LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 9/21/2009+

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

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

Nikolaos Kantzelis dives into ASP.NET 4.0,SEO and meta tags in this 9/27/2009 post:

I am thinking to create a new series of posts regarding ASP.NET and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I am going to start with this post, talking about some new features that make our asp.net apps more SEO friendly. At the end of the day, there is no point having a great application and somehow “scare” the search engines away. This is going to be a short post so let’s quickly have a look at meta keywords and ASP.NET 4.0.

Evolutionary Geek’s Pre-Generating Entity Framework Views with Embedded Metadata post of 9/24/2009 covers this problem and its solution:

Problem: When you are using embedded metadata in your Entity Framework project, the MSDN topic for How to: Pre-Generate Views to Improve Query Performance (Entity Framework) comes up short.

Solution: This posting shows a simple (if tedious) technique for working with both embedded metadata and the pre-generated views.

Alex James continues his Entity Framework Tips series with Tip 36 – How to Construct by Query of 9/23/2009:

While writing my tips series and writing EF controllers for MVC I found that I regularly wanted to create and attach a stub entity.

Unfortunately it isn’t quite that simple, you have to make sure the entity isn’t already attached first, otherwise you’ll see some nasty exceptions. …

And concludes:

Again I’ve demonstrated that mixing EF Metadata and CLR Expressions makes it possible to write really useful helper methods that take a lot of the pain out writing your apps.

Mike O’Brien’s Linq to Entities Query Visualizer post of 9/22/2009 points to Raja Venkatesh’s LINQ to Entities query visualizer download:

LINQ to SQL

Simon Segal’s A Linq To SQL Saga Persister for NServiceBus post of 9/22/2009 posits:

NServiceBus is becoming a very popular Open Source development framework and out of the box it supports some very elegant feature extensibility points (thanks Udi) that have been designed very deliberately in a technology agnostic way. This allows us as developers to write our own implementations of certain features in the technology of our choice, and the subject of this post focuses on extending the Saga Persister. However at this point let me just say that it may well be worth your while to read Udi’s post on Saga’s before continuing and then come back here to finish.

Eric J. Smith and Shannon Davidson explain in LINQ to SQL - Detach Entities how to “Easily detach entities when using LINQ to SQL”:

How do I use disconnected entities with LINQ to SQL? Every developer that has used LINQ to SQL has asked this question in dismay. Where is the detach? How do I use these entities with services, JSON, encapsulation, and multiple data contexts? All are normal questions when building a solid framework. By default, LINQ to SQL does not like to let go of its entities and does not see a reason that an entity should be disconnected from its context. PLINQO makes it very simple to detach LINQ to SQL entities. We are going to walk you through how this was implemented in PLINQO by showing how to manually add the detach functionality using LINQ to SQL.

Joydip Kanjilal confuses LINQ to SQL with LINQ to Objects in his Guidelines and Best Practices in Optimizing LINQ Performance article for ASP.NET Pro magazine’s September 2009 issue:

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a query execution pipeline for use in the managed environment of .NET Framework. In essence, LINQ is Microsoft's object relational mapper between your business objects and the underlying data sources and provides a simplified framework for accessing relational data in an object-oriented fashion.

Although LINQ is great in the sense that you can query data in your object model seamlessly, there are certain factors that you need to consider to ensure that your application performs to the extent you need it to. This article takes a look at some of the best practices that you can follow for enhancing the performance of LINQ in your applications.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

DevExpert explains Implementing a LINQ version of SQL’s LIKE Operator in this 9/25/2009 post:

One of the requirements of one of my recent projects was to implement a search page which allowed the user to enter a search term that supported wildcards.  The search term could contain any number of wildcards in any position within that term.

If you’ve done anything like this before, you probably know there’s nothing built-in to LINQ that supports this type of behavior.  Sure, you could use a combination of String.StartsWith, String.EndsWith, or String.Contains, but this could quickly become too cumbersome if there are many wildcards and/or they are scattered throughout the search term. …

Damien Guard’s When an object-relational mapper is too much, DataReader too little post of 9/22/2009 begins:

I fired up Visual Studio this evening to write a proof-of-concept app and found myself wanting strongly typed domain objects from a database but without the overhead of an object-relational mapper  (the application is read-only).

One solution is to write methods by hand, another is to code generate them but it would be nice to be able to do:

var customers = new SqlCommand("SELECT ID, Name FROM Customer", connection)
  .As(r => new Customer { CustomerID = r.GetInt32(0), Name = r.GetString(1) }).ToList();

So for any DbCommand object you can turn it into a bunch of classes by specifying the new pattern.

Damien then shows you the tiny helper class for “the new pattern.”

Beth Massi explains Mail Merging Into a Single Word Document Using XML Literals in this 9/23/2009 post:

With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 we can work with a much simpler, standard, XML format called Open XML which opens the door for many types of applications that cannot work via COM. What if you needed to build a scalable web service that processes many documents in high volume? What if you wanted to quickly read or write to these formats from a client application but wanted to have minimal dependencies on other applications? These types of programs do not want to require Microsoft Office be installed to run. The cool thing is you have the tools already with Visual Basic 2008. XML Literals are an easy way to manipulate any kind of XML, including Open XML.

She continues with Merging Text & Photos into a Word Document using Open XML SDK of 9/24/2009:

Yesterday I posted about how we could create a letter generator (mail merge) that took data from a database to create a Word 2007 document using the System.IO.Packaging class. I showed how to take data from Northwind using a single LINQ query to create XDocument objects representing letters to customers and then create a single document of all the data using XML Literals.

Today I want to show how we can embed images into the documents as well as text. Since we’re using Northwind for this example, we’ll use the Employee.Photo field from that database.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

No new articles of significance this week.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

Chris Swain’s Distracted by Dynamic Data post of 8/4/2009, which I missed at the time, begins:

Lately my work has kept me so busy I haven't had time to do much with Tank Wars and Silverlight in general.  However, my work project is out on the fringe of Microsoft's latest technology using ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  There are lot's of posts out there on the basics of this new approach at data driven web site development, so I won't bother to cover them.  If you need a place to start, check out the Dynamic Data site. 

While this is a nice new tool to help us rapidly create data driven web sites, it is still a relatively new tool.  As such, it has some bugs and oversights that have yet to be addressed.  I wanted to cover a couple of these in this post.

Technorati Tags: Entity Framework,Entity Data Model,EDM,LINQ to SQL,LINQ to XML,LINQ to Objects,LINQ,ASP.NET Dynamic Data

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 9/21/2009+

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

Tip: Copy •, •• or ••• to the clipboard, press Ctrl+F and paste into the search text box to find updated articles.

•• Update 9/23/2009: Rob Gillen’s Azure with Large Data Sets presentation and live demo, Jay Fry’s review of the 451 Group’s “Cloud in Context” Event, CloudSwitch leaves stealth mode, Mary Hayes Weier says subscription-based pricing for Oracle products is “on Safra’s desk,” Linda MGlasson on “The Future of PCI,” Chris Hoff warns about patches to IaaS and PaaS services, Gartner’s Tom Bittman proposes recorded music as A Better Cloud Computing Analogy than water or electricity, two Johns Hopkins cardiologists recommend standardizing EHR/PHR on VistA. 

• Update 9/22/2009: Zend Simple Cloud API and Zend Cloud, Ruv on OpenCloud APIs, John Treadway on Cloud Computing and Moore’s Law, Lori MacVittie on Cloud Computing versus Cloud Data Centers, Andrea DiMaio and the Government 2.0 HypeCycle, and more.

Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform published 9/21/2009. Order today from Amazon.

Read the detailed TOC here (PDF). Download the sample code here. Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

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)
• .NET Services: 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 these links, click the post title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

•• Rob Gillen (@argodev) delivered a Windows Azure: Notes from the Field presentation to the Huntsville [AL] New Technology Users group (HUNTUG.org) on 9/14/2009 that demonstrates methods for processing large earth science datasets with Azure tables. See the Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses section for details.

• Zend Technologies reduces cloud-storage vendor lock-in anxiety with its Simple Cloud API of 9/22/2009 for Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Nirvanix and RackSpace storage services. See the Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses section for details.

Simon Munro’s Catfax project on CodePlex demonstrates moving SQL data to and from the cloud using SQL CLR, Azure WCF and Azure Storage:

Catfax is a demonstration project which shows how rows can be uploaded and retrieved from the cloud in a manner that is well integrated with SQL Server using SQL-CLR. The application has a SQL-CLR stored procedure that calls a WCF service hosted on Azure. The Azure web role stores the data in Azure Tables which can be retrieved later from SQL by executing a similar SQL-CLR sproc.

A more detailed description can be found [in this] blog post: http://blogs.conchango.com/simonmunro/archive/2009/07/08/catfax-sql-clr-wcf-and-windows-azure.aspx.

Simon’s project is similar for Azure Tables is similar to George Huey’s for SQL Azture databases (see below), but Simon’s is a two-way street.

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SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

My original Using the SQL Azure Migration Wizard with the AdventureWorksLT2008 Sample Database post is updated for George Huey’s new SQL Azure Migration Wizard v.0.2.7, which now handles T-SQL scripts for exporting schema and data from local SQL Server 2005+ databases to SQL Azure in the cloud.

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.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

No significant new posts on this topic today.

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Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

•• Rob Gillen (@argodev) delivered a Windows Azure: Notes from the Field presentation to the Huntsville [AL] New Technology Users group (HUNTUG.org) on 9/14/2009 that demonstrates methods for processing large earth science datasets with Azure tables. Here’s the session’s description:

Come learn about Microsoft's Azure platform (and cloud computing in general) as we look at an application built to assist in the processing and publishing of large-scale scientific data. We will discuss architecture choices, benchmarking results, issues faced as well as the work-arounds implemented.

Rob is a developer focused on Microsoft technologies for over ten years working in the service provider (hosting) market place as well as with federal and corporate customers. Rob specializes in application and service provisioning, identity management, SharePoint and is currently working on the intersection of traditional HPC and the commercial “cloud”. Rob has spent the last two years working on the applications team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is currently working in the Computer Science Research Group at ORNL studying the role of cloud computing in our portfolio of scientific computing.

You can learn more in slides 19 through 21 about Rob’s processing of a 1.2 GB NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) file of climate data for the 20th century stored in Azure tables as a flattened view. Rob documents varying methods of loading the tables in slides 22 through 25. Here his live Silverlight visualization of one set of data shown in slide 26 (click for full-size image, 700 KB):

 

Rob’s blog offers a series of detailed articles posted while he was testing the data processing and visualization techniques described in his HUNTUG presentation and the live demo.

His slide 28 observes that “ATOM is *very* bloated (~9 MB per time period), average of 55 seconds over 9 distinct serial calls)” whereas “JSON is better (average of 18.5 seconds and 1.6 MB).” I’ve been raising this issue periodically since Pablo Castro initially adopted the AtomPub format for ADO.NET Data Services. See Rob’s AtomPub, JSON, Azure and Large Datasets, Part 2 of 8/20/2009 and AtomPub, JSON, Azure, and Large Datasets of 8/14/2009:

•• Suzanne Fedoruk of the Physicians Wellness Network reported on 9/23/2009 that PWN Announces That Consumers Can Now Store webLAB Test Results In Their Microsoft HealthVault Account:

Each day more consumers are turning to webLAB to save time and money by ordering general wellness lab tests online. Physicians Wellness Network (PWN) today announced that consumers can now store, track and trend their webLAB test results in their Microsoft HealthVault account. HealthVault is an open, Web-based platform designed to empower consumers by putting them in control of their health information.

Informed Consumers Make Better Health Choices

"PWN physicians know that informed consumers make better health choices. Storing webLAB test results in a Microsoft HealthVault account makes this possible," said Brent Blue, M.D., president of PWN. "When people can track and trend important numbers, such as their cholesterol levels, they are armed with information to manage their health choices." …

I’m still waiting for QuestDiagnostics and Wallgreens Pharmacy to create their promised links to HealthVault.

•• Two Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions  cardiologists recommend adopting the Veterans Administration’s VistA EHR application in their Zakaria and Meyerson: How to Fix Health IT article of 9/17/2009 for the Washington Post:

… Most currently available electronic medical record software is unwieldy and difficult to quickly access, and there is still no vehicle for the timely exchange of critical medical data between providers and facilities. The stimulus bill included $50 billion dollars to promote uniform electronic record standards, but it will be difficult and costly to construct new systems ensuring interoperability of all current hospital software.

A cheaper and more effective solution is to adopt a standard electronic record-keeping system and ask that all health information software interface with it. In fact, a proven system already exists. The software is called the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), which the Veterans Affairs Department developed. VistA requires minimal support, is absolutely free to anyone who requests it, is much more user-friendly than its counterparts, and many doctors are already familiar with it. … [Wikipedia link added.]

