts to clarify new EF users’ confusion with LINQ [to Entities], Entity SQL, Entity Framework, and deferred query execution terminology.

Simon Segal continues his Entity Framework Repository, Specifications and Fetching Strategies series in this 1/13/2009 post:

Most recently I also made it clear that I felt the idea of Fetching Strategies was (for now) a waste of time (in the Entity Framework) but I have (as promised) reworked the earlier code libraries I posted for LINQ To SQL. The libraries contain a base / generic Repository and base Specification that can be utilised in building more specific Repositories (ala DDD) and the specifications are useful in building dynamic queries and testing for entity equality.

I have also decided that another amendment should be made as to my original intent and therefore not pursue a single library to support both Microsoft ORM products and thus leave them as separate.

Download the source code.

Justin Etheredge’s Making the Entity Framework Fit Your Domain - Part 2 post of 1/12/2009 continues his quest to use EF in domain-first design mode with POCOs and the IEntityWithKey, IEntityWithChangeTracker and IEntityWithRelationships interfaces. According to Justin, “The last interface ‘IEntityWithRelationships’ requires a bit more work to get implemented,” so he’s leaving that implementation to his next post on the topic.

The Entity Framework Design Team’s Update on Computed Properties post of 11/12/2009 outlines the intention to replace computed properties with Model Defined Functions, which the team described last week. The team concludes:

We think our best course of actions in the short term is 1) to focus on supporting Model Defined Functions and 2) ask for your feedback on the relative importance of Computed Properties given the points listed above.

LINQ to SQL

•• Tony Sneed explains how to use Visual Studio 2008’s built in Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) to generate POCO entity code for Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) in his T4 POCO Templates for L2S and EF. Tony’s T4 templates continue the trend started by Damien Guard and Danny Simmons toward code-generation with T4 templates for data-driven projects [copied from the “Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)” section].

•• Jim Wooley’s Changing the Namespace on generated Entity Framework classes of 1/15/2009 explains how changing the namespace of Entity Framework entities differs from the same operation with LINQ to SQL [copied from the “Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)” section].

Jim also reported a Windows 7 bug with the EF and LINQ to SQL graphic designers in his Win7 and the LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entity designers post of 1/15/2009.

• David Hayden’s O/R Mapper Identity Generation via KeyTable - Reduce Roundtrips and Improve Performance post of 1/14/2009 laments that LINQ to SQL doesn’t support a Key Table (Fowler, Martin, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, p. 222) that supplies identity field values for object IDs (primary key values of persistence tables).

The LightSpeed O/RM tool supports key tables, so Dave uses it to demonstrate how these relatively uncommon objects improve performance by reducing database roundtrips. If the Data Programmability team has some spare resources to upgrade LINQ to SQL in ADO.NET 4.0, support for key tables might be a good investment.

• Luca Bolognese posted Expression tree serialization code posted on Code Gallery, which contains

A wrapper for serializing/deserializing LINQ to SQL queries: A wrapper around the expression serializer allows serializing LINQ to SQL queries and de-serializing into a query against a given DataContext.

on 11/20/2008, but I missed it.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

•• Nikhil Kothari’s DomainDataSource ServerControl post of 1/15/2009 describes a custom ASP.NET server control that replaces the LinqDataSource when you want to:

write an honest-to-goodness complete LINQ expression without learning a DataSource control-specific syntax. Furthermore, [you]'d like to get the goodness of ObjectDataSource and have the data source work against some business logic rather than directly against the DataContext or the DAL.

Nikhil is a software architect in the .NET Developer Platform group within Microsoft’s .NET Developer Division.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

•• Beth Massi shows you how to build a WPF client for an ADO.NET Data Service based on the Entity Framework in her ADO.NET Data Services - Building a WPF Client post of 1/15/2009.

