OakLeaf Systems

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 11/16/2009+

2009-11-22T16:20:00.000-08:00

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

•••• Update 11/22/2009: Matt Mullenweg: WordPress and Windows Azure; tbtechnet: Check out Front Runner for Windows Azure; Me: All Your Clouds, a clone of StackOverflow for cloud computing; Girish Raja: PDC - Phone Company CRM & Azure Demo; Me: Windows Azure FAQs post PDC 2009; Eugenio Pace: Updated RIA and WIF samples – Part I; James Hamilton: Sandia Labs’ doubtful claim about 1.035 PUE for Red Sky;

••• Update 11/21 and 11/22/2009: The Azure Services Platform Team: New Service Dashboard and updated SLAs; RightScale: Planned Support for Windows Azure Platform; Alf Pilgrim: New Approach Needed to Cloud Security; Mark O’Neill: ENISA Cloud Computing Risk Assessment - Three Initial Thoughts; Keith Pijanowski: IaaS, PaaS, and the Windows Azure Platform; Jean-Christophe Cimetiere: Interoperability at PDC09: Let's Recap; The Microsoft Pinpoint Team: About Microsoft Pinpoint; and a few others.

•• Update 11/20 /2009: Me: Windows Azure Case Studies for PDC 2009 – Part 1; Chris Hoff: ENISA Cloud Computing Security Risk Assessment report'; Josh Greenbaum: Azure’s effect on the Future of Microsoft (and Enterprise Software as Well); Stacey Higgenbotham: Microsoft’s intentions for the Azure Services Platform; Alex Wilhelm: Microsoft’s Pinpoint and Dallas – Huge New Azure Offerings; Savio Rodrigues: Windows Azure supports MySQL; MSDN: Microsoft Windows Azure platform AppFabric; and many others from PDC09.

• Update 11/18/2009: Chris Hoff: Don’t Underestimate Windows Azure; Clemens Vasters: Introducing the Port Bridge; Windows Azure AppFabric Team: Microsoft Windows Azure platform AppFabric; John Treadway: Azure Owns the Enterpri$e; Mary Jo Foley: Reports from PDC 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

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

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

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

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

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page.

* Content for managing data synchronization will be added after PDC 2009.

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

Charlie Calvert continues his series of video segments by Jim Nakashima in his Video: Azure Services in Visual Studio Beta 2, Part II post of 11/15/2009:

This is the second in a series of three videos showing how Visual Studio 2010 provides support for the development and deployment of Azure Services applications. In these short How Do I Videos, I filmed Jim Nakashima as he demonstrated practical techniques for quickly deploying applications to the cloud. These videos will eventually be published in the How Do I section of the C# Dev Center. I’m hosting them here for now, so that they will be available in time for PDC. …

Click the links below to download the videos to your local machine and view them at their native 1024 X 768 resolution.

Azure Services with Visual Studio Part I

Azure Services with Visual Studio Part II

Azure Services with Visual Studio Part III

To see the post which embeds the first video in this series, click here.

SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

The SSIS Team reports about Something new for SSIS in SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP on 11/12/2009: A new Use Bulk Insert When Possible option.

Previously, the ADO.NET Destination did all of its inserts row by row (we do some batching internally, which is why the component has a BatchSize property, but the underlying ADO.NET provider will always do single row inserts). With this new feature enabled, SSIS will use a bulk insert interface (like enabling “FastLoad” for OLEDB Destination). Unfortunately, there isn’t a generic Bulk Load interface for ADO.NET, so this functionality is currently only supported by SQL Server (through the SqlBulkCopy API). Hopefully we can extend support to other ADO.NET providers in the future.

The main reason for implementing this functionality was to improve our support for SQL Azure. As you might already know, ADO.NET is the primary way to communicate with SQL Azure, and adding support for SqlBulkCopy greatly increased the transfer speed. It also speeds up things when you’re working with regular SQL Server systems -- although OLEDB with FastLoad is still the preferred way of doing SQL data loads. [Emphasis added.]

AppFabric: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow (formerly .NET Services)

•••• Eugenio Pace offers Updated RIA and WIF samples – Part I in this 11/22/2009 post. While the samples don’t involve Windows Azure, they demonstrate Windows Identity Framework programming techniques:

Some time ago, I put together a simple demo integrating WIF in RIA Services. Now RIA is a Beta and there’s a lot of cool stuff in there. The good news from an identity perspective is that it just works :-).

I’ve been playing a little bit with a couple of new samples and with the previous (updated) HRApp. The first one is the “CyclingClassifieds” you can download from here.