• Zend Technologies reduces cloud-storage vendor lock-in anxiety with its Simple Cloud API of 9/22/2009 for Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Nirvanix and RackSpace storage services.

My take: Zend's Simple Cloud API is a set of interfaces for RESTful file storage, document storage, and simple queue services with implementations for Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure storage services, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Rackspace Cloud Files. Identical, or at least similar, implementations for major cloud storage providers will reduce IT managers' widely publicized apprehension of cloud vendor lock-in.

Zend will deliver the PHP implementation for the open source Zend Framework as the "Zen Cloud," which follows in the footsteps of other "OpenCloud" APIs, such as those from Sun Microsystems and GoGrid, as well as earlier Rackspace APIs. The TIOBE Programming Community Index for September 2009 reports that PHP is now #3 in programming language popularity, up from #5 in September 2008, so the Zend Cloud implementation has a large potential audience among developers for Amazon, Nirvanix, and Rackspace storage.

Google is conspicuous by its absence as a Zend contributor. However, that's not surprising because Google offers "Python as a Service" for the Web and doesn't emphasize cloud storage in its marketing materials.

Windows Azure is a .NET Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering but Microsoft (in conjunction with RealDolmen) released CTP3 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP (PHPAzure) on 9/8/2009 as an open-source "commitment to Interoperability." The relative benefits of PHPAzure, Simple Cloud API and Zend Cloud to IT managers and developers remain to be seen. PHPAzure takes advantage of Azure-specific features, such as transactions on members of the same entity group, whereas the Simple API/Zend adapters offer least-common-denominator features of the four supported services.

My conclusion: Windows Azure developers will continue to program in C# and use the sample StorageClient libraries to integrate Azure .NET Web and Worker projects with RESTful Azure storage services. Zend’s initiative might convince the Azure team to formalize StorageClient as an official supplement to its RESTful storage APIs.

• Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect, from the Interoperability Technical Strategy team at Microsoft gives an overview of the Simple API for Cloud Application Services and details the initial contribution from Microsoft in this 00:06:42 Channel9 video of 9/22/2009.

• Maarten Balliaux describes his Zend Framework: Zend_Service_WindowsAzure Component Proposal in detail on this Zen wiki page:

Zend_Service_WindowsAzure is a component that allows applications to make use of the Windows Azure API's. Windows Azure is a Microsoft platform which allows users to store unstructured data (think: files) and structured data (think: database) in a cloud service. More on http://www.microsoft.com/Azure.

The current proposal targets all 3 Windows Azure storage services. These services are:

• Blob Storage
• Table Storage
• Queue Service

An example implementation of this can be found on CodePlex: PHP SDK for Windows Azure and in the ZF SVN laboratory.

• Mary Jo Foley adds her insight of the topic with Zend, Microsoft, IBM join forces to simplify cloud-app devlopment for PHP coders on 9/22/2009:

Zend Technologies and a number of its partners — including Microsoft — unveiled on September 22 another cloud-interop intiative. This one is aimed at developers who are writing new cloud-centric apps in PHP.

All the right buzzwords are part of the newly unveiled Simple API for Cloud Application Services. It’s an open-source initiative that currently includes Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid as the founding members. (No Google and no Amazon, however.) It’s all about interoperability and community and dialogue.

For developers of new “cloud-native” applications, “this is a write once and run anywhere” opportunity, said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. …

• Maureen O’Gara chimes in with IBM, Microsoft, Others in Lock-Picking Cloud API Push of 9/22/2009:

Half the apps on the Internet are written in PHP. That gives Zend Technologies, the PHP house, a stake in the cloud.

So it’s rounded up cloud merchants Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix and has gotten them to support its new open source drive to create a so-called Simple API for Cloud Application Services that developers can write to – or, Zend thinks as likely, rewrite to – to get native cloud apps.

These apps in turn promise to break the lock on closed clouds like Amazon’s, making it possible to move applications and their data in and out of clouds, migrating them around virtually all the major nebulae.

The trick will be in creating Simple Cloud API adapters.

Zend cloud strategist Wil Sinclair – that’s right, Wil – says both Amazon and Google were asked to join the initiative.

Google’s widgetry is based on Python so it’s got an excuse for not joining. Anyway, the in-house Google Data Liberation Front is at least promising to cut the shackles that condemn captive users to remain customers of Google services because their data is held hostage like it already has with Google App Engine.

• See Doug Tidwell explains Cloud computing with PHP, Part 1: Using Amazon S3 with the Zend Framework in the Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services section.

• Eric Nelson’s Using IIS to generate a X509 certificate for use with the Windows Azure Service Management API – step by step of 9/22/2009 is a detailed tutorial:

This is one of a series of posts on my preparations for sessions on Azure and ORMs at Software Architect 2009.

One of the things that has been added to Windows Azure while i have been “elsewhere” is the Service Management API which the team introduced on the 17th of this month (Sept 2009).

This is a REST-based API which allows:

• Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.
• Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups

It uses X509 client certificates for authentication. You can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests.

But… you need an X509 certificate. If you have the Windows SDK installed then you can use makecert (details on the original post). An alternative is to use IIS 7. I decided to use IIS to get my X509 but it turned out a little less obvious than I expected. Hence a step by step is called for. …

• Jonathan Lindo ruminates about Fixing Bugs in the Cloud in this 9/22/2009 post:

… One of the essential elements of success is getting a solid, scalable application online and running smoothly and securely. But there just hasn’t been a lot of innovation here.

Being able to quickly identify, respond to and resolve issues in a SaaS application is critical, because if one server has a bad day, it’s not one customer that feels pain, it’s hundreds or thousands. And that’s bad. SaaS acts like a big hairy amplifier on any defect or scalability issue that might be lurking in your app.

Technologies like Introscope, Patrol, Vantage, Snort and my software debugging company Replay are starting to address the needs, but our customers are still pioneering and forging the landscape as they increasingly feel the pains of this new software paradigm we find ourselves in. …

Msdevcon will offer six new SQL Azure training courses starting on 9/28/2009 in its Microsoft SQL Azure series:

• Microsoft SQL Azure Overview for the Technical Decision Maker 9/28/2008
• Microsoft SQL Azure Overview for Developers 9/28/2008
• Microsoft SQL Azure RDBMS Support 9/28/2008
• Microsoft SQL Azure Programmability 9/28/2008
• Microsoft SQL Azure Tooling 10/5/2008
• Microsoft SQL Azure Security Model 10/5/2008

The above are in addition to the many members of their Azure Services for Developer series.

Sara Forrest writes Bosworth wants you to take charge of your health in her 9/21/2009 post to ComputerWorld:

Adam Bosworth is asking you to take your health into your own hands (or at least into your computer). The former head of Google Health, Bosworth is now working on a new start-up, Keas Inc., which is dedicated to helping consumers take charge of their own health data. His work focuses on making individual health records easily accessible, thus preventing overtreatment and overspending through proper patient education.

While attending the Aspen Health Forum this summer, he took a few minutes to explain the importance of public access to health data.

“Let's talk a little bit about how you got to where you are today. I worked for Citicorp in the distant past, Borland building Quattro, Microsoft for 10 long years building what I now call Lego blocks for adults, BEA Systems for three years, Google, and three of my own start-ups.

I decided about five years ago that I'd spend the next 25 trying to improve health care and help bring it into the 21st century. I went to Google with that in mind and got sidetracked for 18 months running and building what are generally called Google Apps today before getting to work on Google Health. Keas, my current company, is in some way the culmination of everything I've learned in computing, applied to how to improve health care.” …

Adam also is known as the “father of Microsoft Access.”

Howard Anderson reports that healthcare providers are Weighing EHR/PHR Links in this 9/21/2009 post:

Provider organizations have to address several critical issues when launching personal health records projects, one consultant says. Among those issues, he says, is whether to enable patients to access a complete electronic health record and export it to a PHR--a step that John Moore, managing partner of Chilmark Research, Cambridge, Mass., advocates.

Hospitals and clinics also must decide what data elements are most essential to a PHR. Although many agree that medication lists and allergies must be in a PHR, providers are pondering whether to include all lab tests as well as diagnostic images, Moore notes.

Providers also must determine whether to enable patients to add their own notes to data imported from an EHR to a PHR, such as to question a doctor's findings, the consultant says. Plus, they must determine whether those patient notes will then flow into the EHR.

A strong advocate of two-way links between EHRs and PHRs, Moore also says practice management systems should be added to the mix to help enable patients to use a PHR to, for example, schedule an appointment. …

Carl Brooks’ Public sector drags its heels on cloud post of 9/18/2009 cites examples of foot-dragging by public agencies:

As firms experiment with pay-as-you computing infrastructures and an ever-broadening constellation of services and technologies, cloud computing is all the rage in the prviate sector. But the public sector -- a vast technology consumer in the U.S. with different spending habits, requirements and obligations --is dragging its heels.

Public-sector IT departments, for instance, aren't rewarded for investing in the latest technology and for reducing costs; instead, they're expected to keep systems working far past standard technology lifecycles. …

Reuven Cohen analyzes Public Cloud Infrastructure Capacity Planning in this 9/21/2009 post:

In the run of a day I get a lot of calls from hosting companies and data centers looking to roll out public cloud infrastructures using Enomaly ECP. In these discussions there are a few questions that everyone seems to ask.

- How much is it going to cost?
- What is the minimum resources / capacity required to roll out a public cloud service?

Both questions are very much related. But to get to and idea of how much your cloud infrastructure is going to cost, you first need to fully understand what your resource requirements are and how much capacity (minimum resources) will be required to maintain an acceptable level of service and hopefully turn a profit.

In traditional dedicated or shared hosting environment, capacity planning is typically a fairly straight forward endeavor, (a high allotment of bandwidth and a fairly static allotment of resources), a single server (or slice of a server) with a static amount of storage and ram. If you run out of storage, or get too many visitors, well too bad. It is what it is. Some managed hosting providers offer more complex server deployment options but generally rather then one server you're given a static stack of several, but the concept of elasticity is not usually part of the equation.

Is it problems with capacity planning that are holding back adoption of cloud computing by government agencies?

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

•• Krishnan Subramanian asks Does Private SaaS Make Any Sense? and says “Maybe” in this 9/23/2009 post:

Last week, I had a twitter discussion with James Watters of Silicon Angle about the idea of Private SaaS. He is of the strong opinion that Private SaaS is meaningless. Even though I share his opinion on it, I am not religious about having multi-tenancy as the requirement in the definition of SaaS.

The biggest advantage of SaaS is the huge cost savings it offers due to the multi-tenant architecture. However, enterprises are reluctant to embrace SaaS applications due to concerns about reliability, security, privacy, etc.. But, the other advantages of SaaS like low resource overhead, centralized control of user applications, simplified security and patch management, etc. are very attractive to the enterprises. In order to capture the enterprise markets, some of the vendors are shifting towards a Private SaaS approach.

•• Tom Bittman proposes recorded music as A Better Cloud Computing Analogy than water or electricity in this 9/22/2009 post to the Gartner blogs. Radio delivered “music as a service” (MaaS?) but “on-premises” music hasn’t died.

• John Treadway explains the relationship between Moore’s Law and the Cloud Inflection in IT Staffing in this 9/21/2009 post:

I was in a meeting last week with Gartner’s Ben Pring and he made an interesting observation that cloud computing at the end is just a result of Moore’s law.  The concept is fairly simple and charts a path of increasingly distributed computing from mainframes, to minicomputers, to workstations and PCs (which resulted in client/server), then on to the Internet, mobile computing, and finally to cloud computing.  But cloud computing is not an increase in distribution of computing — it’s actually the reverse.  Sure, there are more devices than ever.  But since internet application topologies have replaced client/server, the leveraging of computing horsepower has migrated back to the data center.

The explosion in distributed computing brought on by ever faster processors (coupled by lower prices on CPUs, memory and storage) allowed for the client/server revolution to push workloads onto the client and off of the server.  Today, much of the compute power of edge devices (PCs, laptops and smart phones) is not used for computing, but for presentation.  Raw workload processing is happening on the server to an increasing degree. …

Until the cloud, Moore’s law resulted in a steady increase in demand for skilled systems and network administrators.  At some point, the economies of scale and concentrating effects of cloud computing – particularly in the area of IT operations – will be visible as a measurable decline in the demand for these skills.

John is the newly appointed Director, Cloud Computing Portfolio for Unisys.