Andy Conrad’s Timeout Workaround post of 1/13/2009 admits to a bug in the ADO.NET Data Services client (System.Data.Services.Client.dll) that the team shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1 and the Silverlight 2.0 SDK:

[W]e do not throw the correct exception when a HTTP request has problems while being sent to the server.  I.e. a request timeouts, there is a bad server name, etc.  In other words, any problem that would normally raise a System.Net.WebException.  Unfortunately, in V1 of ADO.NET Data Services a NullReferenceException is raised instead of a WebException and even worse, the exception message is lost. …

We are planning on fixing this bug in a future version of ADO.NET Data Services client (both in .NET and Silverlight) so if your code relies exclusively on catching the NullReference exception, it will be broken when we ship the fix.  Hence, to make your code robust – have your code explicitly catch both exception types.

Andy includes sample code for the workaround.

John Papa’s Manipulating Service References in Silverlight 2 post of 1/13/2009 points out:

The [technique described by Shawn Wildermuth here] can be adapted for Astoria by flipping the service reference’s context object’s instantiation as shown [in the sample code provided.]

Shawn Wildermuth describes Controlling Service References in Silverlight 2 when changing Web service endpoints in this 11/8/2009 post.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

• Steve Naughton’s Dynamic Data – Default Value in ForeignKey Edit FieldTemplate post of 1/14/2009 explains “how to get the DefaultValueAttribute to affect the ForeignKey Edit FieldTemplate.”

SQL Data Services (SDS) and Cloud Computing

This topic moved on 1/3/2009 to Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+.

Miscellaneous (WPF, WCF, MVC, Silverlight, etc.)

•• Gil Fink provides aid in Deciding When to Use ASP.NET MVC Framework instead of ASP.NET Web forms with this 1/16/2009 post.

Gil Fink’s Extending ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper Class post of 1/13/2009 shows “an example of how to extend the ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper class that you can use within your MVC views.”

John K. Water’s Microsoft Releases CTP of VS Extensions for SharePoint post of 1/12/2009 for Redmond Developer News describes:

The new Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS), released as version 1.3, are templates for creating, debugging, packaging and deploying SharePoint projects. This release includes templates for Web Parts, Data Lists, Content Types, Event Receivers and Modules, among others.

The SharePoint Team announced the v1.3 CTP in its Announcing: Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint v1.3 post of 1/12/2009.

The preceding announcement is undoubtedly related to the topics of Mary Jo Foley’s Select testers to get Office 14 alpha release any day now and A new member of the Office 14 family: Office for Sales posts of 1/13/2009. Office for Sales is based on SharePoint and probably will be available for SharePoint Online.

Technorati Tags: Entity Framework,Entity Data Model,EDM,LINQ to SQL,LINQ,ADO.NET Data Services,Astoria Project,ASP.NET Dynamic Data,WPF,WCF,MVC,Silverlight 2,SharePoint

January 2009 Update to Windows Azure SDK and Visual Studio Tools CTPs Available for Download

The Windows Azure team’s Updated SDK and Tools for Visual Studio Available Now post of 1/14/2009 announces a refresh to the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio.

1. Download Windows Azure SDK January 2009 CTP (v. 1.0.1.0 of 1/14/2009)
2. Download Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 January 2009 CTP (v. 1.0 of 1/14/2009)

According to the Azure team’s post, the new CTP offers:

• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role
• Bug and performance fixes based on customer feedback

Be sure to read the release notes before installing the SDK update: Windows Azure SDK CTP Release Notes.

Read the instructions on the download page before running the VSCloudService.msi installer for Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio January 2009 CTP.

Note: This is the second post to the Windows Azure team blog. The first post was Introducing Windows Azure on 10/27/2008.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Data Services,SDS,.NET Services,Cloud Computing

Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 1/5/2009+

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

••• Update: 1/13/2009 10:00 AM PST: Minor additions
•• Update: 1/10/2009 1:30 PM PST: Minor additions
• Update: 1/8/2009 10:00 AM PST: Minor additions

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

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

•• David Pallman asks Questions about time and clocks in the data center in this 1/7/2009 thread in the Windows Azure forum. According to the Azure team’s Aleks Gershaft, the servers’ time zone is Pacific time but Last Modified Time for blobs and table entities is UTC.

• David Lemphers’ Windows Azure - Sending SMTP Emails! post of 1/7/2009 describes how to send STMP emails through a relay host as an Azure web role, which solves the problems described in the System.Net.Mail.SmtpPermission not granted for smtp client from within a webrole thread of the Windows Azure forum.