The identity architecture of the application is simple enough for a first exploration. Out of the box, it is configured for Windows integrated security, so if you run the sample it will simply recognize the user you are logged in as in your network. The app has an “auto-provisioning” feature that automatically registers external users into the application. There’s a stored procedure that will try to locate the user name in the database (Users table), and if it is not found, it will simply add a new record. …

•• MSDN’s Microsoft Windows Azure platform AppFabric page describes the renamed .NET Services product as follows:

The Windows Azure platform AppFabric provides secure connectivity as a service to help developers bridge cloud, on-premises, and hosted deployments. You can use AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control to build distributed and federated applications as well as services that work across network and organizational boundaries. From simple eventing scenarios to complex protocol tunneling, AppFabric Service Bus gives developers the flexibility to choose how their applications communicate, and to address the challenges presented by firewalls, NATs, dynamic IP, and disparate identity systems. AppFabric Access Control enables simple, secure authorization for RESTful web services that federate with a variety of identity providers.

Microsoft.com’s Windows Azure Platform AppFabric page offers a more generic AppFabric description, a What are the Access Control and Service Bus? video and descriptions of the Service Bus and Access Control Features:

Windows Azure platform AppFabric provides Service Bus and Access Control for you and your business partners to bridge assets across cloud, on-premises, or hosted deployment locations, and to interoperate across languages, platforms, and standards.

AppFabric is web-based developer services that make it simpler to connect and interoperate your existing applications and services with the cloud regardless of cloud provider or programming platform. AppFabric helps developers focus on their application logic rather than deploying and managing their own cloud-based infrastructure.

•• Vittorio Bertocci’s Announcing the Identity Developer Training Course on Channel9 post of 11/17/2009 begins:

Microsoft is a recognized thought leader in Identity: since the Geneva announcements wave in PDC08, we opened a dialog with developers for helping you to reap the benefits of claims based identity with the .NET framework. And today we RTM’ed WIF! :)

During the past year we rolled out many successful initiatives, from the Id Element show on Channel9 to the Identity Developer Training Kit. Today we are raising the game again, by releasing the Identity Developer Training Course on Channel9.

Why The Identity Developer Training Course

The hands on lab in the kit were designed specifically to help you to address the most common scenarios, as gathered at events and indicated by the search engine queries that landed visitors to our blogs; however, once the content was packed in the training kit it was totally opaque to search engines and direct queries, leaving the full burden of discoverability to the short description in the download page or blog posts & tweets.

The Identity Developer Training Course represents the unbundling of the Identity Developer Training Kit: all the labs documentation is now unfolded and hosted by Channel9 on the public internet, ready to answer YOUR queries right when you need it.

Once the content is on line, an entire new range of possibilities opens up: we can complement the content with instructional videos that can be streamed on-demand, roll continuous updates without forcing you to re-download the package, and many others we are considering for the next releases. …

•• Rama Charan also reported New training kit released on 11/17/2009 for updated .NET Services November 2009 SDK in an 11/19/2009 thread in the newly renamed App Fabric forum.

• Clemens Vasters’ Port Bridge post of 11/19/2009 begins:

Building “hybrid” cloud applications where parts of an an app lives up in a cloud infrastructure and other parts of the infrastructure live at a hosting site, or a data center, or even in your house ought to be simple – especially in this day and age of Web services. You create a Web service, make it accessible through your firewall and NAT, and the the cloud-hosted app calls it. That’s as easy as it ought to be.

Unfortunately it’s not always that easy. If the server sits behind an Internet connection with dynamically assigned IP addresses, if the upstream ISP is blocking select ports, if it’s not feasible to open up inbound firewall ports, or if you have no influence over the infrastructure whatsoever, reaching an on-premise service from the cloud (or anywhere else) is a difficult thing to do. For these scenarios (and others) our team is building the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus (friends call us just Service Bus). …

and continues:

Introducing Port Bridge

“Port Bridge” – which is just a descriptive name for this code sample, not an attempt at branding – is a point-to-point tunneling utility to help with these scenarios. Port Bridge consists of two components, the “Port Bridge Service” and the “Port Bridge Agent”. Here’s a picture:

The Agent’s job is to listen for and accept TCP or Named Pipe connections on a configurable port or local pipe name. The Service’s job is to accept for incoming connections from the Agent, establish a duplex channel with the Agent, and pump the data from the Agent to the actual listening service – and vice versa. It’s actually quite simple. In the picture above you see that the Service is configured to connect to a SQL Server listening at the SQL Server default port 1433 and that the Agent – running on a different machine, is listening on port 1433 as well, thus mapping the remote SQL Server onto the Agent machine as if it ran there. You can (and I think of that as to be more common) map the service on the Agent to any port you like – say higher up at 41433.