• Lori MacVittie’s Cloud Computing versus Cloud Data Centers post of 9/21/2009 contends: “Isolation of resources in ‘the cloud’ is moving providers toward hosted data centers:”

Isolation of resources in “the cloud” is moving providers toward hosted data centers and away from shared resource computing. Do we need to go back to the future and re-examine mainframe computing as a better model for isolated applications capable of sharing resources?

James Urquhart in “Enterprise cloud computing coming of age” gives a nice summary of several “private” cloud offerings; that is, isolated and dedicated resources contracted out to enterprises for a fee. James ends his somewhat prosaic discussion of these offerings with a note that this “evolution” is just the beginning of a long process.

But is it really? Is it really an evolution when you appear to moving back toward what we had before? Because the only technological difference between isolated, dedicated resources in the cloud and “outsourced data center” appears to be the way in which the resources are provisioned. In the former they’re mostly virtualized and provisioned on-demand. In the latter those resources are provisioned manually. But the resources and the isolation is the same. …

• The new Tech Hermit reports More Bad News for Microsoft Data Center Program on 9/21/2009:

Following on the terrible blow that Debra Chrapaty is leaving Microsoft for greener pastures at Cisco, the program received another huge blow with the resignation of Joel Stone who was responsible for the Operations of all North America based facilities. Moreover, he is taking a prominent position at Global Switch overseeing worldwide data center operations and will be based out of the United Kingdom. ..

The many mails we have received here at Tech Hermit feel that these resignations have more to do with a failure or at least troubled integration with the various Yahoo executives integrating into the program. As you may know, Dayne Sampson, and Kevin Timmons from Yahoo recently joined the Microsoft GFS organization the latter having responsibilities for Data Center Operations previously run by General Manager, Michael Manos.

One thing is clear that after the departure of Manos, the only real voice from Microsoft around infrastructure leadership was Chrapaty. With her departure and now key operations leadership as well, we have to ask is Microsoft’s data center program done for?

• Rich Miller’s Tech Hermit Blog Returns post of 9/22/2009 report on the reincarnation of the Tech Hermit brand and the Digital Cave blog, which has offered many insights into Microsoft’s data center operations.

• Jake Sorofman reads the crystal ball in DATACENTER.NEXT: Envisioning the Future of IT of 9/21/2009:

These days, there’s a lot of time spent defining cloud computing. If you believe the pundits, its definition remains a mystery—a cryptic riddle waiting to be deciphered.

Personally, I’m not that interested in defining cloud.

What is far more interesting to me is defining the future of IT, which almost certainly embodies aspects of what most people would recognize as cloud computing. Whether the future of IT is cloud itself is a silly tautological question since we haven’t defined cloud in the first place.

What we do know is that IT is facing a fundamental transformation—a transformation forced by technological, economic, competitive forces. Technologically, enterprises are recognizing that IT has become unthinkably complex. Economically, enterprises are under pressure to slash budgets and do more with less. And competitively, enterprises are recognizing that IT has become core to business and the delay of yesterday’s IT creates serious competitive risk. …

Jake Sorofman is Vice President of Marketing, rPath

Kara Swisher reports Top Microsoft Infrastructure Exec Chrapaty Heads to Cisco in this 9/20/2009 post to D | All Things Digital:

One of Microsoft’s top execs, Debra Chrapaty, who heads its infrastructure business, is leaving the software giant to take a top job at Cisco (CSCO), sources said.

Chrapaty–whose title is corporate VP of Global Foundation Services–is also one of increasingly few top women tech execs at Microsoft (MSFT), where she has worked for seven years.

The job put her in charge of, as a Microsoft site notes, “strategy and delivery of the foundational platform for Microsoft Live, Cloud and Online Services worldwide including physical infrastructure, security, operational management, global delivery and environmental considerations. Her organization supports over 200 online services and web portals from Microsoft for consumers and businesses.”

James Hamilton’s Here’s Another Innovative Application post of 9/21/2009 begins:

Here’s another innovative application of commodity hardware and innovative software to the high-scale storage problem. MaxiScale focuses on 1) scalable storage, 2) distributed namespace, and 3) commodity hardware.

Today's announcement: http://www.maxiscale.com/news/newsrelease/092109.

They sell software designed to run on commodity servers with direct attached storage. They run N-way redundancy with a default of 3-way across storage servers to be able to survive disk and server failure. The storage can be accessed via HTTP or via Linux or Windows (2003 and XP) file system calls. The later approach requires a kernel installed device driver and uses a proprietary protocol to communicate back with the filer cluster but has the advantage of directly support local O/S read/write operations.

MaxiScale’s approach sounds similar to that used to provide redundancy for Windows Azure tables and SQL Azure databases.

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Cloud Security and Governance

•• Chris Hoff (@Beaker) brings up issues about updating IaaS and PaaS cloud services for the second time in his Redux: Patching the Cloud post of 9/23/2009:

… What happens when the underlying CloudOS gets patched (or needs to be) and blows your applications/VMs sky-high (in the PaaS/IaaS models?)

How does one negotiate the process for determining when and how a patch is deployed?  Where does the cloud operator draw the line?   If the cloud fabric is democratized across constituent enterprise customers, however isolated, how does a cloud provider ensure consistent distributed service?  If an application can be dynamically provisioned anywhere in the fabric, consistency of the platform is critical.

I followed this up with a practical example when Microsoft’s Azure services experienced a hiccup due to this very thing.  We see wholesale changes that can be instantiated on a whim by Cloud providers that could alter service functionality and service availability such as this one from Google (Published Google Documents to appear in Google search) — have you thought this through? …

•• Linda MGlasson begins a series on “The Future of PCI” with The Future of PCI: 4 Questions to Answer on 9/22/2009:

It's been an interesting year for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS, or just PCI).

On one hand there were the Heartland Payment Systems (HPY) and Network Solutions data breaches, after which at least one industry analyst declared "It's stop pretending that PCI is working."

On the other, there is the State of Nevada, which has passed a new law requiring businesses to comply with PCI when collecting or transmitting payment card information.

In the middle, is a debate among payment card companies, banking institutions, merchants, industry groups and even congressional leaders, questioning the merit of the standard and all hinting at the same open question: What is the future of PCI?

PCI stakeholders are gathering this week for the 2009 PCI Security Standards Council Community meeting in Las Vegas, NV. … [PCI link added.]

Linda continues with the four questions.

David Linthicum’s Should Failures Cast Shadows on Cloud Computing? post to InformationWeek’s Intelligent Enterprise blog of 9/21/2009 posits:

The Gmail outage last week left many asking about the viability of cloud computing, at least, according to PC World and other pundits.

"Tuesday's Gmail outage was not only an inconvenience it calls into question -- yet again -- the feasibility of present-day cloud computing. One popular prediction is that future computers won't need huge hard drives because all our applications and personal data (photos, videos, documents and e-mail) will exist on remote servers on the Internet (otherwise known as 'cloud computing')."

Every time Twitter goes out, or, in this case, a major free email system goes down, everyone uses the outage as an opportunity to cast shadows on cloud computing. I'm not sure why. In many cases its apples versus oranges, such as Twitter versus Amazon EC2. Also, systems go down, cloud and enterprise, so let's get over that as well.

Joseph Goedart reports Baucus Wants Tighter HIPAA Standards in this 9/21/2009 post to the Health Data Management site:

The health care reform plan issued by Senate Finance Committee chair Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) calls for mandated adoption of "operating rules" that would significantly tighten the standards of HIPAA administrative/financial transactions. It also would increase the number of transaction sets.

The "operating rules" referenced in the plan are those developed under the voluntary CORE initiative under way for several years. CORE is the Committee on Operating Rules for Information Exchange within CAQH, a Washington-based payer advocacy group. The initiative seeks to build industry consensus on tightening of the HIPAA standards to facilitate health care financial/administrative transactions and offer more information to providers. …

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Cloud Computing Events

•• Jay Fry processes customer feedback about cloud computing in his Making cloud computing work: customers at 451 Group summit say costs, trust, and people issues are key post of 9/22/2009:

A few weeks back, the 451 Group held a short-but-sweet Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE) Summit to discuss "cloud computing in context." Their analysts, some vendors, and some actual customers each gave their own perspective on how the move to cloud computing is going -- and even what's keeping it from going. [Link to ICE added.]

The customers especially (as you might expect) came up with some interesting commentary. I'm always eager to dig into customer feedback on cloud computing successes and roadblocks, and thought some of the tidbits we heard at the event were worth recounting here.

• Jay’s topics include:
• Clouds under the radar
• Customers: Some hesitate to call it cloud
• Cloud: It's (still) not for the faint of heart
• Biggest pain: impact on the people and the organization
• Need to move beyond just virtualization
• Can I drive your Mercedes while you're not using it?
• Are we making progress on cloud computing?

When: 9/3/2009   
Where: Grand Hyatt Hotel, San Francisco, CA, USA 

Brent Stineman’s Twin Cities Cloud Computing – August Meeting Recap post of 9/20/2009 reviews an unscheduled visit by David Chappell to the Twin Cities Cloud Computing User group’s August 2009 meeting:

David’s presentation was divided into two portions. The first and most lengthy was a detailing of what is the Windows Azure Platform. Its obvious that David has spent a significant amount of time with the Windows Azure product team. Not only does he have a great understanding of the products past and present, but it seemed like he knew more than he was letting on about its future. The most important take-away I had from this was understanding the target audience for each of the components of the Windows Azure Platform.

Windows Azure, the application hosting platform, was intended to allow someone to build the next Facebook or Twitter. That’s why its database is a horizontally scalable system that is not based on traditional RDBMS models. This is also why its includes features and a price-tag that is unlike contemporary co-location type hosting packages. Those packages are targeted at simpler hosting needs. On the flip side of this is SQL Azure, a vertically scaling database that provides full RDBMS support. This component is less interested in scalability as it is in providing a targeted cloud based database solution.

<Return to section navigation list> 

Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

•• Mary Hayes Weier reports Oracle Contemplates Huge Shift: Subscription-Based Pricing in this 9/23/2009 post to InformationWeek’s Plug into the Cloud blog:

Oracle, it seems, is trying to hammer out a strategy to more heavily embrace the most radical faction of the SaaS movement, one that completely upends the traditional software vendor profit model: Subscription-based pricing. If what Oracle said yesterday in a Web event is true, this could be a huge shift for the software giant.

Oracle launched the virtual Web event, around midmarket software announcements, with a live video keynote address featuring some Oracle execs and a presentation about what's new. There it was in the preso: new pricing options will include "subscription-based pricing."

As noted in a story posted earlier today, that means Oracle will offer SaaS beyond the two apps (On Demand CRM and Beehive) it now offers, for all or some of the business applications it sells to midsize companies. The question is how exactly it plans to do that. When I asked Mark Keever, the Oracle VP who heads up midmarket apps, about subscription-based pricing in a follow-up call Tuesday, he didn't have any more details he could share with me right now. But, his group did have permission to say that subscription-based pricing would be available for midsize companies.

Just for laughs, Larry Ellison goes bonkers over cloud computing at the Churchill Club while Ed Zander looks on in this 00:03:13 You Tube video. 

•• CloudSwitch claims to be a “fast-growing cloud computing company backed by Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, currently in stealth-mode” in this initial appearance of their Web site and blog on 9/23/2009:

We're building an innovative software appliance that delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely so enterprises can dramatically reduce cost and improve responsiveness to the business.

With CloudSwitch, enterprises are protected from the complexity, risks and potential lock-in of the cloud, turning cloud resources into a flexible, cost-effective extension of the corporate data center.

We're led by seasoned entrepreneurs from BMC, EMC, Netezza, RSA, SolidWorks, Sun Microsystems and other market-leading companies, and we're building a world-class team with proven expertise in delivering complex enterprise solutions.

•• Ellen Rubin asks Moving to the Cloud: How Hard is it Really? and notes “Today's cloud providers impose architectures that are very different from those of standard enterprise applications” in a 9/23/2009 post to the CloudSwitch blog:

Many IT managers would love to move some of their applications out of the enterprise data center and into the cloud. It's a chance to eliminate a whole litany of costs and headaches: in capital equipment, in power and cooling, in administration and maintenance. Instead, just pay as you go for the computing power you need, and let someone else worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.

But moving from theory into practice is where things get complicated. It's true that a new web application built from scratch for the cloud as a standalone environment can be rolled out quickly and relatively easily. But for existing applications running in a traditional data center and integrating with a set of other systems, tools and processes, it's not nearly so simple.

• Doug Tidwell explains Cloud computing with PHP, Part 1: Using Amazon S3 with the Zend Framework in this detailed IBM developerWorks tutorial of 9/22/2009:

Cloud computing promises unlimited disk space for users and applications. In an ideal world, accessing that storage would be as easy as accessing a local hard drive. Unfortunately, the basic APIs of most cloud storage services force programmers to think about protocols and configuration details instead of simply working with their data. This article looks at classes in the Zend Framework that make it easy to use Amazon's S3 cloud storage service as a boundless hard drive.