• Scott Watermasysk will conduct the NYC Code Camp - Understanding Data Storage Options in the Cloud session on 1/10/2009 and give a PhillyNJ.NET – What is Azure? talk to the PhillyNJ.NET Users Group on 1/15/2009 according to his two posts of 1/7/2009.

• Mark Nottingham submitted a Link Relations and HTTP Header Linking Internet Draft to the IETF on 12/1/2008. The draft “document specifies relation types for [Atom and HTML] Web links, and defines a registry for them.” If adopted, the document would affect the Atom syndication (RFC4287) and AtomPub (RFC5023) RFCs, which might affect the ADO.NET Data Services client library, and thus Azure Table Services.

• OakLeaf’s Azure Storage Services - StorageClient Library: Table Storage API Class Reference post of 1/7/2009 includes class diagrams for TableStorage, TableStorageDataServiceContext, TableStorageDataQuery and other .NET types with which developers must conversant to take full advantage of Azure Table and Blob Storage services. The post has bee updated to include diagrams similar to class diagrams for the Details of TableStorage, TableStorage.DataServiceContext and TableStorage.DataServiceQuery classes from the System.Data.Services.Client namespace.Oakleaf’s

• OakLeaf’s Azure Storage Services - StorageClient Library: Blob Storage API Class Reference and Azure Storage Services - StorageClient Library: REST Blob Storage API Class Reference of 1/6/2009 provide class diagrams for the two primary components of the StorageClient library for processing blobs.

• OakLeaf’s Fighting the Azure Blob Storage Blues post of 1/2/2009 describes issues encountered while creating an Azure Blob Test Harness project that’s an extension of Jim Nakashima’s early Windows Azure Walkthrough: Simple Blob Storage Sample of 10/29/2008. Problems reported include failure of one or more GridView cells to render, overlapping table rows and similar UI issues.

However, it appears that IE 8 Beta 2 cause the GridView rendering issues because Firefox 3.0.5 doesn’t exhibit the symptoms. Intermittent failures to download large files from SkyDrive probably are caused by Azure. [Repeated from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 12/29/2008+.]

SQL Data Services (SDS)

•• Cerebrata Software, an Indian startup, has announced Omega.SDSClient, a browser-based Silverlight 2.0 application that lets you access and manage data stored in Windows Azure’s SQL Data Services. Here’s a screen capture of Omega.SDSClient managing the oakleaf1 authority’s Customers entity set in the Northwind container:

Omega.SDSClient lets you:

• Connect to SQL Data Services.
• Manage authorities.
• Manage containers.
• Manage flexible entities.

These new features will be added shortly:

• Support for BLOB entities.
• Querying capabilities.
• Advanced container & entity operations.

You can download run the tool’s current demo (beta) version on the Cerebrata site and obtain a license file from the Omega.SDSClient site. Pricing for production use doesn’t appear to be available yet.

Jeff Currier from Microsoft’s SDS team answered my The SQL Data Services Team’s Recent Silence Isn’t Golden post of 1/3/2009 with the following comment:

We've been a bit more silent than usual because the features we've been focusing on have been more of a operational nature (and therefore not customer facing). This should explain the recent silence (along with the holidays).

However, the team isn’t discussing long-promised customer-facing features.

.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

•• Anne Thomas Manes, a Burton Group analyst, says SOA is Dead; Long Live Services in her 1/5/2009 blog post. Here’s the abstract:

SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its offspring: mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on “services”.

Once thought to be the savior of IT, SOA instead turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations. SOA was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale. Except in rare situations, SOA has failed to deliver its promised benefits. After investing millions, IT systems are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and systems are more fragile than ever. …

The latest shiny new technology will not make things better. Incremental integration projects will not lead to significantly reduced costs and increased agility. If you want spectacular gains, then you need to make a spectacular commitment to change. Like Bechtel. It’s interesting that the Bechtel story doesn’t even use the term “SOA”—it just talks about services.

And that’s where we need to concentrate from this point forward: Services.

••• Her SOA Obituary: Misinterpretations and Perceptive Enrichment post mortem of 1/9/2009 begins:

The cacophony generated by my SOA obituary post exceeded my expectations. Obviously, I hit a nerve.