• The Windows Azure AppFabric Team’s Microsoft Windows Azure platform AppFabric page describes the the AppFabric announced at PDC 2009:

The Windows Azure platform AppFabric provides secure connectivity as a service to help developers bridge cloud, on-premises, and hosted deployments. You can use AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control to build distributed and federated applications as well as services that work across network and organizational boundaries. From simple eventing scenarios to complex protocol tunneling, AppFabric Service Bus gives developers the flexibility to choose how their applications communicate, and to address the challenges presented by firewalls, NATs, dynamic IP, and disparate identity systems. AppFabric Access Control enables simple, secure authorization for RESTful web services that federate with a variety of identity providers.

The term AppFabric appears to replace .NET Services in this context.

Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

•••• Girish Raja’s PDC - Phone Company CRM & Azure Demo of 11/21/2009 offers a player for “the full video of the ‘Phone Company’ demo that shows the integration of Dynamics CRM ‘5’, AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure.” Click here for links to all PDC session about Dynamics CRM and xRM. Here’s a link to Developing xRM Solutions Using Windows Azure.

Girish is a technical evangelist for Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM.

•••• Me: All Your Clouds is a new StackOverflow clone for posting and answering questions about cloud computing. Windows Azure and Amazon EC2 are the two principal topics. Here’s a link to David Burela’s sample question, which I answered on 11/22/2009.

•••• tbtechnet recommends USA Early Adopters: Check out Front Runner for Windows Azure on 11/22/2009:

Great news – I just saw the brand new Front Runner for Windows Azure Platform go live.

This program is a no-brainer if you want to get your cloud applications on to Azure in record time. Plus, the program helps you market your cloud applications.

I like the idea of getting FREE help fast tracking applications on to the cloud with FREE email and phone support.

Check Front Runner out here: http://frontrunner.msdev.com

I also found out that Front Runner is giving out instant Windows Azure Community Technology Preview (CTP) tokens – these tokens are like gold and you’ll bypass the several days wait if you went through other channels.

Here’s are my two initial Front Runner entries (click image for 1024-px full-size capture):

•••• Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress and Windows Azure post of 11/19/2009 answers questions about what was announced during his keynote segment at PDC 2009:

This week I had a unique opportunity to appear at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, to demo four open source technologies — WordPress, Apache, MySQL, PHP — running on Microsoft’s new EC2 competitor called Azure.

WordPress and Windows Azure probably aren’t the first two things you’d think of together. WordPress has been free and open source software from the very beginning, Windows not so much, but we’ve always supported as many platforms as possible and for at least 4 years now you could run WP on Windows and IIS (Internet Information Services).

Choice and competition are great for spurring innovation and better for users and I believe open source software is a good thing even if it’s on a proprietary platform. (Just like we have an open source iPhone application, or encourage people to use Firefox on Windows.)

Matt continues with a FAQ about the PDC 2009 WordPress/Azure announcement:

••• The Microsoft Pinpoint Team presents the About Microsoft Pinpoint page to describe Microsoft’s new IT directory:

Pinpoint is the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have.

At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology service providers quickly and easily get software applications and professional services to market—and engage customers who need what they offer.

Pinpoint is the largest directory of qualified IT companies and their software solutions built on Microsoft technologies.

More than 7,000 software application offerings.
More than 30,000 Microsoft-technology experts.
The largest, most diverse set of Microsoft business platform offerings in the industry in a central location.
Direct links between applications and the services that support them.

Whether you’re searching for expert help or offering it, Pinpoint helps you easily find and engage the right people and technologies to get the job done.

••• Jean-Christophe Cimetiere’s Interoperability at PDC09: Let's Recap post of 11/20/2009 to the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog reports:

This PDC09 further demonstrates how Microsoft is making interoperability a priority and reality by demonstrating how − as an open platform − Windows Azure offers choices to developers. We’ve been able to show our progress with practical examples (like WordPress), additional technologies to run on Windows Azure (Tomcat, MySQL) and new SDKs/tools (like AppFabric SDK for PHP, Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse version 1.0). We’re on a journey, but it’s a significant milestone!

Jean’s post covers the following Azure-related topics:

••• RightScale Announces Planned Support for Windows Azure Platform in this 11/17/2009 press release for PDC 2009: Cloud management platform to add Windows Azure to growing list of supported infrastructure-as-a-service clouds.

