Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 4/26/2010+

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

 
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, Codename “Dallas” and OData
• AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus
• Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

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

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

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

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

Rob Gillen recommends External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure in this detailed post of 4/26/2010:

I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting.

Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards).

Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately).

We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here.

We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here.

Rob continues with more details of his test regimen>

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SQL Azure Database, Codename “Dallas” and OData

Marcello Lopez Ruiz’ MicrosoftDataServicesRootUri, or How to customize WCF Data Service URIs post of 4/26/2010 points to Peter Qian’s Overwriting the service root URI in Wcf Data Service of 3/24/2010:

Peter has a great write-up about this, so I won't go into much detail here. Go read his post, then come back for a bit more context.

You have always been able to get a data service to process requests using a specific URI as the root. The data service doesn't have some magic knowledge about where it's being hosted; instead, it relies on the IDataServiceHost2 interface for this.

This is a "big hammer" kind of customization, though, because it requires you to completely reimplement the host, including things like header processing, some error handling, and managing request and response payloads.

In the current version, you can keep relying on the built-in support for WCF hosting, and simply use the technique that Peter described to tweak the service for the very common case of wanting to provide the illusion that the service is hosted at a different URI, one that for example includes a session token.

Enjoy!

PS: remember the companion MicrosoftDataServicesRequestUri property; again, Peter does a good job explaining how that works.

David Lemphers explains WCF, REST and URL Rewriting with Windows Azure! in this 4/26/2010 post:

So there is nothing I find nicer than a well formatted, REST based URL. Take for example: http://myhost/customer/2/orders [a]s a way to retrieve all orders for customer number 2.

There is also nothing I like more than WCF! The flexibility to declaratively control the behavior of my web service is perfect for situations where I need to respond quickly to heterogeneous client calling requirements (REST, SOAP, etc).

And finally, I love Windows Azure, nothing more really to say there. So how do you build a RESTful WCF Service in Windows Azure?

Start with a new Cloud project:

Then add a new WCF Service Web Role:

Now, this is enough to get a WCF service going in Windows Azure, so just hit F5 and you’ll get this:

…

David continues with his tutorial.

The OData Team released the Open Data Protocol - Client Libraries under Apache License Version 2.0 of January 2004 http://www.apache.org/licenses/ on 4/15/2010.

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AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus

The .NET Connected Framework Team announced the availability of Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 Refresh for Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4 RTM on 4/16/2010:

Today we are pleased to announce a Beta 2 Refresh for Windows Server AppFabric.  This build supports the recently released .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 RTM versions—a request we’ve had from a number of you.  Organizations wanting to use Windows Server AppFabric with the final RTM versions of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 are encouraged to download the Beta 2 Refresh today.  Please click here for an installation guide on installing the Beta 2 Refresh.  We encourage developers and IT professionals building ASP.NET applications or applications that use WCF or WF and run on IIS to download the Beta 2 Refresh and provide feedback at http://connect.microsoft.com/dublin/feedback or via our forum at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dublin/threads/.

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of application services focused on improving the performance and management of Web and Composite applications.  To deliver these benefits, Windows Server AppFabric provides distributed caching technology and pre-built management and monitoring infrastructure that utilize familiar .NET skills. 

Currently in Beta 2, Windows Server AppFabric enhances the Application Server role in Windows Server and is available as a free download.

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Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses

Bill Zack points out the availability of A Windows Azure Sample Application: Bid Now in this 4/26/2010 post to the InnovateShowcase blog:

Remember the DinnerNow sample application? Well, that was a connected web application and was introduced and updated last year before Windows Azure was available. The Bid Now sample application, along with source code, has just been released and available for download. This online auction application is designed to show how developers can create highly scalable applications using Worker Roles and Windows Azure Storage -- Queues, Tables and Worker Roles, plus Live ID based authentication. Before deploying it to Windows Azure, you can debug and test the application your local development box.

For more information see here…

Brian Sommer’s Convergence – Microsoft debuts Dynamics GP 2010 (and a bit of cloud) post of 4/26/2010 to the Enterprise Irregulars blog from Convergence 2010 reports:

Cloud CRM & Azure Connect with On-Premise Dynamics ERP

At Convergence 2010, the annual Microsoft confab for Dynamics GP (Great Plains), SL (Solomon), AX (Axapta) and NAV (Navision), Microsoft showcased a number of integration points between its new Dynamics GP, Dynamics CRM and other Microsoft tools such as SharePoint and Azure Portal tool. Approximately 8500 attendees made it to this relatively upbeat event.

Of the demonstrations I saw, Microsoft showed how Unified Communications (UC) were part of most Microsoft applications and tools. For example, they showed how their cloud-based CRM product would integrate with their on-premise or hosted Dynamics GP product. If a user needed to contact a creditor, accounts receivable clerk or other individual, all that was required was a click on a small screen icon to launch a telephone call, email or video conversation.

The Dynamics GP product was enhanced with additional BI (business intelligence) reports, enhanced Excel Pivot functionality, 15 new tailored user roles and more embedded Microsoft Office forms. In total, the product ships with 380 web services and 400 SQL or Excel reports. The other Dynamics products were upgraded late last year.

• One of the demos gave attendees a peak at the new Windows Phone 7 user interface. Unfortunately, it was a very brief peek.
• Dynamics CRM Online has multilingual support and will be sold in 32 markets by year-end.
• Overall, the products showed well and offered a mix of on-premise and SaaS products. Microsoft has stated that they are “All-in” when it comes to the cloud.

In one-on-one interviews I had with Microsoft executives, I learned that:

• Multi-tenancy isn’t really there yet for the Dynamics GP products. The products can be hosted by third parties with prior enhancements getting easier and easier to roll forward to newer releases.

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Windows Azure Infrastructure

Chris Czarnecki asserts Microsoft Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) Stands Out From the Crowd in this 4/26/2010 post to the Learning Tree International blog:

In a recent interview with Information Week editors Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer sent the message that Microsoft is ‘all in’ when it comes to cloud computing. The message Steve Balmer sent regarding Azure in comparison to other cloud providers was interesting, stating that ‘ There is nobody with an offer like ours (Azure) in the market today, not even close. We’re actually trying to help people do what they really need to do for the modern time’.

He compared three other major PaaS vendors, Amazon, Salesforce.com and Google to Microsoft Azure claiming ‘Amazon basically say give us your VMs and you can still muck around at the low level, they are taking todays complexity and putting it into the cloud’. Salesforce.com was dismissed as ‘not being a general purpose programming platform for large scale deployment’ and Google as ‘ kind of its own weird, funny proprietary environment’.

To me the most striking aspect of the interview is Steve Balmers view that the way all applications are developed for the cloud has to be changed to take advantage of the cloud. There is some validity in this view but not for all applications that will run in the cloud. Some applications will be required to scale to millions of users and have the associated large scale storage requirements – but may other applications will not require this level of scalability.

It is my firm belief that the majority of applications that are or will be deployed to the cloud will do so to make use of the cost effective server provisioning, reduced administration costs as well as transparent scalability when required. Amazon, Salesforce.com and Google all provide solutions that meet these requirements.

Microsoft Azure certainly differs from other vendors offerings. It requires a new skill set for developers and architecture for applications making use of the Azure system and libraries. There is an elegance in much of this, but nothing compelling that other vendors do not offer. Of the four major PaaS providers, Microsoft Azure most certainly has the feeling of still being in an embryonic stage and the lack of provision for migrating existing Web application to the platform seems to be a major omission in the Microsoft cloud strategy. It will be interesting to see how this evolves over the coming months.

Dave Durkee asks “The competition among cloud providers may drive prices downward, but at what cost?” as a preface to this Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free post to current issue of Communications of the ACM. Here’s the opening:

The last time the IT industry delivered outsourced shared-resource computing to the enterprise was with timesharing in the 1980s when it evolved to a high art, delivering the reliability, performance, and service the enterprise demanded. Today, cloud computing is poised to address the needs of the same market, based on a revolution of new technologies, significant unused computing capacity in corporate data centers, and the development of a highly capable Internet data communications infrastructure. The economies of scale of delivering computing from a centralized, shared infrastructure have set the expectation among customers that cloud computing costs will be significantly lower than those incurred from providing their own computing. Together with the reduced deployment costs of open source software and the perfect competition characteristics of remote computing, these expectations set the stage for fierce pressure on cloud providers to continuously lower prices.