I’m unsure why IBM promotes Amazon Web Services; perhaps it’s because AWS isn’t Microsoft or Google.

• Ruven Cohen asks What is an OpenCloud API? in this 9/14/2009 post:

When it comes to defining Cloud Computing I typically take the stance of "I know it when I see it". Although I'm half joking, being able to spot an Internet centric platform or infrastructure is fairly self evident for the most part. But when it comes to an "OpenCloud API" things get a little more difficult.

Lately it seems that everyone is releasing their own "OpenCloud API's", companies like GoGrid and Sun Microsystems were among the first to embrace this approach offering there API's under friendly open creative common licenses. The key aspect in most of these CC licensed API's is the requirement that attribution is given to the original author or company. Although personally I would argue that a CC license isn't completely open because of this attribution requirement, but at the end of the day it's probably open enough.

Ruv concludes:

This brings us to what exactly is an OpenCloud API?
A Cloud API that is free of restrictions, be it usage, cost or otherwise.

and offers his $0.02 on Zend’s cloud initiative with New Simple Cloud Storage API Launched of 9/22/2009.

Andrea DiMaio reports Open Data and Application Contests: Government 2.0 at the Peak of Inflated Expectations on 9/22/2009:

Government 2.0 is rapidly reaching what we at Gartner call the peak of inflated expectations. This is the highest point in the diagram called “hype cycle”, which constitutes one of our most famous branded deliverables to our clients and that often feature on the press.

Almost all technologies and technology-driven phenomena go through this point, at variable speed. A few die before getting there, but many  stay there for a while and then head down toward what we call the “trough of disillusionment”, i.e. the lowest point in that diagram, to then climb back (but never as high as at the peak) toward the so-called “plateau of productivity”, where they deliver measurable value.

If one looks at what is going on around government 2.0 these days, there are all the symptoms of a slightly (or probably massively) overhyped phenomenon. Those that were just early pilots one or two years ago, are becoming the norm. New ideas and strategies that were been developed by few innovators in government are now being copied pretty much everywhere. …

Anthony Ha’s Dell buying Perot Systems for $3.9B post of 9/21/2009 to the Deals&More blog summarizes the purchase:

Dell announced today that it’s acquiring Perot Systems, the IT services provider founded by former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, for $3.9 billion.

Perot Systems has more than 1,000 customers, including the Department of Homeland Security and the US military, according to the Associated Press, with health care and government customers accounting for about 73 percent of its revenue. In the last year, the companies say they made a combined $16 billion in enterprise hardware and IT services.

Dell is buying Perot stock for $30 a share, and says it plans to turn Perot into its services unit. The deal should help Dell sell its computers to Perot customers. It’s expected to close in the November-January quarter.

Last year, Dell competitor Hewlett Packard bought another Perot-founded services company, Electronic Data Systems.

As reported in an earlier OakLeaf post, Perot Systems was Dell’s pre-purchase choice for hosting cloud-based EMR/EHR applications. According to Perot CEO Peter Altabef, Perot Systems is one of the largest services companies serving the health-care sector, from which it derives about 48 percent of its revenue; around 25 percent of revenue comes from government customers.

More commentary on Dell’s acquisition of Perot:

• Dell and Perot: What this means by Brian Sommer for ZDNet’s Software and Services Safari blog
• Dell: Perot Systems purchase an 'anchor' acquisition; More deals likely by Larry Dignan for ZDNet’s Between the Lines blog
• Update: Dell agrees to buy Perot Systems for $3.9B: Perot will become Dell's global services unit by Peter Sayer for IDG News Service

Rich Miller reports Amazon EC2 Adding 50,000 Instances A Day in this 9/21/2009 post:

Amazon doesn’t release a lot of detail about the growth and profitability of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing operation. But a recent analysis found that Amazon EC2 launched more than 50,000 new instances in a 24-hour period in just one region. Cloud technologist Guy Rosen analyzed activity on EC2 using Amazon resource IDs, and estimates that the service has launched 8.4 million instances since its debut. …

The new analysis follows up on previous research by Rosen on the number of web sites hosted on EC2 and other leading cloud providers. He noted that the data is a one-day snapshot, and could be skewed by a number of factors, but says the numbers are “impressive, to say the least.”

Maureen O’Gara reports Citrix Aims To Cripple VMware’s Cloud Designs on 9/12/2009 (missed when posted):

Citrix is going to try to bar VMware from getting its hooks deep in the cloud by developing the open source Xen hypervisor, already used by public clouds like Amazon, into a full-blown, cheaper, non-proprietary Xen Cloud Platform (XCP).

It intends to surround the Xen hypervisor with a complete runtime virtual infrastructure platform that virtualizes storage, server and network resources. It’s supposed to be agnostic about virtual machines and run VMware’s, which currently run only on its own infrastructure.

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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,SDS,SQL Azure Migration Wizard,.NET Services,Cloud Computing,Google App Engine,BigTable,Megastore,PHR,EHR,HealthVault,MapReduce,Hadoop,Zend,PHPAzure,Simple Cloud API,Zend Cloud,Oracle,Citrix

Using the SQL Azure Migration Wizard with the AdventureWorksLT2008 Sample Database

George Huey’s SQL Azure Migration Wizard (MigWiz) offers a streamlined alternative to the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) Script Wizard for generating SQL Azure schemas that conform to the service’s current Data Definition Language (DDL) limitations. You can download the binaries, source code, or both from CodePlex; a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) governs use of the software. You can learn more about MigWiz and watch a screencast from Wade Wegner’s SQL Azure Migration Wizard post of 9/1/2009.

•• Update 9/21/2009: There were still a few problems remaining with processing the raw AdventureWorksLT2008.sql script from SSMS that George’s v0.2.7 release solves:

v 0.2.6

1. Modified code to parse index when loading from file
2. Modified NotSupportedByAzureFile.config to correct Regex expression for index options.

You must manually add a clustered index primary key constraint to SSMS’s Script Wizard’s output for the AdventureWorksLT2008’s BuildVersion table as shown emphasized (bold) in the example below:

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.objects WHERE object_id = OBJECT_ID(N'[dbo].[BuildVersion]') AND type in (N'U'))
BEGIN
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[BuildVersion](
    [SystemInformationID] [tinyint] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
    [Database Version] [nvarchar](25) NOT NULL,
    [VersionDate] [datetime] NOT NULL,
    [ModifiedDate] [datetime] NOT NULL,
/******* Added 9/21/2009 RJ ******/
CONSTRAINT [PK_BuildVersion_SystemInformationID] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
(
    [SystemInformationID] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX  = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE  = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON, ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]END
GO

If you don’t add the constraint, you will encounter many errors when attempting to generate the SQL Azure database.

The Attempting to Run a Raw SSMS-Created Script That Populates Table Data section has been renamed Running an SSMS-Created Script That Populates Table Data.

•• Update 9/19/2009: George’s v0.2.6 release solves the problems reported in the Attempting to Run a Raw SSMS-Created Script That Populates Table Data section. George’s Release Notes say:

v 0.2.6

1. Implemented suggestion from rogerj to give the user the option to parse a TSQL file for incompatibilities
2. Fixed parsing for Multi-part names with Server or Database specifier
3. Modified parsing for ROWGUIDCOL to leave uniqueidentifier
4. Modified the way a file is loaded (1000x performance increase)

Note, that when parsing for “text” to replace with “varchar(max)”, if you have a comment in your code (i.e., Take user’s text and save it), then text will be changed to varchar(max). If this causes you lots of problems, take the search for text out of the TSQL section of NotSupportedByAzureFile.config.

• Update 9/8/2009: Added promised Attempting to Run a Raw SSMS-Created Script That Populates Table Data section.

I wanted to add a few sections about the MigWiz to Chapter 13, “Exploiting SQL Azure Database's Relational Features,” of my forthcoming Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform book for Wrox/Wiley, so I gave it a test drive with the AdventureWorksLT2008 sample database over the Labor Day weekend.

This post’s first section demonstrates the most common workflow for duplicating an on-premises SQL Server 2008 schema (but not data) for the AdventureWorksLT2008 in SQL Azure running in a Microsoft data center. In the process, I detected and worked around a few problems with MigWiz v.0.2.3 of 9/2/2009.

The second section, Attempting to Run a Raw SSMS-Created Script That Populates Table Data, describes an unsuccessful attempt to process a script file generated by SSMS’s Script Wizard that includes INSERT statements for adding data.

Note: Reducing the size of screen captures doesn’t cause a significant reduction in page size or loading time.

Generating an SQL Azure Schema from an On-Premises SQL Server Database

1. Run SQLAzureMW.exe to open the ScriptWizard page and click Connect to open the Connect to SQL Server dialog. With the default SQL Server tab active, select the server instance in the Server Name list, accept the default Use Windows NT Integrated Security option and 15-second Connection timeout, and click Connect to connect to the instance and open the Select Source page.

2. Select the on-premises server’s database that you want to script in the Select Source page and click Next to open the Choose Script Options page.

3. Accept the default options in the Choose Script Options page and click Next to display the Select Object Types page.

4. Click Select All and then clear the User Defined Data Types and XML Schema Collections check boxes, because the current SQL Azure CTP doesn’t support these object types:

 

Click Next to open the Choose Schemas page.

5. AdventureWorksLT2008 has only a single SalesLT schema, so select it.

Click Next to open the Choose Stored Procedures page, click Select All, and click Next to open the Tables page.

6. Click Select All to choose all tables for scripting.

Click Next to open the User Defined Functions page, click Select All, click Next to open the Views page, click Select All to choose all Views, click Next to open the Output Option page, accept the default Script to Window / SQL Azure option, and click Next to open the Script Wizard Summary page.

7. Expand the Script Wizard Summary page’s nodes to review your selections, options, and objects.

8. Click Script to generate the script, process it with the regular expressions from the NotSupportedByAzureFile.Config file, and display the corrected script with annotations in the Results Summary page:

 

Problems with SeverityLevel=”2”, if any, appear in red.

9. Click Next to open the Setup SQL Azure Connection page to set up for executing the script on SQL Azure running in the DataCenter of your choice by pasting the server protocol:name from the connection string, and entering the User Name and Password. Click Test Connection to display the combo list and select the previously created but empty AdventureWorksLT2008 database in the list:

If you didn’t create the database, type its name in the combo list. Click Script to execute the script against the SQL Azure cloud instance and display the SQL Azure Response page.

10. You’ll see an error in the SQL Azure Response page of v.0.2.3 of 9/2/2009 associated with an attempt to create an XML index on the ProductModel.CatalogDescription column, which SQL Azure doesn’t support:

There’s only a single instance of this error, so it’s easier to remove the offending instruction from the script than to write the regex.

11. You’ll also see another error near the end of the response caused by not detecting a PAD_INDEX = OFF directive in the CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX statement for the vProductAndDescription view:

This is another instance where simply removing the offending directives solves the problem: SORT_IN_TEMPDB = OFF must also be removed. The better choice is to remove the entire statement.

After fixing the two preceding issues, your response turns all green.

Running an SSMS-Created Script That Populates Table Data

Manually editing T-SQL scripts generated by SSMS’s Script Wizard is tedious at best. MigWiz v0.2.6 and later support T-SQL scripts created by SSMS’s Script Wizard. Here are the SSMS Script Wizard options I set to create the 5-MB, 6,590-line Raw_AdventureWorks2008LT_Azure.sql file, which is also included in the AdventureWorks2008LT_Azure.zip file on SkyDrive:

Here’s a list of the objects generated by the script:

Executing the script on SQL Azure running in the Production Fabric involves these steps:

1. Add the missing clustered primary key index constraint to the BuildVersion table as described near the beginning of this post, and save Raw_AdventureWorks2008LT.sql.

2. Click the Text File tab of the opening MigWiz dialog, mark the Parse TSQL for SQL Azure Incompatibles check box, click the Browse button, navigate to the location where you saved Raw_AdventureWorks2008LT.sql, and open it:

  

Click Next and wait while MigWiz crunches the file.

3. The script displayed in the SQL Script pane includes comments indicating unsupported T-SQL constructs, which have been removed by the regex instruction in the NotSupportedByAzureFile.Config file. The Result Summary pane is empty.

 

Click Next to open the Setup SQL Azure Connection page.

4. Complete the SAL Azure Connection page:

Click Next and wait for processing to complete to open the SQL Azure Response page. (Processing stops after encountering a large number of errors).