RightScale®, Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, today announced planned support for the Windows Azure platform. This support will enable customers to deploy RightScale-managed applications to Windows Azure and take advantage of the unique properties offered by the Windows Azure platform. RightScale's intent to support Windows Azure underscores its commitment to providing customers with a wide range of cloud infrastructures for maximum flexibility and portability in their cloud deployments.

"Our planned support for the Windows Azure platform within RightScale is important because it will expand the set of cloud infrastructure providers available to RightScale users to include Microsoft, a key vendor in the evolving cloud market," said Michael Crandell, RightScale CEO and founder. "Through the new Service Management API, RightScale will support the Windows Azure infrastructure-level services, similar to its support of other Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, such as Amazon and Rackspace. This will vastly increase freedom of choice, providing users of other cloud platforms access to the Windows Azure platform, while simultaneously enabling Windows Azure users access to other cloud platforms."

The problem I see is the lack of an estimated date when RightScale’s Azure support will begin.

•• My Windows Azure Case Studies for PDC 2009 – Part 1 post of 11/20/2009 reports:

Microsoft’s public relations team published during the Professional Developer’s Conference 2009 53 case studies that contained Azure as a keyword.

The post provides links to and abstracts of the first 20 of these case studies.

•• Savio Rodrigues reports Microsoft Azure set to capture open source revenue streams and quotes Port25’s Peter Galli in this 11/20/2009 to InfoWorld’s Open Sources blog:

Azure follows in Amazon's footsteps -- and other large IT vendors can't be far behind. …

Three weeks ago I wrote that Amazon RDS was going to eat into MySQL's revenue potential. I also pointed out that Amazon's RDS was but a precursor to future Amazon cloud service offerings for other popular open source products. While that post was centered on Amazon, it wasn't a stretch to predict that any of the big IT vendors (IBM, Microsoft, HP, Google, Cisco, EMC/VMware, and Sun/Oracle) would offer RDS-like cloud services in the future.

Well, reading details of the Windows Azure platform this week, the prediction badge no longer applies to Microsoft. According to Microsoft, Azure SQL will support MySQL, and Azure .Net Services will support Apache Tomcat. Microsoft will also support PHP and Apache Web Server on Azure. I'll focus on MySQL, and to a lesser degree Apache Tomcat for this discussion. I believe MySQL and Apache Tomcat will be the first two products offered as a service on large IT vendor cloud platforms, aside from the IT vendor's strategic software stack that is. …

Amazon decided to offer MySQL via Amazon RDS, it did so without purchasing MySQL support from Sun. I've confirmed that Microsoft Azure is supporting MySQL on Azure without paying Sun for a MySQL Enterprise subscription. …

•• Jim Nakashima’s ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure (November 2009 edition) post of 11/19/2009 begins:

With the November release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, we’ve done some things in Visual Studio 2010 to make it easier to use ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure together.

Note: In the November release of the Tools + SDK, Windows Azure only supports .NET 3.5 SP1, .NET 4.0 projects are not supported.

Creating a New Project

The first thing you’ll notice in Visual Studio 2010 is that we now have a project template option for an ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Role. (Click on File | New | Project… | Windows Azure Cloud Service)

Note: To use ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure together on Visual Studio 2008 – please follow the steps under “Using an Existing Project”.

Jim goes on with a detailed tutorial for creating a new or using an existing ASP.NET MVC project with Windows Azure.

Jim’s Using the Sample Windows Azure ASP.NET Providers post of the same date explains:

[T]he sample Windows Azure ASP.NET providers were included in the samples folder that was installed with the SDK.

As of the November 2009 release of the Windows Azure Tools & SDK, this is no longer the case. The samples are available online at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples.

To use these samples:

1. Download the samples and unzip (These are no longer included as part of the samples installed to the SDK folder)

2. Add the AspProviders/Lib/AspProviders.csproj project to the solution by right clicking on the solution and selecting Add | Existing Project… and navigating to the AspProviders.csproj file.

3. Add a reference from your ASP.NET MVC 2 Web role to the AspProviders sample library by right clicking on the “references” folder in the ASP.NET MVC project and selecting “Add Reference…”

and selecting the AspProviders assembly:

4. Open the web.config file and add/change the providers. …

and continues with a detailed explanation of modifying Config.web’s system.web elements.