Admittedly, the title was designed to draw a response. But I was still a bit surprised by the number of people that misinterpreted my meaning. I attribute the misunderstanding to the ambiguity of the term "SOA" itself, which JP talks about in his post from earlier today.

Sam Gentile’s Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs) Drive SOA Adoption Part 2 is the second chapter of a series that describes how ESBs are (supposed to) work using the commercial Neuron ESB for WCF as an example.

Following this series to its conclusion should enable you to judge whether .NET Services’ Service Bus (formerly “BizTalk Services”) meets your requirements or you need a purpose-built commercial ESB.

To learn more about the .NET Services.Service Bus watch Clemens Vasters’ Microsoft .NET Service Bus: Connectivity, Messaging, Events and Discovery PDC 2008 presentation (BB38). Clemens is the Service Bus Technical Lead.

Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

••• Alin Irimie’s Weekly Cloud Application: Wikipedia Explorer post of 1/12/2009 describes Dot Net Solutions’ new version of its Wikipedia Explorer, which is built on top of Windows Azure. The project, which was built in partnership with Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, runs on a snapshot of Wikipedia’s entire English database that took 50 Azure server instances “a little over four days” to reformat from wikicode to XAML.

•• David Pallman’s Azure Storage Explorer of 1/9/2009 is a three-pane Windows form for inspecting blobs,tables and queues in a specified Azure storage account. David updated his Explorer on 1/12/2009:

Azure Storage Explorer has been updated. Binaries and source code to "preview version 0.2" have been posted on CodePlex. This update adds some polish, has cleaned-up source code, and allows items in cloud storage to be deleted.

•• Jon Udell’s Test-driven development in the Azure cloud post of 1/8/2009 continues the description of his project to recreate the elmcity.info calendar aggregator on the Azure platform. In this installment he focuses on test-driven development in Azure.

To make NUnit run under Windows Azure code access security restrictions, Jon added [assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers()] attributes to its assemblies and then rebuilt nunit.core.dll, nunit.core.interfaces.dll, nunit.framework.dll, and nunit.testutilities.dll. Yet another case where Azure’s lack of support for partially trusted callers bites you. 

•• Cerebrata Software, an Indian startup, has announced Omega.SDSClient, a browser-based Silverlight 2.0 application that lets you access and manage data stored in Windows Azure’s SQL Data Services. See the entry in the “SQL Data Services (SDS)” section.

• David Lemphers’ Windows Azure and Web Services! post of 1/6/2009 explains how to work around a problem with the current internal Windows Azure environment’s configuration to enable connections to .asmx Web Services in Web Role projects when running in the Azure Cloud Fabric.

• Oakleaf posted on 1/5/2009 Initial Azure Blob Generation Time vs. File Size Graph, which plots Upload, Create and Total time data for a set of *.bmp and *.zip files ranging in size from ~70 kB to 37.75 MB stored by my Windows Live SkyDrive account. The post includes source data from the OakLeaf Windows Azure Blob Test Project that’s now running in production on Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Blob Test Harness Project is Live! post of 1/4/2009 has instructions on how to use the test harness.

OakLeaf’s quick summary of currently available viewers for Azure tables and blobs is from my reply to a Would a Azure Storage Web UI be useful? thread in the Windows Azure forum:

There are several UIs for Azure storage and logs available, but the ones I've tried leave much to be desired. Examples:

Sergei Meleshchuk’s Azure storage viewer post of 12/24/2008 showed a storage browser for Queues, Blogs and Tables that looked promising, but it wouldn’t run for me. Starting the app causes it to immediately stop running under Windows Vista Ultimate on two computers. Others confirm it won't run on Vista. If Sergei fixes his app to run on Vista, it probably would satisfy most users.

Chris Hay offers his Windows Azure Blob Browser WPF application for CRUD operations on Azure blobs that you can download from here. It's list boxes aren't expandable and don't have scrollbars, but I use it.

David Aiken’s Windows Azure Online Log Reader is a no-frills Azure Services log reader by the author of Yap, an Azure-based Twitter clone with LiveID login but a terrible user experience.