5. Making the modification to the Raw_AdventureWorks2008LT_Azure.sql results in only a few non-fatal errors near the end of the script:

Technorati Tags: SQL Azure Database,SQL Azure,Windows Azure,SQL Azure Migration Wizard,Transact-SQL,T-SQL,AdventureWorks,AdventureWorksLT2008,Schema Migration,Cloud Computing

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 9/17/2009+

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

Tip: Copy •, •• or ••• to the clipboard, press Ctrl+F and paste into the search text box to find updated articles.

••• Update 9/20/2009: Yahoo! SVP on Open Source (Hadoop), advertising Sun Grid Engine in the cloud, Jayaram Krishnaswamy guesses about SQL Azure, Neil Mackenzie discusses Azure Tables, The Medical Quack on Connected Health and Jamie Thomson reports on Office Web Apps.
•• Update 9/19/2009: David Robinson explains SQL Azure's two-hour outage and says new CTP coming, Update on the October .NET Services CTP, Ryan Dunn and Tushar Shanbhag detail inplace-upgrades for Azure projects, J.D. Meier on Security Mental Model for Azure, Chris Hoff (@Beaker) on SAASprawl, Bill Lodin gets you started with Windows Azure
• Update 9/18/2009: Azure Service Management API docs and test tool, In-place Project Upgrade option, Business Week picks up Google article from ComputerWorld, try Windows Live Web Apps without an invitation, ARRA breach rules and HIPPA 

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)
• .NET Services: 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 these links, click the post title to display the single article you want to navigate.

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

••• Neil Mackenzie writes about Partitions in Windows Azure Table on 8/20/2009:

The best place to start learning about Windows Azure Table is the eponymous whitepaper in the resources section of the Windows Azure website. The next step is to look at the Windows Azure Storage Services API Reference documentation on MSDN and particularly the Table Service API section. The Windows Azure forum on MSDN is a good resource for posing questions and hopefully getting some useful responses. Microsoft staff have been good at using the forum to provide additional information and clarification not yet available in the regular documentation. …

Johannes Vermel’s Table Storage or the 100x cost factor post of 9/17/2009 reveals:

Until very recently, I was a bit puzzled by the Table Storage. I couldn’t manage to get a clear understanding how the Table Storage could be a killer option against the Blob Storage.

I get it now: Table Storage can cut your storage costs by 100x.

At outlined by other folks already, I/O costs typically represents more than 10x the storage costs if your objects are weighting less than 6kb (the computation has been done for the Amazon S3 pricing, but the Windows Azure pricing happens to be nearly identical).

Thus, if you happen to have loads of fine grained objects to store in your cloud, say less-than-140-characters tweets for example, you’re likely to end-up with an insane I/O bill if you happen to store those fine-grained items in the Blob Storage.

But don’t lower your hopes, that’s precisely the sort of situations the Table Storage has been designed for, as this service lets you insert/update/delete entities by batches of 100 through Entity Group Transactions.

Steve Guy asks this question in his Azure table partition sizes - many questions thread opener of 9/17/2009:

According to the whitepaper here (Page 5,  1.1 "Scalability of the table")
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/1/3B170FF4-2354-4B2D-B4DC-8FED5F838F6A/Windows%20Azure%20Table%20-%20Dec%202008.docx
"a partition i.e. all entities with same partition key, will be served by a single node. Even so, the amount of data stored within a partition is not limited by the storage capacity of one storage node."

This seems like slightly confusing wording. What I take from that is that in a vast partition, the partition may have to be spread over several nodes (due to storage limitations), but the indexing and coordination will be handled by a single node. Is that how it works?

Microsoft’s Neil MacKenzie quotes Brad Calder in his response to a similar question:

… The quote from above hints at the fact that our access layer to the partitions is separated from our persistent storage layer.  Even though we serve up accesses to a single partition from a single partition server, the data being stored for the partition is not constrained to just the disk space on that server.   Instead, the data being stored for that partition is done through a level of indirection that allows it to span multiple drives and multiple storage nodes.

<Return to section navigation list> 

SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

••• Jayaram Krishnaswamy claims SQL Azure Will Dominate the Cloud on 9/20/2009:

With SQL Azure Microsoft's SQL Server enters the AZURE environment providing similar services as its ground based product. The Community Technology Preview is available for download on registering but I am yet to get mine. For details of why and how, access the team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/ssds/.

Jayaram’s conclusion appears a bit premature because he hasn’t yet tested the product. Ulitzer must be short on cloud-computing articles today.

•• George Huey released v0.2.6 of his SQL Azure Migration Wizard (MigWiz) which adds the option to run his NotSupportedByAzure.config regex file against T-SQL scripts created by SQL Server Management Studio [Expess], which can copy data to Azure tables if specified as a Script Option in SSMS[X]’s Script Wizard.

For more details, see my Using the SQL Azure Migration Wizard with the AdventureWorksLT2008 Sample Database post updated 2/19/2009.

•• David Robinson delivers a detailed explanation of the SQL Azure service outage (see below) in his Short blip in service availability today post of 9/17/2009:

Our goal is and always has been to be as transparent with the user community as possible. With that, as soon as we noticed that there was a service disruption; notification was sent to the MSDN forums. Once we go live, customers would have received an email notifying them. We posted an additional update a few minutes later once we identified what the issue was. If we had not identified the issue so quickly, our incident response plan, or "playbook" as we call it, requires us to notify our users every hour until the issue is resolved. Our goal is to ensure that if an incident should arise, our customers are never questioning what is going on and are always kept in the loop. We believe that by combing our best of breed data platform service with clear, frequent communications, we will only strengthen the rock solid relationship we have with our customers.

You will notice above I mention a refresh to our CTP bits. Yes, a refresh is coming. I'll be sending out more information on that soon.

I wouldn’t call a two-hour outage a “short blip.”

According to Tam the SQL Azure Service Outage -- Service Recovered thread of 9/17/2009 in the SQL Azure — Getting Started forum SQL Azure had an unscheduled outage of about two hours starting at about 12:20 PM PDT and ending at about 2:20 PM PDT.

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.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

The .NET Services Team brings you another mid-course correction (or, if you prefer, reversal) in the Update on the Next Microsoft .NET Services CTP of 9/18/2009:

The next Community Technology Preview (CTP) of .NET Services and the supporting Software Development Kit (SDK) is due out in October, and will closely resemble what is planned for our commercial launch. So, what does this mean for capabilities that will comprise of .NET Services when we reach commercial availability? The Microsoft® .NET Service Bus remains largely the same compared to the current CTP, while the Microsoft® .NET Access Control Service will undergo changes in order to bring us closer to locking down the .NET Services launch features.

Following are excerpts from the post’s topics:

What We’ve Heard and Observed Regarding Microsoft .NET Services

In speaking with the community in the past several months, it became clear that we all need a better way to control access to REST web services. We believe that the .NET Access Control Service will address this need and compliment other Microsoft technologies for security and identity management. The combination of simplicity and support for key enterprise integration scenarios will ensure that .NET Services are useful to enterprise developers as well as the broader developer audience.

What to Expect from Microsoft .NET Services Access Control Services in the October CTP:

• Simple Web Trust – Authorization for REST Web Services and the .NET Service Bus
• Two token-exchange endpoints -  REST with symmetric key and REST with SAML Extension
  • REST with symmetric key: Makes it easy for developers on any platform to package claims for the .NET Access Control Service
  • REST with SAML Extension will work with tokens issued by ADFS V2
  • Both endpoints will be addressable using standard HTTPs POST requests
• Claims Transformation Engine - Transform input claims to output claims using configurable rules
• Security Token Service - Package and transit output claims using REST tokens

In concrete terms, this means the WS-* integration features currently supported today will be temporarily unavailable while we focus on delivering a robust infrastructure for REST web services authorization. Once this infrastructure is in place, we will work on future version features of .NET Services, like web single sign-on and rich WS-* support. In future releases, we will reinstate full support for the WS-* protocols, web Single Sign On, and round out the .NET Access Control Service offering in a way that spans the REST/SOAP spectrum. We’ll talk more about these future features at a later date.

What to Expect from Microsoft .NET Services Bus in the October CTP

• Services Naming System and Registry
  • Enable tree hierarchical based service naming system
  • Service Naming Registry enables opt-in service public discoverability
• Messaging
  • Enable one way, request/response and peer-to-peer messaging through NAT and firewall
  • NET Service Bus endpoint is secured by .NET Access Control Service
• Message Buffer
  • Provide a FIFO data structure within .NET Services namespace and exist independent of any presence of active listeners.
• Routers – We are temporarily removing Routers beginning with the next CTP. For developers who architected applications relying on the Router functionality, we will provide a sample to demonstrate a method for implementing Router-like functionality – including multicast, anycast, and push-style message operations – using existing Service Bus features.
• Queues - Queues will be replaced with a simpler offering called Message Buffers. In future releases we will add message buffer durability, delivery guarantees, and other enhanced message delivery semantics.
• WSHttpRelay Binding - The WSHttpRelay Binding will no longer be available beginning in the October CTP release. Customers who were using the WSHttpRelay Binding are advised to consider migrating to the WS2007Relay Binding, which provides support for the updated versions of the Security, ReliableSession, and TransactionFlow binding elements.
• External Endpoint Registration - Beginning with the October CTP release, it will no longer be possible to register external (non-Service Bus) endpoints in the Service Registry. We expect to re-instate this functionality in a future release.

Sounds to me as if .NET Services continues to be a moving target quite close to Windows Azure’s purported v1 release at PDC 2009. Technically, .NET Services (like SQL Azure) isn’t a component of the Windows Azure Platform, so the team might be off the hook with all but Azure book authors.

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Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

••• The Medical Quack reports Connected Health Prevention Could Cut U.S. Healthcare Costs by 40 Percent by monitoring patients with connected medical devices on 9/18/2009:

The information below in the press release addresses a couple of items I speak of frequently on the blog….education and awareness for starters.  This is a survey conducted to determine where technology can effectively help save money.  Cambridge Consultants is seen regularly here on the blog usually when I speak of some of their new developed connected technologies and devices (i.e. the blue tooth inhaler), and the Center for Connected Healthcare is a division of Partners Healthcare in Boston which represents the connected and IT side of their current program and offerings.  My own feeling reflected below on education, and more. …

HealthVault was one of the first cloud-based Personal Health Records (PHRs) to offer capture and storage of personal clinical data from USB-connected blood glucose meters, blood pressure meters, inhalers, pedometers, and the like. HealthVault’s Microsoft Connected Health Conference page has links to videos of several sessions that discuss connected devices:

• Connecting Devices to HealthVault (Technical Track)
• Learn How Continua Devices Can Work with HealthVault (Technical Track)
• Connecting Patients and Hospitals Remote Monitoring (Business Track)

See the Center for Connected Health’s 2009 Connected Health Symposium, Up from Crisis: Overhauling Healthcare Information, Payment and Delivery in Extraordinary Times, in the Cloud Computing Events section (@connectedhealth).

••• Brad Reed provides more background on mobile telehealth technologies in How emerging wireless techs are transforming healthcare: “Advanced wireless technologies will allow large data to be transferred directly from patient to service provider”:

When carriers announce plans to build out faster 4G wireless networks or to ramp up the speeds of their current 3G network, talk typically turns to how it will benefit consumer applications such as mobile gaming or high-definition video streaming.

But perhaps an even more important aspect of increased mobile data speeds will be their impact on the mobile "telehealth" devices that doctors are increasingly using to keep track of their patients' conditions. A study released this summer by ABI Research projects that there will be approximately 15 million wireless telehealth sensors and devices in use by 2012, or more than double the number of wireless telehealth systems in use today. ABI says that these systems will be used primarily to "monitor and track the status of patients with chronic conditions" so that their providers can detect early warning signs before they become dangerous. …

••• Philip Moeller describes how These Digital Doctors Thrive on House Calls in this 9/18/2009 article for U.S. News & World Report:

Wireless and other digital forms of virtual healthcare, if designed and used well, can save a large amount of money, create better health outcomes, and help seniors remain in their homes. The extent and timing of this trend remains unclear, but seniors and their families should expect to see various forms of remote medical care headed their way. With aging populations soaring in virtually all of the world's most affluent countries, using technology to save money and improve medical care is set to become a major global industry.