•• John Moore reports in his PHAT: Mash-Up on Healthcare IT post of 11/17/2009 about his participation in the Harvard School of Public Health event, Public Health and Technology (PHAT):

On Monday, I participated in the Harvard School of Public Health event, Public Health and Technology (PHAT) which brought together a diverse views of healthcare, reform and the role that IT will play. The morning session focused on the status quo so to speak addressing the challenges of HIT in the clinical setting and the fed’s initiatives regarding the HITECH Act to get clinicians wired. The afternoon session, which began with a keynote by Keas founder Adam Bosworth on consumer access and use of IT to self-manage their health and health of loved ones. A lot of ground was covered over the course of this day long event with highlights provided in a mash-up below.

John’s detailed topics include:

Current State, Clinicians, ARRA and HITECH Act
Consumer Empowerment through HIT
The Wrap

•• Bill Zack announced the Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure in an 11/18/2009 post to Microsoft’ Innovation Showcase blog:

The Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure November CTP contains a series of new components that improve the experience of synchronizing with SQL Azure. This download includes runtime components that optimize performance and simplify the process of synchronizing with the cloud.

The Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure contains a database provider for Sync Framework that is specifically tuned for SQL Azure and a stand-alone utility for SQL Server that enables synchronization between an on-premise SQL Server database and SQL Azure. Additionally, the Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure contains a Visual Studio plug-in that demonstrates how to add offline capabilities to applications which synchronize with SQL Azure by using a local SQL Server Compact database.

The Power Pack includes the following components:

SqlAzureSyncProvider
Sql Azure Offline Visual Studio Plug-In
SQL Azure Data Sync Tool for SQL Server
New SQL Azure Events
Automated Provisioning

Read more about the preceding components and download the Power Pack here…

•• Alex Wilhelm describes Microsoft’s Pinpoint and Dallas – Huge New Azure Offerings in his 11/18/2009 post to the Next Web site:

At the Professional Developer Conference today, Microsoft introduced Pinpoint and Dallas, two new and important components to their Azure offering.

Pinpoint is an enterprise level cloud based application store for developers using the Azure cloud. Dallas, a subset of Pinpoint, is Microsoft’s “information marketplace,” offering data sets for developers to use inside of their Azure applications.

Dallas is a very exciting development in the Azure family, opening up blocks of information to all comers, freeing it from obscurity and perhaps higher pricing. Current featured data sets in Dallas include image sets from the Nasa Mars Rover, and data from the Associated Press.

Of course, not all data sets will be free, but to have them open for purchase is a step in the right direction. I talked with the Dallas team, and sadly data from Twitter is not part of Dallas. They had no immediate comment as to the possibility of Twitter becoming part of the program. …

•• Kevin Hoffman reports in his Windows Azure Facebook SDK post of 11/17/2009:

OK, OK … maybe not (just) for Windows Azure, but Microsoft just released a Facebook client library to help make it easier for everyone to create some interesting applications. Clarity Consulting Inc. developed the original Facebook Developer Toolkit for the Microsoft Visual Studio Express Team. They worked with Microsoft on an idea to keep the code [...] Related posts:

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•• Kraig Brockschmidt, who’s Community Program Manager for the Data Developer Center (formerly the Data blog), reports on 11/17/2009 about XML + “Oslo” = “It’s All Data” (the new Data Developer Center):

After some months of planning and execution, we’re delighted to present you with the newly redesigned and expanded Data Developer Center on MSDN!

The expanded part here comes from the fact that the Data DevCenter is now home to what used to be two other separate centers, XML and “Oslo”. Actually, the XML DevCenter already joined with Data back in early October more or less intact. The former “Oslo” site, on the other hand, has merged with Data as of PDC 2009, a natural result of “Oslo” becoming SQL Server Modeling and taking a clear place within the larger ecosystem of data development technologies.

The redesign part then really came up as the natural result of this merging. Back in early July, Elisa Flasko (the owner of the Data DevCenter at that time) and myself (owner of the “Oslo” DevCenter) started to explore how best to present all the diverse technologies that we’d be supporting on the merged DevCenter. …

Greg Robinson’s detailed Hosting WCF Services in Windows Azure tutorial of 11/11/2009 begins:

So you want to host a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service in Windows Azure? Here’s how you do it. This post will describe the steps you need to get your WCF service up and running in Windows Azure. This walkthrough assumes you are already familiar with the basics of WCF services. Hosting your services in Windows Azure has the benefit of you not having to provide the hardware for hosting your service and you can instead rely on Microsoft providing that capability for you.

Glenn Laffel, MD reports Lower EHR use in Hospitals that care for the Poor in this 11/16/2009 post:

Hospitals that treat large numbers of poor patients utilize electronic health records (EHRs) less frequently and provide care of lower quality, according to a study by Harvard scientists. However, the scientists also found that when such hospitals do use EHRs, the quality gap disappears.