David Lemphers’ Windows Azure Logs! post of 1/1/2009 starts the new year with a spartan LogBrowser project that I couldn’t get to read my logs.

Above are from recent OakLeaf blog posts.

OakLeaf posted Windows Azure Blob Test Harness Project is Live! on 1/4/2009 to announce the availability of and provide instructions for the OakLeaf Windows Azure Blob Test Project on Windows Azure. [Repeated from Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 12/29/2008+.]

Azure Services Framework and Infrastructure

••• Scott Watermasysk’s Two Tips On Preparing For The Cloud post of 1/12/2009 suggests that architects and developers contemplating use of cloud computing:

1. Assume they (the cloud providers) are right.
2. Decouple your current applications as much as possible.

Scott offered these tips to attendees of his first talk on cloud computing at the NYC Code Camp.

••• Paul Miller contrasts neophyte cloud users’ preference for meta data as opposed to “end user-approachable self-service customization” or vice-versa in his So do ‘Cloud Babies’ like metadata post of 1/11/2009. He concludes:

A database of flight codes, routes, times and aircraft is rich with data just begging to be used in a plethora of ways, whilst ‘BA283′ is equally comfortable as a piece of metadata describing one airline’s afternoon flight from London to Los Angeles.

The concept of metadata can be an extremely useful one; so long as we avoid becoming too dogmatic in defining its boundaries or fervid in upholding spurious conceptual purity.

••• Cloud Computing Journal’s Keynote Systems to Present at Cloud Computing Conference in NYC post of 1/10/2009 reports that

Vik Chaudhary, VP of Product Management & Corporate Development at Keynote Systems, will be presenting at SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York City this coming March 30-April 1, 2009.

According to Fuat Kircaali, Chaudhary's session will be

[L]ooking at how cloud platforms assure that your application will perform well and meet the high expectations for your end users by taking these clouds on a test flight. He will be running an application on a cloud platform, and examining performance bottlenecks and their impact on functionality by looking at how various clouds make it easy or hard to monitor the reliability and availability of applications.

••• Redmonk analyst Michael Coté warns Don’t confuse SaaS with Cloud Computing on 6/30/2008. Michael explains:

I’ve recently tracked down one of the causes of much confusion about and wheel spinning in cloud computing: it stems from thinking that Software-as-a-Service - software you get, largely, through a web application involving little or no on-premise installs, usually priced by subscription - counts as “cloud computing.”

Indeed, cloud computing is (visually) much less sexy than that. Cloud computing is “merely” what SaaS applications (usually) run on.

Fritz Nelson of InformationWeek describes CES: Startup Ctera's CloudPlug (Literally) device in this 1/11/2009 post from Las Vegas’s Consumer Electronic Show. Fritz says:

The CloudPlug is a tiny plug with a processor inside, an Ethernet jack and a USB port, with which you can turn any USB device into a NAS and back up your data to Ctera's cloud-based service. …

The company's CEO and co-founder is Liran Eshel, formerly the CEO of SofaWare, one of many companies Checkpoint gobbled up over the years. Eshel says the device has a powerful processor inside, making it what seems like the world's smallest server. Via a web interface you define which folders to share, and with whom, and set it up for automatic backup, which Ctera also offers. This is perfect for a small office that needs simple file services and online backup. Ctera wouldn't specify pricing yet, partly because the company will offer it through managed service providers who will likely set pricing based on connectivity and storage requirements.

•• Thomas Bittman, a member of the Gartner Blog Network, wrote Cloud Computing and K-12 Education on 11/26/2008. Bittman points out:

Content creation has traditionally been very personal during the K-12 years, and content produced then has often had a very short lifespan. Publishing text, images, films, art, and opinions has been limited to a small audience, and publishing tools were very limited. …

This is no longer true. Anyone can create content that is available to the world instantly, and can last for many years – possibly “forever”. Content can be constantly evolving through collaboration and interaction and updates. People don’t just refer to information, or just copy it, they interact with it. They modify it, they add to it – and this is to be encouraged.