This pricing pressure results in a commoditization of cloud services that deemphasizes enterprise requirements such as guaranteed levels of performance, uptime, and vendor responsiveness, much as has been the case with the Web hosting industry. Notwithstanding, it is the expectation of enterprise management that operating expenses be reduced through the use of cloud computing to replace new and existing IT infrastructure. This difference between expectation and what the industry can deliver at today's nearzero price points represents a challenge, both technical and organizational, which will have to be overcome to ensure large-scale adoption of cloud computing by the enterprise. …

Graphics Credit: Gary Neill

David Makogon offers links to Azure team blogs and voting sites in this 4/26/2010 post to the RDA Blogs.

Matt Prigge asks “Like it or not, cloud-based ‘IT as a service’ is coming -- and you're in its crosshairs. Are you up to the fight?” in a preface to his You vs. cloud computing post of 4/26/2010 to InforWorld’s Information Overload blog:

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard the blare of that hypemonster known as cloud computing. The cloud is revolutionizing the way we do IT, cutting costs, increasing efficiency, and making perfect toast every time! Such cheerleading about a field that barely exists is enough to make anyone tune out.

But don't change the channel quite yet. This is important: The cloud is growing up and it wants you, your infrastructure, and quite possibly your job. Your organization's management is reading some of the same trade magazines you're starting to ignore -- and the cloud's promise of better, faster, cheaper IT sounds good to them.

Fortunately, you have an edge: You know it's coming. Unlike the legions of well-paid software developers who promptly found themselves out of a job after they were outsourced early in the last decade, we in IT at least have had an ample chance to see what's coming and adapt before it arrives in full force. In reality, the growing prospect of the wholesale outsourcing of much of our infrastructure is an excellent opportunity to up our game and do what we do better. …

David continues with the reasons that “Why cloud computing is inevitable.”

BBC News reports “The UK will spend over £1 billion on cloud computing by 2012 - twice as much as today - researchers predict” in its Cloud computing to double by 2012 story of 4/26/2010:

This would mean more consumers and businesses subscribing to web-based services, such as Google Apps.

Cloud-based services currently account for around 7.5% of the £8 billion UK software market, according to research company TechMarketView. But others say cloud computing is hyped and will complement traditional desktop software rather than replace it.

"In the old days, big companies used to generate their own electricity. But they do not do that any more", said Philip Carnelley, senior analyst at TechMarketView. "Software is going the same way - let others do the processing."

TechMarketView predicts cloud services will be worth around £1.2 billion per year in the UK by 2012. "This is not just analysts hyping things up", says Philip Carnelley, a senior analyst at the company. "It is a genuine shift."

Cloud computing means that people do not have to invest in powerful computers and software to store their data. Instead, they can outsource their needs to cloud companies, which charge subscription fees.

Hybrid evolution

But not everyone agrees that cloud computing will replace traditional software which processes data locally. "The amount of cloud computing is quite small at the moment, so even if it does double that is not such a big deal", says analyst Laurent Lachal at rival research firm Ovum. "The IT industry loves to concentrate on a topic for a few months and then turn against it. There will be a backlash by the end of the year."

Lachal does not dismiss cloud computing, but he thinks its limitations make it more of an add-on to software. "It's becoming a hybrid system - for example you create your work on software on your PC, and then you save it and share it through the cloud."

Not as hyped as prognostications from the colonies.

Lori MacVittie’s The IT Optical Illusion essay of 4/26/2010 comes from Interop 2010:

Everyone has likely seen the optical illusion of the vase in which, depending on your focus, you either see a vase or two faces. This particular optical illusion is probably the best allegorical image for IT and in particular cloud computing I can imagine.

Depending on your focus within IT you’re either focused on – to borrow some terminology from SOA – design-time or run-time management of the virtualized systems and infrastructure that make up your data center. That focus determines what particular aspect of management you view as most critical, and unfortunately makes it difficult to see the “big picture”: both are critical components of a successful cloud computing initiative.

I realized how endemic to the industry this “split” is while prepping for today’s “Connecting On-Premise and On-Demand with Hybrid Clouds” panel at the Enterprise Cloud Summit @ Interop on which I have the pleasure to sit with some very interesting – but differently focused – panelists.

See, as soon as someone starts talking about “connectivity” the focus almost immediately drops to … the network. Right. That actually makes a great deal of sense and it is, absolutely, a critical component to building out a successful hybrid cloud computing architecture. But that’s only half of the picture, the design-time picture. What about run-time? What about the dynamism of cloud computing and virtualization? The fluid, adaptable infrastructure? You know, the connectivity that’s required at the application layers, like access control and request distribution and application performance.

Part of the reason you’re designing a hybrid architecture is to retain control. Control over when those cloud resources are used and how and by whom. In most cloud computing environments today, at least public ones, there’s no way for you to maintain that control because the infrastructure services are simply not in place to do so. Yet. At least I hope yet; one wishes to believe that some day they will be there. But today, they are not. Thus, in order to maintain control over those resources there needs to be a way to manage the run-time connectivity between the corporate data center (over which you have control) and the public cloud computing environment (which you do not).

That’s going to take some serious architecture work and it’s going to require infrastructure services from infrastructure capable of intercepting requests, inspecting the request in context of the user and the resource requested, and applying the policies and processes to ensure that only those clients you want to access those resources can access them, and those you prefer not access them are denied.

It will become increasingly important that IT be able to view its network in terms of both design and run-time connectivity if it is going to successfully incorporate public cloud computing resources into its corporate cloud computing – or traditional – network and application delivery network strategy. …

Lori continues with links to related articles.

Vivek Bhatnagar’s Windows Azure Buying Process and Account Management post of 4/25/2010 begins: 

Last week I had an opportunity to meet many CIOs in “CIO conference” at Microsoft campus. Some of them have already deployed workloads on Windows Azure. In all my discussion, there was a common question on Windows Azure account management. Therefore I decided to write new blog post on Windows Azure account management.

Windows Azure account management is an integrated process involving two portals i.e. Microsoft Online Commerce Portal (MOCP) and Windows Azure Developer Portal (DevPortal).

Microsoft Online Commerce Portal (MOCP) is a Web portal you use to try or buy subscriptions to Microsoft Online Services. Windows Azure Developer Portal (DevPortal) is a web portal you use to create services and deploy your code. A subscription on MOCP is mapped to a project in DevPortal.

Windows Azure buy work flow is below:

Vivek continues with detailed instructions for the Windows Azure buy workflow.

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Cloud Security and Governance

Paul Venezia posits “McAfee's update fiasco shows even trusted providers can cause catastrophic harm” in his McAfee's blunder, cloud computing's fatal flaw post of 4/26/2010 to InforWorld’s The Deep End blog:

Thanks for proving my fears well founded, McAfee.

A while ago, I wrote a piece about not trusting the cloud for a variety of reasons, predominately security and the potential for a third party to ruin my company whether it meant to or not. McAfee's massive blunder last week provided a case in point for that argument.

Granted, you can't really call McAfee a cloud vendor. McAfee's play is sort of the cloud model in reverse; instead of customers placing important assets on McAfee's cloud, customers download and install McAfee's software on their important assets -- desktops and servers -- and trust McAfee to issue updates without manual supervision. McAfee betrayed that trust in the worst way possible: It took down thousands and thousands of customer systems.

The same thing can and will happen to cloud vendors and their customers, but the damage could be far worse. While the McAfee debacle caused primarily Windows XP SP3 desktops and workstations to crash, servers and the corporate data stored on them were unaffected. If a similar situation were to happen to a real cloud vendor, the situation would be reversed. The time and aggravation required to reimage, repair, or reinstall hundreds or thousands of corporate desktop pales in comparison to the specter of massive data loss or long-term application and resource unavailability due to third-party problems. This should worry anyone who places trust in any cloud they don't control. …

Paul’s arguments fall far short of proving organizations that use off-premises PaaS are more vulnerable to amateurish quality control failures than those who run all IT operations in on-premises data centers. This is especially true of an upgrade bug that obliterated clients’ network connectivity.

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Cloud Computing Events

The Triangle .NET User Group announced an OData Workshop featuring Chris (Woody) Woodruff from 6/2/2010 at 8:30 PM to 6/5/2010 2010 at 12:00 PM (EDT) to be held at the Jane S. McKimmon Conference & Training Center, North Carolina State University, 1101 Gorman Street, Raleigh, NC 27606:

Abstract

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open protocol for sharing data. It provides a way to break down data silos and increase the shared value of data by creating an ecosystem in which data consumers can interoperate with data producers in a way that is far more powerful than currently possible, enabling more applications to make sense of a broader set of data. Every producer and consumer of data that participates in this ecosystem increases its overall value.