Ashish Jha and colleagues used the Medicare disproportionate-share hospital (DSH) index as a surrogate for the proportion of poor patients served by each hospital. Using this metric, so-called “high-DSH index” hospitals are the ones caring for the highest percentage of poor people.

To collect information on EHR utilization, the scientists piggybacked a questionnaire onto the 2008 American Hospital Association survey. The questionnaire solicited information regarding the presence and degree of implementation of 32 electronic clinical functions.

Glenn continues with a detailed analysis of the findings.

Windows Azure Infrastructure

•••• James Hamilton asks Is Sandia National Lab's Red Sky Really Able to Deliver a PUE of 1.035? and “strongly suspects” that Sandia National Lab’s Red Sky supercomputer Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) is 1.35:

… A PUE of 1.035 implies that for each 1 watt delivered to the servers, 0.035 is lost in power distribution and mechanical systems. For a facility of this size, I suspect they will get delivered high voltage in the 115kV range. In a conventional power distribution design, they will take 115kV and transform it to mid-voltage (13kV range), then to 480V 3p, then to 208V to be delivered to the servers. In addition to all these conversions, there is some loss in the conductors themselves. And there is considerable loss in even the very best uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems. In fact, a UPS alone with 3.5% loss is excellent. Excellent power distribution designs will avoid 1 or perhaps 2 of the conversions above and will use a full bypass UPS. But, getting these excellent power distribution designs to even within a factor of 2 of the reported 3.5% loss is incredibly difficult and I’m very skeptical that they are going to get much below 6% to 7%. In fact, if anyone knows how to get down below 6% loss in the power distribution system measured fully, I’m super interested and would love to see what you have done, buy you lunch, and do a datacenter a tour. …

•••• Franz Bouma shares his doubts about cloud computing in general and Windows Azure in particular in his “Cloud Cloud Cloud, if you're not in it, you're out!"... or something post of 11/18/2009:

… Yesterday I watched the live stream of the PDC '09 keynote and in general it made me feel uncomfortable but I couldn't really figure out why. This morning I realized what it was and I'll try to explain it in this blog. …

I have lived through internet bubbles, read McNealy's 'The Network is the computer' articles / propaganda, shaked my head when I heard about Ellison's Java client desktop idea, waded through the seas of SOA and SOA related hype material, so I have a bit of an idea what "Big computer with software somewhere + you" means. In this 'modern age' it's dubbed 'Cloud computing', though to me it looks like the same old idea that has been presented by various people in the past but with new labels. With all these platforms presented in the past, there was really one issue: what was the problem they all tried to solve? Why would one want to use it? With Cloud computing, that same old issue hasn't been solved. …

Can Azure do what I described above? I honestly have not the faintest idea, even after watching the keynote yesterday and by reading up some marketing stuff. That doesn't give me confidence, as it's in general not a good sign if a vendor has a hard time explaining what problem a product solves.

Frans is the developer of and cheerleader for the LLBLGen Pro object/relational mapping tool.

•••• Me: The Windows Azure Platform Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) were updated on 11/18/2009 for announcements at PDC 2009:

What was announced about the Windows Azure platform today at the Professional Developers Conference?

Microsoft today announced global availability of the Windows Azure platform, including Windows Azure, SQL Azure Database and AppFabric. The Windows Azure platform is available in 21 countries and remains free for all customers and partners through January 31st, 2010.

Microsoft also announced a community technology preview (CTP) of Microsoft codename “Dallas,” a Windows Azure platform Information Service that provides developers and information workers access to premium third party data sets and content, on any platform.

With the Windows Azure platform and the new features announced today, developers can take advantage of greater choice and flexibility in how they develop and deploy applications, whether on premise or in the cloud, and using familiar tools and programming languages. This enables customers to increase revenue and productivity, respond faster to customer needs and reach new markets.

Over 20 customers and partners including NASA, Domino’s Pizza, Coca Cola, Kelly Blue Book and Accenture, among many others, are already running live cloud applications on the Windows Azure platform, demonstrating strong momentum and adoption of Windows Azure, SQL Azure Database and AppFabric

Developers can visit www.WindowsAzure.com to sign up to start building and deploying cloud services and applications today on the Windows Azure platform and to access the “Dallas” CTP

••• Keith Pijanowski’s IaaS, PaaS, and the Windows Azure Platform post of 11/21/2009 begins:

In this post I want to publish an article I originally wrote for the white papers section of www.Azure.com. The final version was not a good fit for Azure.com - so I am publishing it here. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an objective comparison between the Windows Azure Platform and an Infrastructure as a Service offering. (PDF Version)

Here are links to his article’s topics:

Keith Pijanowski is a Platform Strategy Advisor for Microsoft. You can Keith’s other articles on Access and cloud computing here.