•• Rob Bagby’s Powerpoints for ‘Best of PDC’ sessions post of 1/9/2009 includes the slides from Demystifying Azure, which Rob describes as follows:

Th[e] goal of this session is to provide a framework for understanding the Azure namespace. This namespace comprises Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”), Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Data Services, and more.The session will begin with a discussion of the hi-level features of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”), including scalable storage, a rich developer experience, automated service management and service hosting. The session will then provide a high-level overview of the services available in Live Services and .NET Services. The session will conclude with a brief overview of SQL Data Services. This session will demonstrate the use of Azure Table Services, SQL Data Services and will illustrate the Developer Fabric.

•• Andrew Conry-Murray says There's No Such Thing As A Private Cloud in this 1/9/2009 article for InformationWeek’s Plug into the Cloud blog that’s primarily about Parascale, which sells software for the creation of private clouds. I’m inclined to take Andy’s side in the argument.

•• The SQL Data Services forum has a number of interesting questions posted 1/9/2009 and pending replies by Azure team members:

• BasicAuthEndPoint Problem, when using SOAP approach
• When will be other SDS component Like SSRS, SSAS,SSIS will be available?
• Advantages of REST over SOAP or vice - versa to access SDS

My answer to the last question is that my tests show the SOAP wire protocol is about twice as fast as REST when manipulating an entity set consisting of the Northwind Customers table’s 91 entities (rows).

Geva Perry’s Accounting for Clouds: Stop Saying CapEx Vs. OpEx of 1/8/2009 offers accounting suggestions and guidelines for comparing the cost of on-premises and off-premises data processing. He promises a ROI analysis post shortly.

Mike Amundsen applauds de hÓra, Subbu, Tilkov: 2009 Data APIs for supporting HATEAOS (Hypermedia as the engine of application state) by legit REST data API’s in his Snowflake APIs post of 1/9/2009.

•• Eric Novikoff’s Are Humans Really Necessary for Maintaining SLAs in the Cloud? article of 1/9/2009 for Cloud Computing Journal carries the following deck:

Are humans really necessary for maintaining SLAs? In today's cloud computing deployments, especially with systems like Amazon's EC2, the users' application is responsible for both measuring and taking action on application performance issues. This complicates deployment and coding, as well as tying your application to a particular cloud provider. However, I believe that the next generation of cloud deployment frameworks will be able to do this automatically, by integrating general-purpose monitoring applications with policy-based cloud management engines. 

• Bob Muglia calls Azure roll-out “phased” rather than “slow-motion” in this Q&A: Muglia on the cloud, Azure, and the economy interview of 1/6/2009 by CNet’s Ina Fried. The interview is remarkably similar to that with Redmond Developer News linked below.

• Steve Ballmer pays lipservice to cloud computing in his Consumer Electronics Show keynote of 1/7/2009, but the transcript doesn’t include a single instance of him uttering Microsoft’s “Azure” trademark.

• Wally McClure’s podcast, General Thoughts on Windows Azure - Audio only of 1/6/2009, complements his earlier posts on Blob, Table and Queue storage. A Tweet on 1/7/2009 announces that he’ll probably present at CloudCamp Atlanta on 1/20/2009.

• Redmond Developer News’ Q&A with Microsoft's Bob Muglia post of 1/6/2009 is devoted to what appears to be an extensive e-mail interview about Azure with the newly promoted president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business.

• Wally McClure wondered on 1/6/2009 about the status of the StorageClient library as an Azure API in his StorageClient thread starter in the Windows Azure forum. Two MSFT representatives and I replied.

Guy Barette, Microsoft Regional Director for Quebec, says in his 2009 Predictions - ASP.NET, BizTalk and LINQ 2 SQL are dead and so are VB, C# and Azure post of 1/5/2009 that these technologies are dead but then goes on to debunk his initial prediction with the “real story" for Windows Azure:

Azure vs apps hosted in the enterprise: Microsoft has taken a bold approach to cloud computing. Instead of hosting your virtual machines running your apps, they will host your apps in a new cloud OS running in their virtual machines. But why would you do that? To drive IT costs down of course. Look, there’s something called a recession going on right now and it’s a nasty one. At some point, your boss will be asked by his/her boss to cut expenses drastically and maybe one way to do it is to go the cloud way. We’ll see but there’s one thing that I’m sure: this will be another tool in your .NET arsenal and it will not make sense to write all apps to run in the cloud. Again, look at your project/assignment, analyse the problem/need and select the right technology to do the job. I’m sure that people will get burned by using the cloud model on projects where it doesn’t make sense.