OData is consistent with the way the Web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web).   This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.

OData is released under the Open Specification Promise to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.

In this talk Chris will provide an in depth knowledge to this protocol, how to consume a OData service and finally how to implement an OData service on Windows using the WCF Data Services product.

Agenda

• Introductions (5 minutes)
• Overview of OData (10 minutes)
• The OData Protocol (1 hour)
• 15 minute break
• Producing OData Feeds (1 hour)
• Consuming OData Feeds (1 hour)

David Makogon reports that he’s presenting two sessions at the Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals (CMAP) Code Camp Spring 2010 on 5/8/2010 from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM EDT at the Loyola University Maryland Graduate Center in Columbia, MD.

• Microsoft Azure: The Essential Setup Guide
• Level: Beginner

Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform is live! And the tools are free! However, It's a bit tricky to get all set up properly, and it's even trickier to push code into the cloud and not be charged for it! Join me in this session and learn the proper way to get started and to launch your first Azure app!

• Microsoft Azure: Taking Advantage of the Platform
• Level: Beginner

Microsoft Azure consists of several "moving parts" - web roles, worker roles, tables, blobs, queues, service bus, diagnostics... In this session, we'll go over the purpose of each, and then build a demo that shows how this stuff works.

Brian Loesgen recommends a Microsoft Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event subtitled “Cloud benefits delivered” on 5/20/2010:

If you read my blog then you have an interest in BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric, Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, WCF, etc… That means that you would also be really interested in the virtual launch event coming up on May 20th 2010 (8:30AM Pacific Time). Details are below, the event site is http://www.appinfrastructure.com. …

Want to bring the benefits of the cloud to your current IT environment?
Cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including elastic scale and never-seen-before applications. While you ponder your long-term investment in the cloud, you can harness cloud benefits in your current IT environment now. Join us on May 20 at 8:30 A.M. Pacific Time to learn how your current IT assets can harness the benefits of the cloud on-premises—and can readily connect to new applications and data running in the cloud. Plus, you’ll hear some exciting product announcements, and a keynote on Microsoft’s latest investments in the application infrastructure space aimed at delivering on-demand scalability, highly available applications, a new level of connectivity, and more! Save the date!

David Hoerster advertises his OData session at the CMAP Code Camp Spring 2010:

• Introduction to WCF Data Services and OData
• Level: Intermediate

Exposing your data to client applications is a common requirement across most applications; however, there are many ways to accomplish this. Each application seems to implement it a different way which leads to inconsistency across your application spectrum. With the release of the .NET Framework 3.5, Microsoft has introduced WCF Data Services (was ADO.NET Data Services) which is a collection of classes and standards to allow you to expose your data consistently and securely to your client applications. We'll focus on WCF Data Services in .NET 4, in which Microsoft has beefed up the offering, and also the data protocol known as OData.

tbtechnet announced Windows Azure Virtual Boot Camp III May 3rd - May 10th 2010 on 4/26/2010:

After the huge success of the Windows Azure Virtual Boot Camp I and II, here comes…

Virtual Boot Camp III

Learn Windows Azure at your own pace, in your own time and without travel headaches.

Windows Azure one week pass is provided so you can put Windows Azure and SQL Azure through their paces.

NO credit card required.

You can start the Boot Camp any time during May 3rd and May 10th and work at your own pace.

The Windows Azure virtual boot camp pass is valid from 5am USA PST May 3rd through 6pm USA PST May 10th. …

tb continues with instructions for getting your virtual Boot Camp pass.

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

No significant articles today.

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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,OData. Open Data Protocol,Windows Azure AppFabric,Cloud Computing,Convergence 2010,Dynamics CRM,Dynamics ERP

28 TechEd North America Sessions with Keyword “Azure”

• Added ARC304 | Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing breakout session by Wade Wegner on 4/26/2010, reformatted session titles.

As of 4/26/2010, there were:

• 19 18 Breakout Sessions
• 5 Interactive Sessions
• 4 Hands-on Labs

scheduled for TechEd North America 2010. The following abstracts are from the current TechEd Session Catalog:

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Breakout Sessions

• ARC304 | Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Architecture
• Speaker(s): Wade Wegner
• Level: 300 – Advanced

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should you be moving? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, we explore how the Tribune Company has embraced the Windows Azure platform (including Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, and Project codename “Dallas”) to enhance and extend new and existing applications. We explore how they leverage elastic storage, scalable Web and Worker roles, leverage parallel and distributed compute, and handle inter- and intra-organizational communications. This session provides you with specific examples of cloud architectures (with examples) that will help you evaluate the Windows Azure platform for your next project.

ASI202 | Real-World SOA with Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Brian Loesgen, John deVadoss, Thomas Erl
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Companies worldwide are enjoying the benefits and efficiencies that can be realized through a well-defined and implement Service-Oriented Architecture strategy. For many, with the recent “go-live” of the Windows Azure platform, intriguing new architectural patterns for distributed, loosely-coupled applications are being made possible, allowing them to fundamentally re-think how they build and consume applications. In this session we explore what it means to realize the benefits of service-oriented architectures on the Microsoft .NET Framework, and see that exposing legacy assets by means of Web services whilst being necessary is not sufficient. We explore various on-premise and off-premise real-world SOA-related capabilities, examine a number of design patterns, and drill-down into what it takes to bridge from on-premise to the Windows Azure platform. Speakers for this session consist of authors from the recently-released “SOA with .NET and Windows Azure” book and also co-authors of the SOA Manifesto.

ASI204 | Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Overview

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Maggie Myslinska, Todd Holmquist-Sutherland
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Come learn how to use the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control as building block services for Web-based and hosted applications, and how developers can leverage services to create applications in the cloud and connect them with on-premises systems.

ASI302 | Architecting Hybrid Cloud Applications with the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Clemens Vasters, Juval Lowy
• Level: 300 - Advanced

In the abstract, all distributed applications need events management, remote calls and tunneling through various communication boundaries, from address spaces to firewalls and platforms. In the particular, often developers take these requirements either for granted as absolute mandates for specific technologies (“must use Web services”) or as impossible to approach (“it's too hard”) and thus limit the scope of their application both in capabilities and in market share. The availability of the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus is disruptive since it enables new design and deployment patterns that are simply inconceivable without it, opening new horizons for architecture, integration, interoperability, deployment, and productivity. In this unique session organized especially for Tech·Ed, Clemens Vasters and Juval Lowy share their perspective, insight, and expertise in architecting solutions using the service bus for hybrid applications that straddle both the cloud and the intranet, all from the perspective of the application, not merely the technology itself. See how Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) as the universal communication fabric enables families of communication patters, from discrete events, to elastic communication with buffers, discovery with the service bus, how to design for tunneling for diagnostics or logging, to enabling edge devices. The session ends with a glimpse at what is in store for the next versions of the service bus and the future patterns.

ASI305 | Integrating LoB Systems (SAP, Mainframe) with the Cloud Using Microsoft BizTalk Server and the Windows Azure AppFabric

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Application Server & Infrastructure
• Speaker(s): Chris Kabat, Elizabeth Graham
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Cloud computing is a technology that has widespread impact on IT organizations of all sizes. Organizations with large enterprise applications, such as SAP or mainframe applications, often wonder how they can realize the value of cloud computing when they already have such as huge investment in on-premise software. In this session we demonstrate how we interact with a business process that involves an SAP and a Mainframe application from a cloud-based application, leveraging all the advantages the cloud has to offer.  We use Microsoft BizTalk Server and Windows Azure AppFabric to expose enterprise data to our application in a secure and scalable way.

COS200 | Cloud Computing Overview: Moving to the Cloud with Microsoft

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Tim O'Brien
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Businesses are increasingly looking to the cloud as a way to maximize the value and reach of their technology investments, and the Cloud Services track is where you’ll learn about Microsoft’s investments in service-based applications and platform technologies. Join us for this track kickoff session and learn about Microsoft’s vision for cloud computing and the range of tools and technologies to support development, deployment, and management of applications in the cloud. Learn about the Windows Azure platform that allows developers to design and deploy applications and services for the cloud. Also learn about enterprise-ready services from Microsoft Online Services that help organizations quickly deploy and use communication, collaboration, and business intelligence capabilities.

COS302 | Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Steve Marx
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Go beyond "Hello, World" and see how Windows Azure supports building complex, multi-tier applications.