Last April, General Electric and Intel said that they would partner to develop and commercialize home healthcare technologies. Thousands of start-up companies may have promising technologies and share similar dreams. But perhaps none have the commercialization experience, government-relations savvy, and global reach of GE and Intel. Today, the companies' home healthcare offerings include GE's QuietCare product and the Intel Health Guide. GE will market the Health Guide through its sales network, and the companies say they will invest $250 million in building the partnership over the next five years. Given their size and the scale of the opportunity, that number most likely is only an opening ante in what will be a much bigger game. …

••• my6solutions’ updated Are You Following Me, Too Twitter application that returns a list of folks you follow who aren’t following you works for me as of 9/20/2009:

 

•• Bill Lodin answers the omnipresent How Do I: Get Started Developing with Windows Azure? question with a 00:05:29 video:

If you’re a developer and you’re new to Windows Azure, start here! You’ll see what you need to download and install, and how to create a simple “Hello World” Windows Azure application.

••• PassportMD did not return my phone call to them last Thursday regarding their expired server certificate for the HTTPS/TLS protocols on Friday nor has the company founder replied to my Tweet about the same subject more than a week ago. I can only assume PassporMD has passed on to the deadpool. However, a HealthVault representative advised me on 9/20/2009 that “they are definitely alive.”

See my Logins to PassportMD Personal Health Records Account Fail with Expired Certificate post updated 9/19/2009 and 9/20/2009.

•• Mike Amundnsen says “[I]'ve been contemplating application state recently” in his [A]pp state in HTTP post of 9/18/2009:

[I]n my latest work, app state is managed per client. [I]n other words, each client that begins an interaction with the web service has its own application state. [O]the[r] clients that come along have different app state. [E]ach client has app state the reflects the sum of their interactions with the web service. …

• The Windows Azure team’s Introducing the Windows Azure Service Management API post of 9/17/2008 11:38 PM PDT provides the long-awaited documentation and a small test tool:

Today, we are releasing a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help you manage your deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. This is a REST-based API which users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services.

API Details at a glance

• You can find the documentation (along with the rest of the Windows Azure documentation) here.
• This is a REST-based API which uses X509 client certificates for authentication. Users can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests.
• The following operations are currently supported.
  • Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.
  • Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups
• We’ve put together a small tool called csmanage.exe to help you interact with this API and manage your deployments. You can find csmanage here along with our other samples.

In the pipeline

Over the next few weeks, we’ll publishing a sample .NET client library and samples, all with source code, to show how to use the API’s functionality.  This API is currently in CTP form and users should expect changes as we improve the service based on feedback.

The Windows Azure Provisioning page received a concurrent facelift.

• my6solutions’ new Are You Following Me, Too Twitter application purports to return a list of folks you follow who aren’t following you. But it fails for me with an

Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: <. Line 1, position 1.

error after allowing it access to my Twitter account (#FAIL).

• Dana Blankenhorn analyzes the current state of the Obama administration’s health insurance reform proposal in his Harvard study leads liberal pushback post to ZDNet’s Healthcare blog:

Liberals found their voice this week, pushing back against the Baucus mark-up of health reform by citing a Harvard study saying 45,000 die from lack of insurance each year, running 40% greater risks than those who can get care. …

The Harvard study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, updated a 1993 study showing the uninsured ran a 25% better chance of losing their bet, and their life. Adjustments were made for income and lifestyle.

The conclusion was stark and unequivocal. “Uninsurance is associated with mortality.”

• Glenn Laffell, MD gives his irreverent view of the Backus mark-up in his Max Misses the Boat, Docs Dig Public Option post of 9/18/2009:

Immediately after his big speech last week, the Big O began dialing up the heat in Max Baucus’ kitchen.

After all, the Montana Democrat’s Committee, Senate Finance, was the only one of the 5 charged to do so that hadn’t put a reform package on the table, and Obama wants something done before the snow flies.

The pressure forced Baucus to ditch all hope of persuading Chuck Grassley or Olympia (“Don’t blame me, I voted for ARRA”) Snowe to join him in a kumbayah moment of bipartisanship and cut a proposal, like, now.

That's what he did Wednesday, and lo and behold! No one, except perhaps Big Business, seemed to like it. …

Mary Jo Foley announces Microsoft Office Web Apps go to testers: Ten things to know in her 9/17/2009 post to the All About Microsoft blog:

Microsoft is making available to thousands of pre-selected testers on September 17 the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) test build of its Web-ified version of Office.

(Check out some new screen shots of the Office Web Apps.)

Microsoft officials first announced plans for Office Web Apps — an offering that many industry watchers consider the Redmondians’ response to Google Docs — in November 2009. The Office Web Apps CTP originally was due to tester in August. Throughout the past few months, Microsoft officials have continued to stress that Office Web Apps aren’t meant to replace Office, but to complement it. (We’ll see whether that actually comes to pass, given tight IT budgets and the multiple-hundred-dollar price tag for client-based Office — two factors that seem to be doing Google Docs no harm among small- and mid-size business users, according to a new IDC study.)

@Todd Bishop says in a 9/17/2009 Tweet: Best chance of getting invite for Office Web Apps preview is to use Windows Live SkyDrive, look for popup. http://bit.ly/e0PfT.

• My test of LiveSide.net's instructions for joining the Office Web Apps CTP without an invitation (How To Access And Try Microsoft Office Web Apps Tech Preview) worked fine for me.

Ed Bott delivers his US$0.02 in Microsoft delivers a partial preview of its Office Web Apps of the same date.

The Reyman Group, in conjunction with CREDANT Technologies, issued a National Survey Reveals Healthcare Providers' Technological Readiness to Participate in [HITECH and EHR] press release on 9/17/2009:

The dialogue on healthcare reform has focused on patients, but one company sees the issue from a totally different perspective. ReymannGroup recently surveyed healthcare providers nationwide to determine their technological readiness to implement healthcare changes.

ReymannGroup, in conjunction with CREDANT Technologies, has released "Healthcare: State-of-Readiness for HITECH and EHR (Electronic Health Records)," a report based on the survey results. The report is timely, as the stimulus package President Obama signed in February includes the HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act, calling for implementation by 2011 of a national network to share electronic health records.

ReymannGroup evaluated a checklist of information technology considerations among the surveyed organizations for:

• Security and encryption
• Broadband capacity
• Storage of records

Paul Reymann, CEO of ReymannGroup and co-author of the GLBA Data Security Rule, said a key finding is that while many of the respondents are already processing electronic health records, less than half share those records or plan to do so within the next year. In addition, while most consider the need for increased storage as a priority, only about half are evaluating their current broadband and mobile device capabilities.

In general, healthcare organizations realize they must start preparing for compliance with the HITECH Act to receive financial incentives in 2011 through 2014, avoid discounted reimbursements after 2014, and work with an increasingly mobile network of clinicians. …

My attempts to log in to my PassportMD account today encountered a certificate error with an expired (on 9/6/2009) Thawte Premium Service Certificate and timed out with the following SOAP error:

Caught exception: SOAP-ERROR: Parsing WSDL: Couldn't load from 'https://services.passportmd.com/HVService/HVService.asmx?wsdl'

This appears (from its name) to be a service request that requires a connection to Microsoft’s HeathVault service, with which PassportMD synchronizes its services. The failure probably is due to PassportMD’s expired certificate. Calls to “Chat with an operator” at 1.888.902.0808 during stated office hours went to a voice mailbox. I’m not sanguine for PassportMD’s survival.

See Logins to PassportMD Personal Health Records Account Fail with Expired Certificate of 9/17/2009 for more details.

Joseph Goedert’s Study: Consumers Want Say in I.T. Design post of 9/14/2009 claims:

Health care consumers in a study of 20 focus groups believe they need to play a role in determining how health information technology systems are developed to ensure the privacy and security of their medical information.

That's the conclusion of a recently released report from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services. "Results of the focus groups suggest that participants were optimistic that health IT would benefit health care quality," according to the report. "They thought that computers may add efficiency to health care and reduce medical errors, such as those associated with illegible handwriting. However, some participants were concerned that health IT might make providers more impersonal, devoting more attention to the computer screen and less to the patient."

The question, of course, is what consumers, presumably of personal health records, can contribute to the subject.

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

••• Chris Murphy reports Four Factors Changing The SaaS Landscape on 9/20/2009 for InformationWeek’s Global CIO Blog:

… A “future of software” panel at our InformationWeek 500 conference offered several fresh insights into why the SaaS landscape is changing. Here are four.

1. Board of Directors support: “Before the boards were asking ‘What’s this SaaS thing?’” said Ray Wang, consultant with Altimeter Group. “…Now, they’re saying ‘Why aren’t you doing something in the cloud?’” Woe to any CIO who pitches a big IT investment without addressing the cloud option.

2. New product categories: SaaS can “pioneer new application categories that the SAPs and Oracles don’t show any interest in,” said Christopher Lochhead, adviser to SuccessFactors, a service for managing employee reviews. This raises the concern, though, that IT must integrate these hordes of niche services.

3. Attitudes about “on premises” are changing: Wang said everything on premises will come to be seen as legacy, like a mainframe today. Workday CTO Stan Sweet said on premises will come to be only be those things “written by you, unique to you, owned by you.”

4. The recession helped SaaS: That’s because SaaS can be implemented more quickly, with less upfront capital, and often less training, says Lochhead. …

Chris Murphy is Editor, InformationWeek.

•• Ryan Dunn offers a detail explanation of the new inplace-upgrade process for Windows Azure projects in his Upgrading Your Service in Windows Azure post of 9/18/2009:

Windows Azure has been in CTP since PDC 08 in October of last year.  Since that time, we have had a fairly simple, yet powerful concept for how to upgrade your application.  Essentially, we have two environments: staging and production.

The difference between these two environments is only in the URI that points to any web exposed services.  In staging, we give you an opaque GUID-like URI (e.g. <guidvalue>.cloudapp.net) that is hard to publically discover and in production, we give you the URI that you chose when you created the hosted service (e.g. <yourservice>.cloudapp.net).

Ryan then goes on to explain:

• VIP Swaps, Deploys, and Upgrades
• Upgrade Domains
• Role Upgrades

•• Tushar Shanbhag sheds a bit more light on the inplace-upgrade process in his Introducing a New Upgrade Option: In-Place post to the Windows Azure blog of 9/17/2009. Tushar observes:

To ensure application availability during an in-place upgrade, Windows Azure stops only a subset of your instances at a time to upgrade them, while keeping the remaining instances running. To achieve this, Windows Azure logically partitions your application into “upgrade domains” and updates one domain at a time. During the Community Technology Preview, Windows Azure uses two upgrade domains for each application. This means that half of your role instances will be offline at a time during an in-place upgrade. In the future, you will be able to choose how many upgrade domains you want.

You can perform in-place upgrades using the Windows Azure Portal or the new Service Management API. Note that you cannot use an in-place upgrade when the upgrade involves changes to your service definition (e.g., new roles or endpoints). For further details please refer to the MSDN documentation.

Steve Craggs analyzes patents on “remote storage” being litigated in the infamous Eastern District of Texas from the standpoint of a UK citizen in his Come in[to] Texas East District Court, your time is up post of 9/15/2009:

… The latest in this long line of cases appears to be a couple of suits raised by a guy called Mitchell Prust, of Minnesota US, against Apple and others, that are threatening to completely derail the Cloud Computing model. These two cases can be taken as the tip of the iceberg - expect more to appear in the same courtroom. Essentially Prust got three patents approved in the area of remote storage management, the earliest in 2000 - these patents basically deal with the virtualization of storage to allow multiple users across the world to carve out their own little space and manage and use it, as Cloud users do.

One thing that has forever confused me is how patents get approved in the US system. Anyone who knows IT will probably be aware that the IBM VM (Virtual Machine) operating system that started in the late 1960s provided this type of storage virtualization. Perhaps the difference with these patents is that each makes a big thing of the client system being attached through 'a global computer network'. The implication is this means the Internet, which would rule out the IBM VM solution which clearly predates the Internet. However, global access to these systems through global networks was certainly possible in the old days too - when I worked in IBM in the 80s I was able to log on from a remote location across the network, and then continue to interact with my virtualized piece of the greater storage pool. Does this equate to a 'global compute network'? Seems to me to be pretty damn close. …

•• Lori MacVittie answers her Does a Dynamic Infrastructure Need ARP for Applications? question in this 9/18/2009 post: “There’s more than one way to address the rapid rate of change in infrastructure supporting a dynamic environment” and continues:

We spend a lot of time talking about how software and systems and standards are the ultimate solution to addressing the rapid rate of change in the association between applications and IP addresses in a dynamic infrastructure. But sometimes you have look down the stack to find a simpler, more economical and  honestly, elegant, answer to the challenge of managing the problem associated with virtualized and cloud computing architectures. We need to take another look at the link layer protocols and specifically ARP (address resolution protocol) for some pointers on how we might address this particular challenge.

Windows Azure handles these issues for you automatically with load balancing and DNS.