••• The Azure Services Platform Team announced a new Service Dashboard and updated Service Level Agreements at PDC 2009:

Service Dashboard

View the current health of all Windows Azure platform services. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed to keep constantly updated on the status of the Windows Azure platform. (Click image for full-size, 1024 x 768 screen capture.)

Service Level Agreements

Windows Azure SLA

Windows Azure has separate SLA’s for compute and storage. For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and and guarantee that 99.9% of the time we will detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action.
Download Windows Azure Compute SLA.

For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.
Download Windows Azure Storage SLA.

SQL Azure SLA

SQL Azure customers will have connectivity between the database and our Internet gateway. SQL Azure will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. “Monthly Availability Percentage” for a specific customer database is the ratio of the time the database was available to customer to the total time in a month. Time is measured in 5-minute intervals in a 30-day monthly cycle. Availability is always calculated for a full month. An interval is marked as unavailable if the customer’s attempts to connect to a database are rejected by the SQL Azure gateway.
Download SQL Azure SLA.

AppFabric SLA

Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for Service Bus and Access Control are similar to those specified above in the Windows Azure SLA. Due to inherent differences between the technologies, underlying SLA definitions and terms differ for the Service Bus and Access Control services. Using the Service Bus, customers will have connectivity between a customer’s service endpoint and our Internet gateway; when our service fails to establish a connection from the gateway to a customer's service endpoint, then the service is assumed to be unavailable. Using Access Control, customers will have connectivity between the Access Control endpoints and our Internet gateway. In addition, for both Service Bus and Access Control, the service will process correctly formatted request for the handling of messages and tokens; when our service fails to process a request properly, then the service is assumed to be unavailable. SLA calculations will be based on an average over a 30-day monthly cycle, with 5-minute time intervals. Failures seen by a customer in the form of service unavailability will be counted for the purpose of availability calculations for that customer.
Download AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control SLAs.

•• Stacey Higgenbotham analyzes Microsoft’s intentions for the Azure Services Platform in her Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line post of 11/19/2009 to the GigaOm blog:

With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. In the wake of the Redmond giant’s developer conference, where it detailed more of its plans, it became clear that Azure is striving to be a general purpose cloud offering for enterprises that doesn’t make developers sweat the small stuff or compromise on bigger things.

If we compare it to infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as Amazon’s Ec2 or Rackspace’s CloudServers products, Azure attempts to handle more of the actual management and provisioning of virtual machines for a user. The biggest issue the target customer faces isn’t the hardware cost but the expense of managing an application on the hardware, Amitabh Srivastava, senior vice president at Microsoft with responsibility for Windows Azure, told me. So the goal was to allow Azure to run so developers don’t think about the underlying hardware as they might on a pure IaaS product.

This is where the idea of Azure as Microsoft’s OS for the cloud comes in. Azure is a platform-as-a-services play that seeks to leverage what Microsoft has learned through its OS dominance. First, it’s playing nice. Microsoft ensures that developers can use a wide variety of programming languages to build on Azure such as PHP, Eclipse and Java, which is pretty unique among platforms. Earlier this year, I spoke with Microsoft about its plans for Azure and came away with the clear sense that the company’s programs and .Net would really shine on Azure, even though other programming languages would also work. Now I get the sense that Microsoft is working hard to emphasize how suitable Azure is for programs built using a variety of languages, even those that have no ties to Redmond. …

•• Josh Greenbaum’s Why Windows Azure is the Future of Microsoft (and Enterprise Software as Well) post of 11/19/2009 analyzes the impact of the Azure Services Platform on Microsoft’s future market prowess:

… We’re beginning to see inklings of these net new applications running on Azure: some of them were shown last week to industry analysts at the Dynamics Analyst Summit in sunny Redmond (for a few brief hours, anyway). The basic takeaway from the Summit was that the Dynamics gang understand that Azure isn’t just a place to host existing Dynamics functionality (and definitely not the place to run AX in the cloud: one can rent Dynamics AX in a hosted model from a Microsoft partner, but it won’t be running on Azure), but a platform for a new class of enterprise application that can be simultaneously on demand and on premise, and deliver net-new functionality that can’t be readily delivered in an pure on-premise mode. It’s a good start.