COS303 | Lap around the Windows Azure Platform

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Steve Marx
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Come hear how the Windows Azure Platform provides a scalable compute and storage environment with Windows Azure, secure connectivity with Service Bus and Access Control Service, and a relational database with SQL Azure. Learn about these new services and see several demos that show how to build applications that run in and take advantage of Microsoft’s new cloud platform.

COS304 | Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to Microsoft SharePoint Online Customization and Integration Deep Dive

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Brad Younge
• Level: 300 - Advanced

During this session, we discuss how we accomplished the CRM Online and SharePoint Online customizations and integration that are available in our Stratus product. We initially demo the final product and touch on the high level architecture which includes three of Microsoft's cloud platforms: CRM Online, SharePoint Online and Azure. Then we dive deep into how we accomplished making customizations to CRM and SharePoint on the fly, how we created a seamless user experience in both the above applications without being able to deploy custom binaries to either platform, and how the Azure platform brought everything together. Stratus is an Enterprise Application Mashup tool that integrates the best features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Microsoft SharePoint. CRM users can feed client contact information and upload client documents directly to SharePoint sites from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM while SharePoint users can view these documents and general information about the CRM accounts, opportunities and cases they relate to. To learn more go to http://stratus.statera.com.

COS305 | Microsoft SQL Azure Development Best Practices

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Rick Negrin
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This session covers best practices for using the SQL Azure cloud relational database. We walk through the creation of a departmental application from scratch. We see firsthand how easy it is to provision a SQL Azure Database and start developing against it. We also look at importing and exporting data, and reporting. Time is also spent looking at strategies for migrating your existing applications to the cloud so that you are provided with high availability, fault tolerance and visibility to these often unseen data repositories. Finally we see how the reach of the cloud provides you with opportunities to create a new, differentiated class of applications.

COS306 | The Economics of Cloud Computing

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Dianne O'Brien
• Level: 300 - Advanced

When architecting and developing cloud applications, you now have the ability to directly impact the cost for running your application. In this session, learn about the Windows Azure Platform pricing model, the service level agreements for the platform, and the top cost considerations you should make when architecting your application.

COS307 | Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to Build Applications That Run on Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Jim Nakashima
• Level: 300 - Advanced

A platform is only as powerful as the tools that let you build applications for it. This session focuses on using demos, not slides, to show the best way to use Visual Studio 2010 to develop Windows Azure applications. Learn tips, tricks and solutions to common problems when creating or moving an existing application to run on Windows Azure. Come see how Visual Studio 2010 supports all parts of the development cycle as we show how to take an ASP.NET application running on IIS and make it a scalable cloud application running on Windows Azure.

COS310 | Windows Azure Storage Deep Dive

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Jai Haridas
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Learn about the storage capabilities provided by Windows Azure including storing and manipulating blobs, structured non-relational entities, and using queues. Learn tips, tricks, and performance guidance for building new applications or migrating an existing project.

COS311 | Migrating Applications to Microsoft SQL Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Cihan Biyikoglu
• Level: 300 - Advanced

This exciting session walks through the creation of a departmental application from scratch. See firsthand how easy it is to provision a SQL Azure Database and start developing against it. We look at importing and exporting data, and reporting. Time is also spent looking at strategies for migrating your existing departmental applications to the cloud so that you are provided with high availability, fault tolerance, and visibility to these often unseen data repositories. Finally, we show how the reach of the cloud provides you with opportunities to create a new, differentiated class of applications.

OSP213 | SharePoint and Azure: How Do They Play Together?

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Office & SharePoint
• Speaker(s): Steve Fox
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

There is immense opportunity for you to build and deploy cloud-centric solutions using the new Windows Azure platform. However, what does that opportunity look like vis-à-vis Microsoft SharePoint? In this session, see the different ways in which you can integrate Azure services with SharePoint to extend your SharePoint solutions into the cloud.

SIA303 | Identity and Access Management: Windows Identity Foundation and Windows Azure

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Security, Identity & Access
• Speaker(s): Vittorio Bertocci
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Claims-based identity provides an open and interoperable approach to identity and access control that can be consistently applied both on-premises and in the cloud. Come to this session to learn about how Windows Identity Foundation can be used to secure your Web Roles hosted in Windows Azure, how you can take advantage of existing on-premises identities and how to make the best of features in our cloud offering, such as certificate management and staged environments.

SIA317 | Securing the Microsoft Cloud with Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Forefront Families of Products

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Security, Identity & Access
• Speaker(s): John Howie, Mark Estberg
• Level: 300 - Advanced

The infrastructure that supports Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise cloud offerings, including Azure, Bing, BPOS, Hotmail, and Messenger, runs on servers in datacenters world-wide. Running as many servers as Microsoft does presents challenges for any management software, including Microsoft’s own, yet there is a need to meet compliance burdens and ensure the ongoing security of the systems that keep customers’ data both secure and maintain their privacy. In this session hear how Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services security and compliance team meets statutory and regulatory compliance requirements, and keeps systems secure using Systems Center Configuration Management, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager products, and Forefront Identity Manager and Endpoint Protection products. Also, learn of uses that these products are put to, that might surprise you, and many of the tricks and techniques used to overcome the problems of scale and geographic distribution, and how you can apply the same to your own systems and networks.

WEM201 | Discover Windows Embedded Standard 7 as Your Next Application Platform

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Windows Embedded
• Speaker(s): Alexander Wechsler
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

"Did you ever dream of building highly interactive and robust next generation applications on a platform that can be tailored exactly to your needs? If so, this session is just for you! Discover how Windows Embedded Standard 7 combines the power of Windows 7 with the ease, flexibility and dedicated functionality of the Embedded branch of the Windows family (predecessors: NT 4.0 embedded, XP embedded, WES 2009). Join us for a wild ride across a lot of technologies such as Silverlight 4.0, Sensor & Location PLatform, Enhanced / File Based Write Filter, Windows Azure, Gadgets, Powershell, Dialog Filter, the new managed DPWS stack, to name just a few. The time to design the next wave of smart connect devices is now!"

WSV310 | What Does the Cloud Mean for the IT Professional?

• Session Type: Breakout Session
• Track: Windows Server
• Speaker(s): Joey Snow
• Level: 300 – Advanced

Do cloud services make the IT pro obsolete? Join us in this informative session to discuss the role of IT pros with regard to Windows Azure. Discover what’s changed and what hasn’t for the IT professional including how to manage services in the new cloud environment and what tools are available to help manage the application lifecycle.

 

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Interactive Sessions

COS02-INT | Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Patrick Butler Monterde
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Windows Azure allows any developer or business access to extreme scale computing and storage capacity. This session provides developers insight on the underpinnings that make Windows Azure well suited for computationally intensive/burst applications, as well as design principles for loosely coupled scale out applications that take full advantage of the Windows Azure platform. A typical example from the financial modeling industry is given to illustrate.

COS03-INT | Deploying, Managing, and Monitoring Cloud Applications on Windows Azure

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Ryan Dunn
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Microsoft understands that cloud computing needs to provide the same level of manageability and serviceability as existing premises applications. This session provides IT pros and businesses guidance on best practices around management and deployment of Windows Azure applications to meet service level agreements and application upgrade requirements. Microsoft provided tooling is used in some cases to illustrate.

COS06-INT | Migrating Existing Applications into the Cloud with Windows Azure

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Mark Kottke
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

Windows Azure provides developers and businesses the benefit of lower TCO through fully automated service management, while providing instant scale out of existing applications. Come learn how to identify which existing LOB and Web apps make good targets for easy migration to the cloud and create a plan to migrate between on-premises to Windows Azure.

COS07-INT | Using Microsoft SQL Azure as a Datahub to Connect Microsoft SQL Server and Silverlight Clients

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Sean Kelley
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this session we demonstrate how the Sync Framework is being used to enable a new series of exciting scenarios made possible by SQL Azure. First, we demonstrate how the Sync Framework is being integrated with SQL Server to make it easy to extend data to SQL Azure in only a few clicks. We then show how customers can drop down to lower levels in the stack in an effort to customize the behavior of that data movement without having to rebuild the application from the ground up. Finally, we demonstrate how the Sync Framework is being enhanced to expand our offline client-side reach beyond traditional Windows Presentation Foundation/Winforms applications by adding support for Microsoft Silverlight, HTML 5, Windows Phone 7, and other devices such as an iPhone.