2009 prediction: Microsoft has a lot of work to do to convince people to move to cloud computing. 

Guy’s 2009 prognostications aren’t the last you hear for the Azure Frameword and Infrastructure this year. You can read other Regional Directors’ predictions in their The Region blog.

Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

••• James Urquhart’s Finding distinction in 'infrastructure as a service' post of 1/12/2009 discusses ‘cloud centers,’ a term coined by Randy Bias, chief technology officer of ServePath, who offer GoGrid, to describe hosting companies-turned-cloud providers.

••• Cloud Computing Journal reports Adobe Takes LiveCycle into the Cloud on 1/12/2009:

Kumar Vora, vice president and general manager for LiveCycle at Adobe today announced the availability of Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express software - a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment.

“Adobe continues to push the boundaries when supporting its enterprise developer community,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services. "We are excited to see Adobe extend to its customers the vast potential for unlocking productivity by providing access to enterprise-scale environments in the cloud by offering developer access to its comprehensive LiveCycle ES solution via Amazon Web Services," he added.

••• Kai describes how to emulate Amazon EC2 and SimpleDB in his Eucalyptus - Free Interfacing (Mocking) of Amazon Web Services post of 1/7/2009. Kai writes:

Usually, when you develop applications that make use of EC2 or S3, you'd need to pay for every bit even though you develop on your local machine or in a staging/testing environment. Amazon is of course very happy about it. But with Eucalyptus running on your in-house hardware, your AWS-powered applications will be very happy to talk to Eucalyptus as if it's the real amazon web services. You can also test drive Eucalyptus without installing anything. Be sure to check EC2 API compatibility and S3 API compatibility first.

•• The Conference on Innovative Data Systems (CIDR) 2008 emphasized social data analysis and cloud computing during its last semi-annual meeting at Asilomar, CA (near Monterey) on 1/4/2009 to 1/6/2009. Highlighted presentations were:

• Internet-Scale Data Center Power Efficiency (James Hamilton, Amazon)
• Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Social Data Analysis by Jeff Heer (Stanford University)
• Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Data by Christopher Olston, Edward Bortnikov, Khaled Elmeleegy, Flavio Junqueira, Benjamin Reed (Yahoo! Research)

All presentations are available for downloading in individual and collected Electronic Proceedings (13MB) PDFs.

•• John Foley’s Amid Belt-Tightening, Engine Yard Expands The Cloud post of 1/9/2009 observes:

In the past few weeks, Engine Yard has brought in a new CEO, laid off 15% of its workforce, and merged two of its key development efforts. With that out of the way, the Ruby on Rails hosting company appears ready to announce a cloud platform and a new hosting option. …

On Jan. 14, Engine Yard will make two announcements. The company is offering details under embargo, which I declined, but Walley give a few tips about may be coming in the above blog post. He writes that Engine Yard plans to bring out new services based on Amazon Web Services and to release its Vertebra software as open source. Vertebra is a framework for "orchestrating complex processes" on a company's own IT infrastructure or in "the cloud" on Amazon's EC2 or VMware's Vcloud.

It's worth noting that Amazon, along with New Enterprise Associates, invested $15 million in Engine Yard in mid '08. With that in mind, it's not surprising that Engine Yard would be looking to host Rails apps on AWS, if that's what it's doing. However, I would also point out that, unlike some other application hosting companies, Engine Yard actually operates its own data centers, two in the United States and a third planned in London. As Engine Yard looks for ways to manage costs, it will be interesting to see if cutting back on data center expense is one of them.