•• Treff LaPlante continues his Software Flexiblity in the Cloud series with Software Flexibility in the Cloud - Part 4 of 5: “Week 4: Platform as a Service.”

In my last post, I began dissecting cloud computing into its three primary components: infrastructure last week, platform this week and software as a service next week.

Platform as a service (PaaS) refers to the tools used to build software applications (software programs) in the cloud. Think of it as a cloud-based development environment for building and managing software applications. These custom-built applications are then hosted on infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

For example, whereas Microsoft .Net is a traditional type of development platform, a product like WorkXpress is a cloud-based development platform designed to accomplish similar goals. When you work in .Net, you are responsible for all the aspects of installing, managing and updating your tool set, the hardware it runs on, where it's deployed. When you work in PaaS, all of the management requirements are handled for you or are greatly simplified, leaving you free to simply build your application.

Treff apparently isn’t aware that the Windows Azure Platform is a PaaS with .NET as the Platform. According to Wikipedia:

WorkXpress was built on well known components PHP and MySQL and allows for API integrations without programming.

WorkXpress claims to be a Fifth-Generation Language (5GL). To paraphrase W. C. Fields, “I’d rather be in the cloud with C#.”

•• Nancy Nally explains Why I Don’t Trust the Cloud in this 8/19/2009 post to the Web Worker Daily blog:

“Cloud computing” has easily replaced “Web 2.0” as the current trendy buzzword. The state of California is even turning to it for government systems. I have to say, however, that I have serious reservations about heavily implementing cloud computing in my own work flow. I believe that cloud computing is the killer app of the future, but the future isn’t quite here yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I do make limited use of cloud computing applications, especially Gmail. But mostly, I don’t feel comfortable putting my entire computing life “in the cloud”. Here’s why. …

Nancy goes on to detail her issues with these topics, which most others share with her:

• Access
• Backups
• Data loss
• Service stability
• Privacy and security

•• Danny Goodall offers A Market Landscape/Taxonomy/Segmentation Model for Cloud Computing in his 9/18/2009 post to the Lustratus/REPAMA site:

I’ve completed the first draft of the cloud computing segmentation model upon which we will build our REPAMA studies.

As I’ve mentioned before along my journey to arrive at this model, I’ve found the cloud computing market to have quickly become crowded and confused. This is largely due to the ease at which “traditional” vendors have re-repositioned themselves to catch the cloud computing wave.

The other issue of course is that over time cloud computing will cease to be a new paradigm and will quickly become the way consumers and businesses avail themselves of computing services. So what I’m seeing here is a market in transition where just about every category in traditional software sales will have an offer in the cloud computing space until on-demand models becomes “the norm”. …

Danny includes a link to a set of slides that make his research more available. I provided corrections for his Microsoft BizTalk Services and Microsoft SDS vendor designations in a comment.

• The Windows Azure team’s Introducing a New Upgrade Option: In-Place post of 9/17/2009 announces:

Today we are introducing a new upgrade mechanism, called “in-place upgrade,” which enables you to incrementally roll a new version of your service over the existing version without first deploying the new version to staging. With this new mechanism, you can upgrade your entire application or just a single role (e.g. web role) without disturbing the other roles in your application. Note that you will still have the option to upgrade as before, by first deploying the new version to staging and then swapping it with the production deployment.

To ensure application availability during an in-place upgrade, Windows Azure stops only a subset of your instances at a time to upgrade them, while keeping the remaining instances running. To achieve this, Windows Azure logically partitions your application into “upgrade domains” and updates one domain at a time. During the Community Technology Preview, Windows Azure uses two upgrade domains for each application. This means that half of your role instances will be offline at a time during an in-place upgrade. In the future, you will be able to choose how many upgrade domains you want. …

Thanks to @johnspurlock for the heads up.

• The Windows Azure Team gives the Windows Azure Portal’s landing page a new look (click for full-size screen capture):

The Account and Help and Resources page received similar treatment.

• M. Koenig, M. West and B. Guptil’s IT Executives Not Aligned with Non-IT on Cloud Solution Benefits Saugatuck Research Alert (site registration required) of 9/17/2009 concludes:

Current Saugatuck research among Cloud Computing users (see Note 1) indicates that expectations of cost reduction overwhelmingly drive interest in the adoption of Cloud Computing services.

Figure 1 illustrates how both IT and non-IT executives alike rank cost-reduction-centric benefits as the top business benefits that they expect to derive from Cloud Computing infrastructure services. However, as the research shows, there are significant differences in expectation between IT executives and their counterparts in other areas of the business. …

• James Urquhart posits Five ways that Apps.gov is a trendsetter in this 9/18/2009 post to CNet’s Wisdom of Clouds blog:

I'm one of many who believe this week's announcement of Apps.gov--a portal targeted at reducing the cost and effort for public agencies to acquire cloud services--is forcing all of IT to face the economics of cloud computing.

Apps.gov, a federal government initiative out of the General Services Administration, demonstrates several concepts that have been the dream of many private enterprise IT departments for some time, but have been successfully executed by very few. Here are the five trends that I think Apps.gov demonstrates, and why you should pay attention …

• Phil Wainwright postulates Web 2.0 as The democratization of IT in this 9/18/2009 post to ZDNet’s Software as Services blog:

… [P]assive consumption is the last thing Web 2.0 is about. If the media barons of Web 1.0 had had their way, users would have sat in their walled gardens and meekly consumed whatever Yahoo, AOL and the rest saw fit to distribute. Instead, users seized control, told each other what they thought of online content and started generating their own blogs, videos and commentary. Web 2.0 was a grassroots revolution, not consumerization but democratization, and that is the trend that is now transforming IT.

• Amitabh Srivatsava’s Realizing Microsoft’s potential in the cloud contribution of 9/17/2009 to Venture*Beat’s Microsoft-sponsored “Conversations on Innovation” series doesn’t shed much new light on the Windows Azure Platform:

Cloud computing is democratizing the internet in the same way that personal computers democratized computing itself decades ago. With the greater efficiency and agility of the cloud, running internet-scale applications is now within the reach of any company. Just like the advent of the personal computer, the cloud is creating brand new opportunities and revolutionizing the way companies do business. Startups in particular are looking to the cloud as a way to get applications built and deployed faster, with no up-front costs.

With the cloud, customers are able to run applications at internet scale while simplifying their development and operations. Up-front expenses are eliminated because there’s no hardware to buy. Instead, customers use a pay-as-you-go model, and cloud providers can keep those costs low by automating management in the platform. …

Amitabh Srivastava is a Senior Vice President at Microsoft with responsibility for Windows Azure.

Kevin Jackson predicts One Billion Mobile Cloud Computing Subscribers !! in this 9/16/2009 post and adds, “The timing of secure cloud computing technologies and secure mobile devices couldn't have been better”:

Yes. That's what I said! A recent EDL Consulting article cites the rising popularity of smartphones and other advanced mobile devices as the driving force behind a skyrocketing mobile cloud computing market.

According to ABI Research, the current figure for mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide in 2008 was 42.8 million, representing 1.1 percent of all mobile subscribers. The 2014 figure of 998 million will represent almost 19 percent of all mobile subscribers. They also predicted that business productivity applications will take the lead in mobile cloud computing applications, including collaborative document sharing, scheduling, and sales force automation.

Alistair Croll posits For CIOs, Clouds Are The Fourth Column in this post of 9/16/2009 to InformationWeek’s Plug into the Cloud blog:

Clouds are transforming IT; that's not news. But regardless of your cloud computing agenda, clouds are already affecting your IT plans, because they give IT executives a cudgel with which to bludgeon traditional software and infrastructure providers.

Every IT decision of any real consequence starts with a shortlist of three competing offerings. One of them is usually the incumbent provider -- Cisco, IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and so on. Along with this incumbent are a couple of alternate providers. Sometimes these providers are simply "column fodder" designed to rein in the incumbent; but many IT companies have built healthy businesses by being the alternate.

It's time for a fourth column: a cloud-based offering. That means every Request for Proposals that a company issues must have a cloud-based option, regardless of whether the company actually plans to adopt clouds.

Alistair then goes on to explain why.

David Chappell’s Updating the Windows Azure Story post of 9/14/2009 points to an update his Azure whitepaper:

If you're paying close attention, you already know this, but it's still worth pointing out that Microsoft has changed various aspects of what was called the Azure Services Platform. It's now known as the Windows Azure platform, and some pieces have been deleted, such as the Workflow part of .NET Services. For a current description, take a look at the updated version of my paper Introducing the Windows Azure Platform (formerly called Introducing the Azure Services Platform).

Is this the end of changes in this technology? Probably not--there may well be more updates before it's generally available later this year. Still, if you care about cloud computing, keeping up with Microsoft's cloud platform isn't a bad thing to do.

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Cloud Security and Governance

•• J. D. Meier’s Security Mental Model for Azure Patterns and Practices at Microsoft post of 9/17/2009 compares the security mental module for conventional applications:

We’ve been exploring Azure on the patterns & practices team for potential security guidance.   To get our heads around it, we’ve had to create a simple view for our team that we could quickly whiteboard or drill into.  We wanted a way to easily compare with our previous security guidance.  Here’s what we ended up with …

Today’s application security mental model:

Compare that to our evolving security mental model for Azure:

 

Glad to see the patterns & practices folks working on Windows Azure.

•• Chris Hoff (@Beaker) offers this Incomplete Thought: Forget VM Sprawl, Worry More About SaaSprawl…:

A lot of fuss has been made about run-away VM sprawl in enterprises who are heavily virtualized due to the ease with which a VM can constructed and operationalized.

I’m not convinced about the reality versus the potential of VM Sprawl, meaning that I have no evidence from anyone facing this issue to date.  I wrote about this a while ago here.

As virtualization and the attendant vendors push more from enterprise virtualization to enterprise Clouds, what I’m actually more concerned with is SaaSprawl. …

What we likely could end up with is another illustration of a “squeezing the balloon” problem; trading off CapEx for what I call OopsEx — realizing what might amount to substituting one problem for another as you trade reduced upfront (and on-going) capital investment for what amounts to on-going management, security, compliance and service-level management issues in the long term.

•• Roger Grimes recommends that you Learn cloud security before it's too late in this 9/18/2009 post to InfoWorld’s Security Adviser blog: “Cloud computing is real, it's here, and it will be adopted by your company, whether you're ready or not.”

Don't believe anyone who says cloud computing is just a buzzword, doomed to become the next failed, overhyped industry former technology darling. Cloud computing is already here, and if you don't learn to secure it, you won't have much of a job to cling to in the not-too-distant future. Think of the information security version of a Cobol programmer.

Being a computer security professional is one of the toughest jobs in the world -- perhaps not as dangerous as an Alaskan crab fisherman or a high-voltage power lineman, but technically it is as tough as they come. In the computer world, technology changes so fast that you have to learn -- and master -- something completely new every two years. And you are evaluated on only what you've done lately. No one cares anymore if you were "da man" in fighting macro viruses or if you could disassemble VBScript worms. Your bosses only care how you fared fighting hackers and malware in 2009. Nothing else matters. …

• Joseph Goedart reports Breach Rules Require New Look at HIPAA in this 9/18/2009 post from Health Data Management’s Health IT Stimulus Summit in Boston:

New federal requirements under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act governing the notification of breaches of protected health information bring major changes to the HIPAA privacy and security rules, said Steven J. Fox, a partner in the Washington law firm Post & Schell. “You do have to really start over with HIPAA,” he told attendees at Health Data Management’s Health IT Stimulus Summit in Boston. “You’re going to have to do completely new education and training.”

And that training will need to continue on a rolling basis during the next year as new guidance and rules are published to replace an interim rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that becomes affective on Sept. 23. An accompanying interim rule from the Federal Trade Commission, covering protection of personal health records, became effective on Sept. 17.

Health care organizations must update their privacy and security policies and procedures to ensure an adequate response to breach incidents, Fox noted. Not only does ARRA strengthen privacy and security rules, but it also gives state attorneys general the right to enforce HIPAA privacy and security rules. “I can see some of them wanting to get in on this,” he added.

Krishnan Subramanian claims Cloud Security Needs A Rethink But The Evolution Will Be Slow in this 9/17/2009 post:

Recently, Andreas M. Antonopoulos wrote an informative piece on Computer World about Cloud Security. In his post, he clearly outlines the mental shift needed on Cloud Security so that auditors and regulators are convinced about the issues of security and compliance. The crucial takeaway from his post is the following

“we are rapidly moving from a location-centric security model to a more identity- and data-centric model”

This is the key to the success of cloud computing. I have emphasized several times in this space about the need to rethink how we do security. As pointed out by Mr. Antonopoulos, we need a mental shift from our old fashioned location based security concepts to securing the data, identity, etc.. To emphasize the point about the much needed mind shift, he gives a neat example about how to exert control and ownership on the data without having any control over the infrastructure where it is stored. …

Tim Greene puts on his OpEd hat with Fed cloud plan is wisely tempered by security concerns of 9/17/2009 for NetworkWorld’s Cloud Security Alert:

The federal CIO is pushing for government use of cloud services immediately, and the way he is going about it can teach a lesson to businesses struggling with how to use these services securely.