COS13-INT | Database Performance in a Multi-tenant Environment

• Session Type: Interactive Session
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Speaker(s): Liam Cavanagh
• Level: 300 - Advanced

Microsoft SQL Azure presents unique opportunities with regards to performance. The key distinction is multi-tenancy where every user database is co-located with multiple other databases on the same machine. Since your database no longer runs on dedicated hardware, activities of your neighbor databases could impact your performance. When the neighbors are quiet, your database has the luxury to utilize all the resources on the machine. However, when the neighbors get busy, your database performance may be affected. In this session, we show you a case study in which we quantify the multi-tenancy impact on performance. We give you some guidelines to monitor such effect on your database and what you can do to make your database performance more predictable.

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Hands-on Labs

COS01-HOL | Introduction to the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

This lab covers the basics of the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus. It shows how to connect clients and services via SOAP and REST over the Service Bus using the AppFabric SDK. It explores the different bindings you can use, shows how to expose a MEX endpoint, and also how to handle message security and binary data.

COS02-HOL | Introduction to the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

The Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) is a service designed to secure REST Web services. ACS allows a REST Web services to integrate with both simple clients and enterprise identity technologies using a single code base.

COS03-HOL | Introduction to Windows Azure

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this lab, explore the basic elements of a Windows Azure service by creating a simple GuestBook application that demonstrates many features of the Windows Azure platform, including Web and worker roles, blob storage, table storage, and queues.

COS04-HOL | Introduction to Microsoft SQL Azure

• Session Type: Hands-on Lab
• Track: Cloud Computing & Online Services
• Level: 200 - Intermediate

In this lab, walk through a series of simple use cases for SQL Azure such as: preparing your account, managing logins, creating database objects, and querying your database.

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Technorati Tags: TechEd 2010,TechEd North America 2010,Azure,Windows Azure,SQL Azure,AppFabric,Windows Azure AppFabric,Azure Access Control Services,Codename "Dallas",Cloud Computing

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 4/24/2010+

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

 
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, Codename “Dallas” and OData
• AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus
• Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses
• Windows Azure Infrastructure
• Cloud Security and Governance
• Cloud Computing Events
• Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

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

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

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

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

CloudBerryMan’s Manage Azure Blob Storage with CloudBerry Explorer post of 4/25/2010 to CIO.com’s Cloud Computing News blog announces:

CloudBerry Lab has released CloudBerry Explorer v1.1, an application that allows users to manage files on Windows Azure blob storage just as they would on their local computers.

CloudBerry Explorer allows end users to accomplish simple tasks without special technical knowledge, automate time-consuming tasks to improve productivity.

Among new features are Development Storage and $root container support and availability of the professional version of CloudBerry Explorer for Azure.

Development storage is a local implementation of Azure storage that is installed along with Azure SDK. Users can use it to test and debug their Azure applications locally before deploying them to Azure. The newer version of CloudBerry Explorer allows working with the Development Storage the same way you work with the online storage.

$root container is a top level container in Azure Blob Storage account. All other containers are created within this top level container. With the newer release of CloudBerry Explorer users can work with $root container just like with any other container.

With the release 1.1 CloudBerry Lab also introduces the PRO version of CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob storage. This version will have all the features of CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO but designed exclusively for Windows Azure. CloudBerry Explorer PRO for Azure will be priced at $39.99 but for the first month CloudBerry Lab offers an introductory price of $29.99.

In addition CloudBerry Lab as a part of their strategy to support leading Cloud Storage Providers is working on the version of CloudBerry Backup designed to work with Azure Blob Storage. This product is expected to be available in May 2010.

CloudBerry Explorer is designed to work on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft PowerShell command line interface allows advanced computer users integrate Amazon S3 storage access with other routines.

CloudBerry Explorer for Windows is freeware. CloudBerry Explorer PRO costs $39.99 (US). Users have to continue paying their Windows Azure charges directly to Microsoft.

For more information & to download your copy, visit our Web site at:

CloudBerry Explorer Freeware for Windows Azure http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-azure

CloudBerry Explorer PRO for Windows Azure http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=explorer-azure-pro

<Return to section navigation list> 

SQL Azure Database, Codename “Dallas” and OData

G. Garza’s Microsoft SQL Azure – A Database for the Cloud post of 4/24/2010 to the Windows 7 News & Tips blog provides a brief, semi-technical description of SQL Azure and an embedded 00:04:01 video:

If you are a SQL database administrator or developer, Microsoft Azure will give you with multiple database features normally found on your server. Cloud based computing has received a lot of publicity. Microsoft is presenting a SQL Database called Azure that is a cloud-based relational database service built on the back of existing SQL Server technologies like Sql Server 2005, or SQL Server 2008. It provides a scalable, highly available, and multi-tenant service hosting a database by Microsoft on the cloud. For IT database managers, SQL Azure Database helps to address the problems associated with the deployment and distribution of multiple databases.

Among the things that developers do not have to do is to install, setup, patch or manage any software. The high availability and fault tolerance is a part of the database service, and there is no physical administration required.

SQL Azure Database supports Transact-SQL (T-SQL), a standard in the database development environment. Customers can use their existing knowledge in T-SQL development which is the standard relational data model. The model is familiar for its symmetry and coordintaion with existing on-premises databases. When database administrators use SQL Azure they can help reduce costs by integrating their programs with existing toolsets. This will provide symmetry with databases that reside on-premises as well as on cloud databases.

What do you get with SQL Asure?

• You can create scalable, and custom web applications. These are especially needed in a small to mid-size businesses, hobbyist, and startups.
• You can develop corporate departmental applications
• You can make packaged line-of-business applications. These are attractive to traditional, SaaS ISVs and for custom developers.
• You can also bring multiple data sources together that are in the Cloud to enable secure access from multiple locations, desktop and/or devices.

James Coenen-Eyre (@bondigeek) offers a glowing third-party review of OData in his OData – “He who dies with the most data wins” post of 4/19/2010:

I have been digesting some of the OData videos from Mix10 and gaining some clarity on just what it is. Hopefully this post will give someone else some clarity as well.

“What I find especially cool about OData is that it realises the possibility of bringing together disparate data sources in a consistent manner thus simplifying the ability to create an application that combines data from different sources seamlessly.”

So what is OData? Well it is closely related to WCF Data Services which at one point were called ADO.NET Data Services and originally had a code name of Astoria. You can get the history over at Wikipedia here.  The official website can be found here www.odata.org and it’s a really nicely laid out site. Simple but informative. I think Microsoft are going for the OpenSource angle here with the look and the content and I would say they have succeeded. The more cynical out there might see this as somehow sinister. I choose to see this as Microsoft maturing and speaking the language that developers (in particular OpenSource developers) want to hear.

Ok you still haven’t answered my question. What is OData?

Well as it says over there, it’s the Open Data Protocol.

Having watched the videos, ferreted around a bit and used WCF and ADO.NET plenty over the years I see the OData Protocol as being the glue that is needed to bring together diverse sets of data in an Open and Standard way.

It’s built on Open Standards after all; REST, HTTP, XML,  Atom and JSON.

It lets us consume data in a standard way on both the client and server and over HTTP. Even cross domain calls are easy.

What I find especially cool about OData is that it realises the possibility of bringing together disparate data sources in a consistent manner thus simplifying the ability to create an application that combines data from different sources seamlessly.

And it doesn’t end there. It does so in a web friendly way giving us access to Read/Write data using standard HTTP urls with as fine a grain of control as we require and utilising standard web security protocols. …

Jamesy continues with “jQuery Support,” “Data Mashups” and “Developer Support” topics, and then concludes:

I couldn’t possibly cover everything there is to about OData in this article but I would encourage you to check out the links throughout this article and explore. This is perhaps the most exciting Data Protocol I have seen in quite some time. I say that is it builds beautifully on existing tried and true technologies like LINQ, WCF and open standards.

Vitkaras reached Part 4 of his WCF Data Services Expressions series on 4/16/2010 with Data Services Expressions – Part 4 – Accessing properties, which I missed when posted:

In this part we will talk about accessing properties in the expressions. WCF Data Services may need to access a property value in many different places in the query, but it always uses the same way to do so. Below I’ll use the $filter as an example, but the same would apply to any other place in the query (for example $orderby, $select and so on).

Property metadata

In the WCF Data Services world the shape of the data is defined using metadata classes like ResourceType and ResourceProperty. To get a general idea how to do that, take a look at this series by Alex. Note that even if you’re not using a custom provider, underneath both the built-in providers will define the metadata in the same way, so there’s no hidden magic there.

Currently WCF Data Services uses three kinds of resource types: Entity types, Complex types and Primitive types. Each resource type is defined in the metadata by an instance of ResourceType class.