•• Mary Hayes Weier takes Larry Ellison’s firm to task for its Oracle On Salesforce.com's Service Disruption post of 1/6/2009. In her 1/9/2009 post, Mary starts with:

Salesforce.com went down worldwide for about 40 minutes Tuesday, marking the company's first notable service disruption in months. There's never a good time for a service disruption, but this one seems particularly ill-timed, given Oracle's sudden bloodthirsty gaze on Salesforce.com's customer base. …

and concludes:

But my sense is Oracle is going to be looking at any way it can to weaken Salesforce's position of strength in the CRM SaaS market. SaaS may not be a highly profitable business model for software companies, but Ellison & team clearly want a piece of it.

•• James Urquhart describes Amazon’s new control console for EC2 in his Amazon Web Services releases web-based EC2 console post of 1/9/2009.

• John Foley’s Managing Amazon Web Services From An iPhone post of 1/8/2009 starts with:

The day has arrived when Average Joe can manage data center resources from a soccer field or the beach using the world’s most popular gadget. Ylastic, an Atlanta-based startup founded last year, has introduced an iPhone version of its management interface for Amazon Web Services.

• James Urquhart claims that The biggest cloud-computing issue of 2009 is trust in this 1/07/2009 post to his The Wisdom of Clouds blog. He cites Alan Murphy of the Virtual Data Center blog who points to the dynamic nature of the cloud as a reason why there will need to be more "trust" between customers and vendors and Chris Hoff of the blog Rational Survivability who responds by pointing out that if more trust means less security, we've got a problem.

• Penny Crosman’s Cloud Computing Begins to Gain Traction on Wall Street article of 1/6/2009 describes Nasdaq’s use of Amazon Web Services' S3 storage cloud to capture 30 GB to 80 GB of trading activity data per day. Data is uploaded as flat files that contain details of about 10 minutes of a trades in a particular security. Crosman quotes Nasdaq’s Claude Courbois, associate VP, product development, saying that “data retrieval time is less than one second, and the system scales instantly.”

Brokerage firms use Nasdaq’s Market Replay application to show customers and regulators that best-execution requirements were met for a given trade. You can learn more about tool and sign up for a free trial at https://data.nasdaq.com/mr.aspx.

• John Foley’s SAP CEO Predicts SaaS 'Disillusionment' post of 1/7/2009 observes Bill McDermott’s contention that:

[N]ow more than ever companies need a full featured, integrated applications platform for running global business operations--mySAP, for example--not half-baked applications from unproven SaaS upstarts.

Foley notes that McDermott is SAP’s CEO and continues with his quote:

“It will take another 36 years for software-as-a-service vendors to do the same thing [as on-premises SAP] in the cloud.”

• Cloud Computing Journal reports that former Microsoft tools honcho Tod Nielsen will join VMWare in the newly created position of Chief Operating Officer reporting directly to VMWare CIO Paul Moritz. I knew Tod as the chief marketer for Microsoft Access in its early days (before Access became a member of Microsoft Office.)

John Foley announced on 1/6/2009 a forthcoming Webcast about How Eli Lilly Taps Into The Cloud for pharmaceutical research with Amazon Web Services. You can register here.

Sam Charrington’s Gartner's CIO New Year's Resolutions: Start Taking Cloud Seriously post of 1/6/2009 quotes from Gartner analysts Mark Raskino, John Mahoney and Patrick Meehan outline of 10 tactics that will help CIO’s “survive in 2009,” and put them “ahead of the crowd:”

“You will need to start leading your organization safely in this inevitable direction, or risk being sidelined by its progress.”

Sam, who’s VP of Product Mangement and Marketing for Appistry, paraphrases the report, which requires a Gartner Subscription or $495 to read it:

CIOs are encouraged to immerse themselves (albeit only for a day) in the issues, terms and trends of cloud; test-drive different cloud (SaaS) applications; identify areas in their portfolio that are already helping to explore the cloud landscape; spin up a cloud app development project in ‘09; and start to assess the cost of internal applications of a utility (per-seat, per-month) basis. Later in the report they are encouraged to experiment with EC2-style cloud development.

And concludes:

All in all, I think this is great advice for CIOs, but I think Gartner isn’t pushing them to be aggressive enough. Cloud represents a fundamental shift in “the way of doing things,” and is about more than just SaaS. Many CIOs will benefit from a deeper look into the cloud stack, i.e. at the platform and infrastructure layers as well.

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