Vivek Kundra says the goal of the apps.gov site announced this week is to take advantage of all the things that attract businesses to cloud computing – price, efficiency, productivity, flexibility, etc.

So far just applications are available, and a wide variety at that, which should help cut down the redundancies of application instances that government agencies pay for as well as maintenance and staff time spent on upgrades and patches. The site is also making available social media as a way for agencies to communicate.

But the site has just placeholders for cloud IT services including storage, software development, virtual machines and Web hosting. These are services that will inevitably involve risking data in the cloud environment and Kundra is being appropriately cautious. Without adequate security in place, data entrusted to the cloud could become compromised. …

Seems to me that the last sentence is stating the obvious.

Jim Liddle shows you How to Secure Amazon Elastic Cloud in this detailed post of 9/17/2009:

In this post I will walk you through the  high level  of securing a normal tiered application running on EC2. First I will cover the basics of what EC2 provides and then briefly discuss how this can be used in a real life scenario.

Barry Reingold and Ryan Mrazik of Perkins Coie authored Cloud Computing: Industry and Government Developements in September 2009 for LegalWorks, a Thomson Business:

This article is the second in a three-part series looking at cloud computing from market and legal perspectives. Our first article focused on cloud computing technology and business models, and associated privacy and data security concerns. This article will address recent industry and policy developments. Our final article will discuss legal issues that
arise in cloud computing service contracts.

Their Cloud Computing: The Intersection of Massive Scalability, Data Security and Privacy (Part 1) article is dated June 2009:

This article is the first in a three-part series that will look at cloud computing from the market and legal perspectives. This first article focuses on the technological and business capabilities of cloud computing and associated privacy and data security concerns. Part II will focus on the current state of the law that applies to cloud computing services. Part III will highlight industry and policy developments in the past months and upcoming few weeks.

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Cloud Computing Events

••• The Center for Connected Health will hold the 2009 Connected Health Symposium, Up from Crisis: Overhauling Healthcare Information, Payment and Delivery in Extraordinary Times, on October 21-22, at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers:

• View the Agenda
• More information about Symposium 2009.
  

When: 10/21 – 10/22/2009 
Where: Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers, Boston, MA, USA 

•• David Pallman announces the O.C. Azure User Group September 2009 Meeting on SQL Azure in this 9/18/2009 post:

The next Orange County Azure User Group meeting will be held Thursday 9/24/09 6-8pm at Quickstart Intelligence.

At the September Azure User Group meeting we'll be getting our first look at SQL Azure, Microsoft's cloud-based equivalent to SQL Server. We'll compare and contrast the features, management, performance, and operation cost of SQL Azure in the cloud vs. SQL Server in the enterprise. We'll share some early real-world experience with migrating from SQL Server to SQL Azure.

As usual, we'll also have pizza, beverages, and give-aways. RSVP here.

When: 9/24/2009 6:00 to 8:00 PM PDT 
Where: QuickStart Intelligence, 16815 Von Karman Ave, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92606, USA

VordelWorld user conference to shine spotlight on Cloud Governance issues according to this Vordel Cloud Governance conference features keynotes from Amazon, Burton Group, CA, Oracle and Three [Others] 9/16/2009 press release:

Vordel, a provider of Cloud and SOA Governance products, today announced the line up for its annual vordelworld user conference to be held in Dublin, Ireland November 4-6. VordelWorld puts the spotlight on SOA and Cloud Governance and presents case studies from leading firms such as Amazon, Bank of America, CA, Oracle, Pfizer, Three, US Government,and several leading European Telcos and Insurance companies.

Keynote speakers will provide a mixture of strategic and pragmatic advice to enable companies comprehend the issues at play when considering incorporating Cloud Computing services as part of their existing SOA or non-SOA enterprise architectures. This two day event packed full of insightful and thought-provoking content is a firm favorite in the industry calendar and is always a sell out.

When: 11/4 to 11/6/2009   
Where: Radisson Blu Royal Hotel in Dublin, Ireland (enroll here for €175).

OCCI will hold a conference call on 9/23/2009, according to the OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group post of 9/17/2009:

On next weeks conference call (September 23, 2009 @ 4pm CEST) we will do a walk through of the specification - Have a look here on how to join.

When: 9/23/2009   
Where: Conference call (enroll here)

IBM Innovation Centers will present Cloud computing for developers: Hosted by IBM and Amazon Web Services on 10/1/2009:

[A] cloud computing virtual workshop for developers, professors, students, and ISVs who are looking to jumpstart their skills to build Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Hear why selecting a combination of industry-leading IBM software running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to focus all your resources on designing and distributing innovative applications.

This event will have live presentations, chats, and hands-on labs featuring IBM and AWS experts who will demonstrate products that you can use to create applications through cloud computing that help deliver real business value. …

When: 10/1/2009   
Where: The Internet (enroll here)

The Cloud Computing World Forum (www.cloudwf.com) will outline why Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service are perfect for SMBs during its one day conference in London, according to its Point Zero Media Announces Key Speakers at Inaugural Cloud Computing World Forum press release of 9/17/2009:

The event on the 22nd of October at 76 Portland Place, will feature amongst others, a presentation from Mike Spink, Research Director for Gartner on why the Cloud is perfect for SMBs.

He said, "The promise of Cloud Computing creates a tremendous opportunity for SMB's to revisit their IT strategy and critical planning assumptions.  As the market evolves and matures, Cloud Computing will become a viable and cost-effective alternative to on-premises IT for an increasing percentage of requirements".

When: 10/22/2009   
Where: 76 Portland Place, London, England, UK

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

••• Jamie Thompson’s Office Web Apps is here post of 9/19/2009 reviews Windows Live’s new Excel Office Web App:

… Upon getting in you’ll find the interface very familiar. I have been poking around at the Excel web app as opposed to Word or Powerpoint and so far it seems as though most of the basic functions are there. Missing features that I have discovered so far include:

• CTRL+<down arrow> doesn’t move you to the bottom of a set of data like it does in the desktop flavour of Excel
• There is no fill handle

One thing that I *really* like is the fact that there is no need to hit a ‘Save’ button, everything gets saved straightaway exactly as happens with OneNote 2007. I’ve long thought that the Save button is superfluous these days so its great to see it disappear. …

••• Jeffrey Geelan quotes Shelton Shugar at length on 8/20/2009 in Open Source Is Key to Cloud Computing: Yahoo! SVP: "Ultimately, we believe that advancement in cloud computing technology will be driven by open source initiatives where large communities of engineers can collaborate and develop new code for the new applications and demands posed by the cloud model":

Yahoo! has more than 500 million unique users per month across the world. Yahoo! Cloud services enable us to provide superior user experiences and deliver targeted content to our enormous audience. Examples include faster content access around the globe, real-time sports updates, a personalized homepage experience, targeted news feeds, geo-specific ads and many more.

In addition, Yahoo! Cloud technologies enable us to innovate faster based on common, global and scalable platforms, thus enabling consumers to gain access to innovative features and products faster than ever before.

As one of the largest providers of consumer Internet services in the world, Yahoo’s cloud operates at virtually unprecedented scale, making it a unique environment and testing ground for cloud computing technologies. …

Shelton Shugar is Senior VP Cloud Computing at Yahoo! The interview is mostly chest-beating about Hadoop and the private Yahoo! Cloud Serving Platform.

••• Sun Microsystems’ 00:04:42 Sun Grid Engine and Fulfilling the Promise of Cloud Computing video (site registration required) consists of four one-minute, self-serving animated commercials:

Sun envisions a world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open, compatible, and designed for all types of applications—including high performance computing. Sun is extending cloud computing to High Performance, building not just a cloud, but an entire Cloud eco-system. Through this narrated demonstration, learn how Sun Grid Engine fulfills the promise of cloud computing in HPC.

•• Mark O’Neill praises Google’s move to gain federal users of Google Apps and the App Engine in his Google: First we take Washington post of 9/17/2009:

Leonard Cohen sang "First we take Manhattan". And technology companies sang along: using New York based financial services companies as early adopters of their products and then building out from these beachhead customers. Sun was the prime example. But also think of Check Point firewalls, and of course RIM with the Blackberry. Wall Street customers were a key part of their early revenue, awareness, and indeed contributed to key features in many cases.

But now look at Google with Google Apps. As eWeek reports, Google is building out a Government Cloud service with Google Apps. It is a parallel system to the commercially-available Google Apps. That itself is interesting because Google Apps features multi-tenancy which in theory should have kept government users separate from other others. But clearly nobody wanted to take that chance.

The big story is that Google is using government, not Wall Street, as its beachhead. Where previously a technology company would have used a New York based financial services company as its prime reference, Google is targeting the US Federal Government. It's "First we take Washington", not "First we take Manhattan". And now that Google has a government offering, we see the ripples - like this ZDNet story: "Do you really need Office? Really? If the Feds don't, do we?"

Where are Microsoft’s offerings in the forthcoming Federal cloud computing sweepstakes?

Mark O’Neil is the CTO of Vordel, Inc.

Jaikumar Vijayan asks Will security concerns darken Google's government cloud? in his feature-length 9/17/2009 article for ComputerWorld:

When Google Inc. launches its cloud computing services for federal government agencies next year, one of its biggest challenges will be to overcome concerns related to data privacy and security in cloud environments.

Earlier this week, Google said that it was planning on offering cloud services such as Google Apps to federal agencies starting in 2010. Google said it is speaking with several federal agencies about its offerings, which the company has assured will be fully compliant with the requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). A FISMA certification is required for a service provider, such as Google, to sell to federal agencies.

• Update 9/18/2009: Business Week picked up this article for its Technology section and added this deck:

In seeking contracts from Uncle Sam, Google will need to assuage fears that that cloud computing just isn't safe enough, says ComputerWorld

Thanks to Sam Gross of Unisys, whose security poll the article quotes, for the heads-up.

Darryl K. Taft reports Google Delivers New Java-like Language: Noop in a 9/16/2009 story for eWeek:

The tireless, developer-centric engineers at Google have come up with Noop, a new language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

"Noop (pronounced 'noh-awp,' like the machine instruction) is a new language that attempts to blend the best lessons of languages old and new, while syntactically encouraging industry best-practices and discouraging the worst offenses," according to a description of the language on the Noop language Website.

Noop supports dependency injection in the language, testability and immutability. Other key characteristics of Noop, according to the Noop site, include the following: "Readable code is more important than any syntax feature; Executable documentation that's never out-of-date; and Properties, strong typing, and sensible modern stdlib."

Darryl’s earlier Google Offers App Engine Launcher for Windows post of 9/11/2009, which I missed at the time, says:

Google has released the Google App Engine Launcher for Windows, a graphical user interface for creating, running and deploying App Engine applications when developing on Windows.

In a recent blog post, John Grabowski, a software engineer at Google, said Google App Engine 1.2.5 SDK for Python now includes the Google App Engine Launcher for Windows. Overall, the goal of the launcher is to help make App Engine development quick and easy, he said.

"About a year ago, a few of us recognized a need for a client tool to help with App Engine development," Grabowski said. He said a group of Google engineers had created a Mac version of the launcher in their "20 percent time"—the time that Google allows its engineers to work on independent projects. "Of course, not all App Engine developers have Macs, so more work was needed," Grabowski said, noting that a new group of engineers set out to create the Windows launcher.

Ian Paul claims Google's Gmail fail casts dark cloud on cloud computing in this 9/2/2009 post to MacWorld from PCWorld:

Tuesday's Gmail outage was not only an inconvenience, it calls into question—yet again—the feasibility of present day cloud computing.

One popular prediction is that future computers won’t need huge hard drives because all our applications and personal data (photos, videos, documents and e-mail) will exist on remote servers on the Internet (otherwise known as “cloud computing”).

But how viable is this Utopian computing future when the accessibility of your files is dependent on forces beyond your control?

Gmail fail

When Gmail went down Tuesday, many users were left without access to their e-mail for nearly two hours. After Google had sorted out the mess, the company said in a blog post the cause of the outage was overloaded servers. Sound familiar? Google gave a similar explanation in May after a widespread service outage left 14 percent of Google users across the globe without access to many of the search company’s services. …

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