Both entity and complex types can define properties. A property can be of any resource type (with some limitations, but that’s for another topic). Each property is defined in the metadata by an instance of the ResourceProperty class.

The value of a property is either a primitive type, instance of an entity type, instance of a complex type or null. The actual CLR type of the property value is determined (and defined) by the resource type of the property. Each resource type has an instance type which is the CLR type used to store an instance of that resource type. For example a primitive resource type Edm.String, has instance type System.String. For entity and complex types, the instance type is defined by you in the metadata, usually it’s some class. …

Vitek continues with sample source code.

<Return to section navigation list> 

AppFabric: Access Control and Service Bus

Jeffrey Schwartz reports Microsoft Set To Release ADFS 2.0 (formerly codenamed “Geneva”) in this 4/23/2010 post to Virtualization Review:

Microsoft is expected to release Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, a key add-in to Windows Server 2008 that promises to simplify single sign-on authentication to multiple systems and the company's cloud-based portfolio.

ADFS 2.0 (formerly code-named "Geneva"), which provides claims-based authentication to applications developed with Microsoft's recently released Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), will be available "in any day," said J.G. Chirapurath, senior director in Microsoft's Identity and Security Business Group, in an interview.

Microsoft's claims-based Identity Model, implemented in the Windows Communication Foundation of the .NET Framework, presents authentication schema such as identification attributes, roles, groups and policies and a means of managing those claims, as tokens. Applications built by enterprise developers and ISVs based on WIF will also be able to accept these tokens.

ADFS 2.0 likely will prove important to Microsoft's overall cloud computing vision. Several Microsoft officials and outside observers believe that as enterprise customers, ISVs and software-as-service providers add ADFS 2.0 to their Windows Server environments, it will remove a key barrier to those reluctant to deploy their apps to the cloud.

Pass-through authentication in ADFS 2.0 is enabled by accepting tokens based on both the Web Services Federation (WSFED) and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standards. While Microsoft has long promoted WSFED, it only agreed to support the more widely adopted SAML spec 18 months ago.

Many enterprises have expressed reluctance to use cloud services, such as Microsoft's Windows Azure, because of security concerns. "Security [issues], particularly identity and the management of those identities, are perhaps the single biggest blockers in achieving that nirvana of cloud computing," Chirapurath said.

Because ADFS 2.0 is built into Windows Azure, organization[s] can now offer claims-based tokens that will work with both Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft's cloud-based services, enabling hybrid cloud scenarios. A user can authenticate to Azure or Windows Server and WIF-enabled applications using InfoCards built into Windows 7. [Emphasis added.]

"Just like e-mail led to the explosive use of Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services will do the same for the cloud," Chirapurath said.

Danny Kim, CTO of Boston-based Microsoft Certified Gold Partner FullArmor, who has stress-tested ADFS 2.0, said it is ready for production.

"ADFS 2.0 does the linking of identities back to our server space and our cloud-based services and we have one version that works across all of those environments," Kim said. One major financial services firm wants to roll it out right away to allow its users to authenticate applications running on FullArmor's Windows Azure-based applications, Kim added.

"This is a security-conscious company that has said unless security is guaranteed, we are not going to deploy these services in the cloud," Kim said. ADFS maps the user's token into Active Directory, which is passed through to other ADFS-enabled systems, he explained. …

<Return to section navigation list>

Live Windows Azure Apps, APIs, Tools and Test Harnesses

Brian Galicia of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Oline Team reports New innovations with CRM Online from Convergence 2010 on 4/25/2010:

Press release

1 - May 2010 Service Update:

Expanded language support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The May 2010 service update is the first wave for moving Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online into international markets with multilingual capabilities for North American customers who have departments or teams with French, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese language requirements.

New Portal accelerators. The service update adds new Portal accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. These accelerators include Event Management, eService and Partner Relationship Management and allow organizations to extend their reach and extend the power of CRM to external constituents.

New developer tools and resources. The service update provides new developer tools in the updated Microsoft Dynamics CRM Software Development Kit (SDK) to enable the connection of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with other on-demand and on-premises applications and services such as Windows Azure. [Emphasis added.]

Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration. A new built-in integration framework for Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables customers to easily connect the two systems to help provide business insight and improve user productivity across financials, supply chain, and sales and service. The integration is supported with both on-premises and cloud versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics GP 10. [Emphasis added.]

 

Derrick Harris asserts With SaaS, Microsoft Sweetens Its Azure Offering with TownHall in this 4/25/2010 abstract of his Why SaaS and Paas Could Equal Cloud Computing Gold article for GigaOm Pro (requires paid subscription):

Microsoft this week rolled out its CampaignReady suite of services, which is anchored by the Windows Azure-hosted TownHall. Designed for political campaigns, the suite works by letting candidates connect with constituents via TownHall, while Microsoft’s online collaboration and advertising tools help campaign workers communicate with each other and spread their messages. Especially for local or regional campaigns without the resources to build the specialized tools President Obama’s utilized, Microsoft’s pitch — a prepackaged solution that can be set up, torn down and paid for on demand — should be appealing. But Microsoft’s SaaS-plus-PaaS business model has legs beyond politics, and beyond Redmond.

As I describe in my column this week at GigaOM Pro, the combination of cloud services designed for and hosted on cloud platforms seems like a surefire strategy to secure PaaS (or even IaaS) adoption. By creating targeted applications designed specifically for use on their platforms, cloud providers can increase the likelihood of bringing customers into the fold (and can increase their profit margins) by letting applications help sell the platform instead of relying on the platform itself.

The possibilities are perhaps best exemplified by the number of Salesforce.com customers using its flagship CRM offering, which sits atop its Force.com platform — more than 72,000, according to the company. Presumably, it was positive experiences with the SaaS application that inspired 200,000-plus developers to build more than 135,000 custom applications that run on Force.com. It’s possible that Force.com could have attracted an equally large base as a standalone offering not intrinsically connected with Salesforce.com’s SaaS business, but unlikely.

The issue for most cloud providers is figuring out how to develop an application strategy to complement their infrastructural competencies. Microsoft, on the other hand, brought its decades of software experience with it when it launched Windows Azure. It developed its Pinpoint marketplace of third-party applications ready to run on the platform, it partnered with business-friendly ISVs like Intuit, and now it’s gotten into the SaaS act itself with TownHall. Azure has garnered its fair share of praise, and if Microsoft continues down the SaaS path, Azure could garner more than its fair share of customers and dollars. Read the full post here.

GigaOM Network will present its Structure conference on 6/23 and 6/24 in San Francisco.

See CloudBerryMan’s Manage Azure Blob Storage with CloudBerry Explorer post of 4/25/2010 to CIO.com’s Cloud Computing News blog in the Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services section.

Jim O’Neill’s Feeling @Home with Windows Azure, at Home post of 4/24/2010 provides additional information about Stanford University’s Folding@Home project:

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months working with and talking about Windows Azure to a variety of audiences, but if you’re anything like me, it can be hard to truly ‘get it’ until you touch it.  So to bring it all home (pun intended), my colleagues Brian Hitney, John McClelland, and I have been working on a pretty cool virtual event.

@Home with Windows Azure, is a two-hour webcast, which we’ll be repeating over the next couple of months, through which we’ll cover many of the core components of Windows Azure in a rather unique context; this is not your father’s “Hello World” experience!

The application we’ll be building leverages Stanford University’s Folding@home project.  Folding@home is a distributed computing application, where participants donate spare cycles of their own machines (at home, get it?) to running simulations of protein folding.

Protein folding refers the process by which proteins assemble themselves to perform specific functions, like acting as enzymes or antigens.  When things go wrong, diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis can result, so understanding why things go wrong is critical to advancing treatment and finding cures.   Protein folding though is a very compute-intensive operation, and simulating just a nanosecond of folding activity can take as much as a day of CPU time!

That’s where Windows Azure comes in.  During these sessions we’ll walk through the steps to build a cloud application that will use Azure compute instances to contribute to the Folding@home project.   Registrants will get a no-strings-attached, two-week Azure account as part of the deal, so you’ll have a chance to build your own Azure application and contribute to medical science – how cool is that! …

Joannes Vermorel’s students in the "Génie logiciel et Cloud Computing" course of the ENS (Paris) have produced a “browser-based, minimalistic, massively multiplayer strategy game” called Sqwarea that runs in Windows Azure. From Sqwarea’s description on Codeplex:

This is a project for a browser-based, minimalistic, massively multiplayer strategy game.

It is done as a part of the "Génie logiciel et Cloud Computing" course of the ENS (Paris)

Rules and description of the game: Introduction

• You are a King battling over a gigantic map to conquer the world. Train soldiers, conquer new territories, and resist the assault of other kingdoms.
• This is a massive multiplayer online game: all players are on the same single map. This map is an infinite 2D square matrix.
• The game is time-constrained, played over weeks (even months, or years) rather than minutes. Players are typically expected to play session of a few minutes once or twice a day.

Map

The world is flat (well known Middle Age fact), and looks like a squared grid. Each land square can be either neutral (in grey below) or part of a kingdom (colors below). Each kingdom has a King (in black below), that can be positioned on top of any land square of his kingdom:

Two cases are considered to be adjacent if they have a common edge: common vertices are not enough. The goal for each King is, of course, to spread his kingdom. …

Robin Morrisset continues with additional play details.

Windows Azure Infrastructure

Pedro Hernandez’ Microsoft Joulemeter: Using Software to Green the Data Center post of 4/25/2010 to the GigaOm blog is a Q&A session on Microsoft Research’s energy monitoring initiatives:

Exactly much power does it take to run a virtual machine or specific piece of software? That’s the answer the Joulemeter team at Microsoft Research is hoping to answer for IT managers.

Over the years there have been several innovations to reduce energy usage in the data center, from custom, low-power servers to non-traditional cooling approaches. But more recently, attention has been turning to one feature common to all IT infrastructures: software. Intel, for example, recently unveiled its Energy Checker SDK in a bid to help developers optimize their code for energy efficiency. Now Microsoft is getting in on the act with Joulemeter.

According to Jie Liu, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, along with his fellow researchers Dr. Aman Kansal and Mr. Michel Goraczko, Joulemeter could have big implications for planning and monetizing virtual server environments and cloud infrastructures. In an email Q&A with Jiu, he answers some questions about Joulemeter and its green data center potential. …

Pedro continues with a “lightly edited” version of the Q&A.

Dom Green defines an Infrastructure Access Layer to abstract away your underlying [Azure or other cloud] infrastructure from your business logic or processing in this 4/25/2010 post:

The Infrastructure Access Layer, or IAL for short is a simple concept, nothing new, in-fact you have all been using something similar for years when programming against your databases. I have just expanded the concept to the cloud (and the ability to create “cloud ready” applications).

Infrastructure Access Layer (IAL)

The Infrastructure Access Layer is simply a way to abstract away your underlying infrastructure from your business logic or processing. This means that I can easily change how my applications interact with the infrastructure just by changing a method within the IAL and the business logic would be none the wiser.

Lets take a simple example, I may be developing an applications that takes work items and processes them. I create a method in the IAL called GetWorkItem which will return to my business logic the work item to be processed. This method can then call out to Azure Queues to get a work item, or maybe in the future you will want to switch out where we are getting the work item from, maybe we want to use a web service to call another location, use blob storage to store large work items or listen for a work item to be passed onto a service bus. This can all be dealt with in a single place.

All the business logic knows and cares about is that it is going to call the GetWorkItem method and get a work item back, not where it came from or how it received it it.

Cloud Ready…

Even with more and more people are moving toward the cloud, there are still companies that aren’t quite ready to make the jump, but realise that in the near future may have to and want to know how to create applications that will be able to transition easily to the cloud when they are ready.

By programming against the Infrastructure Access Layer companies will be able to make this move a lot smoother, by just replacing the needed classes so that they interact with the cloud rather than the old infrastructure.

A great example of this would be using a messaging system such as MSMQ as part of your on premise application, and then being able to easily switch this out for Windows Azure Queues or the App Fabric Service Bus when moving into the cloud. Having to make minimal if any changes to your business logic.

Keeping the cloud contained

As I talked about in my last post the cloud can end up getting everywhere and you can soon end up breaking the principle of DRY (Don’t  Repeat Yourself).

With the IAL you can easily keep the cloud contained, letting a minimal number of project have access to the cloud, making SDK upgrades and maintenance easier.

Is that it?

It is indeed. As I said at the start, the IAL is a simple concept that allows you to abstract away your underlying infrastructure from your business logic and also help create cloud ready applications for when people are ready to make that push to the cloud.

The RetirementJobs.com website reports that Microsoft is seeking a Director of Test, Cloud Computing as of 4/23/2010:

We are looking for a Director of Test, who is passionate about re-defining how services are engineered. Our vision is to deliver testing as a service - sharing mature ideas with Windows Azure developers and ISVs. We work in small agile teams taking big innovative bets. If you want to work on hard technical challenges, have a large impact on improving agility of engineering services, with personal growth path then this could be the position for you. [Emphasis added.]

Responsibilities

• Leading a team of engineers to design and implement a testing model for a massively scalable and available system.
• Define the platform quality bar and mechanisms for prevention and earlier detection of SLA issues.
• Employ innovative techniques to detect potential perf, scalability, deployment, or operational (failure recoveries) regressions.
• Develop end-to-end automation for engineering workflow - from developer desktop to production.
• Implement development of shared test infrastructure for platform wide testing
• Coach and develop team members.

Qualifications

BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent.

10+ year of experience leading a development or test of software platforms, preferably in server or cloud based systems.

Proven track record of technical accomplishment and high quality delivery.

Ability to build solid technical teams and mentor leads

Strong project management skills.

Knowledge of various testing techniques and approaches.

My take is that a retiree isn’t likely to be hired for this job. I wonder what the charge for “testing [Azure] as a service” will be.

SnoBlaze introduces its blazeS+S™ Framework for Windows Azure in this detailed 4/2010 PowerPoint deck:

• Reducing the overlap between Azure and implementing a S+S application …
• Decreasing the cost of development for new S+S applications …
• Shortening the time it takes to develop and deploy applications …

blazeS+S™ is a framework providing a common architecture to facilitate the development of S+S applications in the Azure cloud.

The framework consists of architectural design guidelines, class libraries, interfaces, development standards and a common way for implementing and integrating S+S services or extending existing services living in the Azure Cloud.

What Is Blaze S+S?

• Developed by SnoBlaze Corporation (SnoBlaze) in Q4 2009.
• S+S framework that provides all the underlying infrastructure required to build a S+S application on the Azure Platform.
• S+S Delivery Platform that contains components generally required as a service delivery infrastructure for any S+S oriented application.
• Solution Accelerator reducing the burden on the development team in creating underlying “plumbing” code freeing the development team to focus more on building the components required to meet the business needs.
• S+S software framework that helps the transition of an existing business application to the S+S model, or the building of a S+S-enabled application from scratch.

The remaining slides disclose the details of SnoBlaze’s business plan for the blazeS+S framework.

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Cloud Security and Governance

Chris Hoff’s (@Beaker) The Four Horsemen Of the Virtualization (and Cloud) Security Apocalypse… post of 4/25/2010 relates:

I just stumbled upon this YouTube video (link here, embedded below) interview I did right after my talk at Blackhat 2008 titled “The 4 Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse (PDF)” [There's a better narrative to the PDF that explains the 4 Horsemen here.]

I found it interesting because while it was rather “new” and interesting back then, if you ‘s/virtualization/cloud‘ especially from the perspective of heavily virtualized or cloud computing environments, it’s even more relevant today!  Virtualization and the abstraction it brings to network architecture, design and security makes for interesting challenges.  Not much has changed in two years, sadly.

We need better networking, security and governance capabilities!

Same as it ever was.

Beaker concludes with links to his related articles.

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Cloud Computing Events

My Three Azure-Related Sessions at Microsoft’s Convergence 2010 Conference post of 4/25/2010 notes:

MicrosoftDynamics’ Convergence 2010 conference being held this week (4/24 through 4/27/2010) includes a few cloud-related sessions:

CSCRM22 Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Building Relationship Management Solutions in the Cloud

• Monday, April 26 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
• Session Type: Concurrent Session
• Skill Level: 300 – Experienced
• Audience: Technical Decision Maker
• Speaker(s): Girish Raja, Nikhil Hasija

IDCRM22 Connecting in the Cloud

• Monday, April 26 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
• Session Type: Interactive Discussion
• Track: Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Skill Level: 300 – Experienced
• Audience: Technical Decision Maker
• Speaker(s): Craig Fleming, Dennis Ambrose, Heidi Tucker

CSPP04 Leveraging Microsoft Azure to Extend Your Microsoft Dynamics ERP Solution

• Tuesday, April 27 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
• Session Type: Concurrent Session
• Track: Potpourri
• Skill Level: 200 – Intermediate
• Audience: Technical Decision Maker
• Speaker(s): Ashvin Mathew, Ricky Gangsted-Rasmussen

See the original post for session descriptions.

Chris Kanaracus quotes Stephen Elop’s keynote at Convergence 2010 in this Microsoft Exec: We and Users Win With Cloud post of 4/25/2010 to PCWorld magazine:

Microsoft is firmly on the cloud-computing bandwagon and with good reason -- it can make more money by doing so, even as it helps customers cut costs, business division head Stephen Elop said at the Convergence conference in Atlanta on Sunday.

The company has spent billions so far to build out its cloud infrastructure for massive economies of scale, Elop said during a meeting with press and analysts. "What we're doing is taking cost savings and taking them back to the customer."

Microsoft will win out as well, Elop contended. Microsoft is not only selling applications via the cloud, but raw computing power and a development platform with its Azure service.

"What we've done [in the past] is sell software," Elop said. "In the cloud world we're still selling that same software but we're also participating in a bigger part of customers' IT budgets. We're going after more of the pot." Some 90 percent of Microsoft's engineering team will be working on cloud computing in some way within a couple of years, according to Elop.

Convergence is Microsoft's conference for its Dynamics ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) applications. It provides the main platform for company executives to speak directly to users of the software, as Dynamics products are mostly sold by partners.

Cloud computing places Microsoft and its customers "at the center of a remarkable transition in and around everything we do with technology," Elop said during a keynote address earlier Sunday. However, "the most important message is that we are committed to partnering with you through this period of generational change," he added.

Elop's keynote focused on how Microsoft has worked to integrate Dynamics software with other parts of its portfolio, such as Office and Unified Communications. The result is a cohesive stack that will save customers money and time, with the whole benefit "greater than the sum of the parts," he said. …

Bill Zack’s Public Clouds: Clear or Murky? post of 4/24/2010 reviews Cloud Computing Expo New York 2010:

This week I had the privilege of attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York at the Jacob Javits Center.

I was very impressed with how the attendance and interest had increased from last years' event. There were scores of vendors there hawking everything from Public and Private Cloud offerings to management tools and services to in fact anything that could remotely be branded (or rebranded) "Cloud".  It reminded me of the early days of SOA when every vendor was rushing to rebrand whatever they had as "SOA".

But I do sympathize with the attendees who were there to learn and understand what the Cloud is all about and how they can leverage the new paradigm of cloud computing in their businesses.  Many of the keynotes were thinly disguised (and in some case totally undisguised) sales pitches for one vendor’s product or another.  Some of the breakout session were less sales pitchey but … too many of them were.

First a disclaimer: What follow[s] is strictly JMHO (Just my humble opinion) and not the position of Microsoft, my employer.  But it is based on my observations as an architect and a fair amount of sympathy for the attendees. It is an attempt to look at the conference from their point of view. To be clear, I am a Microsoft Architect Evangelist and a strong believer in the Microsoft Cloud and in our hybrid (on-premises + cloud) based approach to supporting our customers.

At this event I also had the privilege of presenting the session on Cloud Design Patterns and I do pride myself that, although we used Azure to illustrate the patterns, the beauty of these patterns is that they can be applied to building applications on almost any vendor's cloud platform.

One thing that seemed abundantly clear to me: A lot of the vendors represented there were new startups.  By next year I fully expect that 60-70% of them will be gone having merged, been acquired or failed. As a customer, therefore, I would be hesitant to put my trust in a company that might not be around a year from now.  So when evaluating public cloud providers (which is the focus of this post) I would limit my consideration to what I call the Big 4: Amazon, Microsoft, Force, and Google. I realize that there are others (like RackSpace) that will be offended by not being included and that will definitely be around in the future, but I had to draw the line somewhere. :-) …

Bill continues with his review and concludes with descriptions of the Big 4’s offerings.

Claude (the Cloud Architect) reminds about Cloud Asia 2010 - Singapore May 3-7, 2010 in this 4/23/2010 post:

… In a short span, CloudAsia has become an exciting major annual event for the region, bringing together international researchers,practitioners and industry players in Grid and Cloud Computing as well as related technologies and applications.

CloudAsia aspires to be an important platform to enable attendees and participants to share experiences, discuss their research findings, network and explore opportunities for collaboration. Delegates are expected to come from local and overseas academia, research institutes and laboratories, both in the public and industry sectors (such as biomedical, digital media,physical sciences and manufacturing).

For More Information:
http://cloudasia.ngp.org.sg/2010/main.php

Andy Patrizio asks How Will Data Centers Change to Fit SaaS Needs? in this 4/22/2010 post to the EarthWeb.com blog about the AlwaysOn OnDemand conference:

The traditional data center will have to evolve as the world adopts more of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, said panelists here at the AlwaysOn OnDemand conference, hosted by Hewlett-Packard at its headquarters.

The issue posed to the four panelists by David Thomas, executive director of TechAmerica Silicon Valley and one of the first SaaS founders when he created Intacct in 1999, was to define what the data center is today and what IT will be advocating in the future..

"It comes down to where does the industry find the best economic benefit. We're not looking at the ultimate victory in adopting either an Amazon [outsourced] model or traditional model, but where the balance lies," said James Urquhart, market strategist and technology evangelist for cloud computing at Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO).

Not only will there be a future balance of internal IT and outsourcing, there will also be a balance of vendors. "I don't believe you see any evidence that everyone will pick a company and go 100 percent with them," said Urquhart.

Doug Merritt, executive vice president of on-demand solutions at SAP, agreed. "The segregation of layers in computing has always existed and there are even more layers now with an increase in requirements," he said.

A single stack player that attempts to provide everything never does well, Merritt noted, and you have best of breed players who emerge. "There will be a need for a super dynamic stack for the next decade because the computing need is so strong. We need a shot in the arm after a decade of muddling around," he said.

And those players, notoriously bad at playing nice with each other, had better learn to interoperate, the panel said, because future generations are growing up with easy interoperation of things like smartphones and videogame consoles and other consumer devices.

The Windows Azure Bootcamp Team announced on 4/25/2010 a two-day Azure BootCamp on 5/13 and 5/14/2010 at 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM in St. Louis, MO:

Address

1 City Place Dr
City Place Auditorium
St. Louis, MO 63141

Trainers

• Avichal Jain
• Brian Blanchard

Special Notes

• Snacks will be provided. Attendees must provide their own lunch.
• See our What to Bring page to see what you need to have on your computer when you bring it.

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Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

Lucia Moses reports Newsweek.com Explores Amazon Cloud Computing in this 4/25/2010 article for MediaWeek:

Newsweek, under a cloud, is going to the cloud. The site is outsourcing its Web site hosting duties to Amazon, joining a small but growing number of companies experimenting with cloud computing.
Until now, Newsweek.com had been hosted by its parent company, The Washington Post Co. The media company has been trying to cut losses at its magazine division, which recorded $29.3 million in operating losses in 2009. By joining the cloud, Newsweek expects to save close to $500,000 annually.

“It saves Newsweek money,” said Geoff Reiss, vp, general manager, Newsweek Digital. “Lots of people out there built their own infrastructure and are going to be tortured by this idea of sunk costs.”

That’s not the only revamp Newsweek.com is making. This week it’s expected to unveil a redesign that eschews the big branding statements and oversized ad units that are standard on many media sites. On the new site, the Newsweek name will shrink and a significant banner ad position goes away.

In its place, the title is adopting a stripped-down design that Facebook users will find familiar. It’s anchored by a newsfeed that gives equal weight to postings—regardless of whether they’re blogs, columns or news. Newsweekopedia, a branded search feature introduced last year, will be replaced with the brand-neutral Topic Finder. And in another sign it’s not business as usual, Newsweek.com hired ex-Gawker editor Gabe Snyder as executive editor.

Liz McMillan reports “Canonical Says It's Adding 200 Per Day” in her Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Claims 12,000 Deployments post of 4/24/2010:

Don't rule out Linux for the Cloud. For example, it's been reported that Canonical COO Matt Asay recently said, "We're now tracking 12,000 active deployments of UEC and we're adding 200 every single day. These are active installations. These aren't people who downloaded it once and kicked the tires for a few days then dropped it."

There's always the pesky payment problem, and Asay was quoted as saying that Canonical wants to be "more aggressive" in converting free installations to paid.

These remarks came at the end of a week that saw the world's largest Cloud Computing event ever held, Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York, which attracted some 5,000 delegates and more than 100 exhibitors. …

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