But there’s going to more to cloud computing than deployment choice, or even hybrid on-prem/on-demand apps. As I’ve been writing a little obsessively, the cloud, particularly the Azure cloud, will reach its apogee as a platform for next-generation, on-demand applications that deliver functionality to the enterprise that can’t be delivered for love nor money on premise. This new generation of application aggregates data, process, and services in the cloud, and in doing so for its many stakeholders, becomes a self-improving, self-appreciating asset that grows in value the more data, processes, services, and stakeholders it accumulates. …

• Mary Jo Foley asks "What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform? in this 11/17/2009 post and reports on statements by Amitabh Srivastava, Senior Vice President in charge of Windows Azure: “Our initial focus on the platform was on enabling Web 2.0 customers to develop and run their apps on it.”

… Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).

To enable existing apps to run on Azure, Microsoft is planning to make virtual machines (VMs) available to developers, which they will be able to customize and run their legacy apps inside them. Srivastava wouldn’t provide a timetable or more details as to how or when Microsoft will do this. Apps running in VMs won’t be able to take full advantage of the elasticity, multitenancy, and other cloud functionality, but they still will derive some benefits, such as automatic cloud backup for apps running on the Azure platform.

On the private cloud front, Microsoft didn’t have much new to say at the PDC. Microsoft officials have said in the past that Microsoft won’t allow customers to run the Azure operating system in their own datacenters. Microsoft’s

main focus here continues to be to provide customers with software like Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc., for them to run in their own datacenters. That said, Microsoft isn’t simply leaving the delivery of a private cloud solution to Amazon and other cloud competitors.

“Lots of the technologies we have in the cloud are things people want to run in their datacenters,” Srivastava
acknowledged.(He cited as an example the ability to run a scalable cloud-storage appliance on premises.)

Microsoft is working on a longer-term solution that would allow the company to offer datacenter containers that can be dedicated to individual customers, Srivastava said. That way, clouds can be customized for individual users and users will be able to manage these containers themselves. Again, Srivastava wasn’t ready to talk about deployment specifics or timetables for this. That said, “Project Sydney” (Microsoft’s newly announced connectivity offering for private datacenters and public clouds) shows the general direction where we are going,” Srivastava said. …

• Mary Jo Foley’s Three new codenames and how they fit into Microsoft's cloud vision article of 11/17/2009 describes …:

Project Sydney: Technology that enables customers to connect securely their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example. Sydney is slated to go to beta early next year and go final in 2010.
Dallas: Microsoft’s “data-as-a-service” offering. Dallas is a new service built on top of SQL Azure that will provide users with access to free and paid collections of public and commercial data sets that they can use in developing applications. The datasets are available via Microsoft’s PinPoint partner/ISV site. Dallas is hosted on Azure already and is available as of today as an invitation-only CTP. No word on when Microsoft is hoping to release the final version of the service.
AppFabric: AppFabric is a collection of existing Azure developer components, including the “Dublin” app server, “Velocity” caching technology, and .Net Services (the service bus and access control services). The version of the Windows Server AppFabric on-premises version of the product is available for download today, with final availability slated for 2010. Community Technology Previews (CTPs) of the Windows Azure AppFabric version are slated to be available during 2010. No word on when the final Azure-based version will be out. …

• John Teadway asserts Azure Owns the Enterpri$e in this 11/17/2009 post:

I had a “discussion” on twitter a few weeks ago where I predicted that Microsoft’s Windows Azure would be “the one to beat” in the enterprise. It’s nice that companies are using Amazon and other clouds, but for the 80-90% of Windows/.NET applications that run your typical enterprise, Azure will be king.

I’m at the PDC in LA today and in packed sessions of enterprise developers and ISVs who are genuinely excited about moving their Windows workloads to the cloud. Azure is not targeted towards the big SaaS/Web 2.0/Facebook app crowd. Instead, they are going after the enterprise users who drive the bulk of spending in the tech market. …

• Chris Hoff’s Just A Reflective Bookmark: Microsoft’s Azure…The Dark Horse Emergeth… post of 11/17/2009 warns:

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:

“Don’t underestimate Microsoft and the potential disruption Azure will deliver.*”

You might not get Microsoft’s strategy for Azure. Heck, much of Microsoft may not get Microsoft’s strategy for Azure, but one thing is for sure: Azure will be THE platform for products, solutions and services across all mediums from Redmond moving forward. Ray Ozzie said it best at PDC:

The vision of Azure, said Ozzie, is “three screens and a cloud,” meaning internet-based data and software that plays equally well on PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.

I think the underlying message here is that while we often think of Cloud from the perspective of interacting with “data,” we should not overlook how mobility, voice and video factor into the equation…

According to Ozzie, Azure will become production live on January 1st and “six data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia will come online.” (I wonder when Amazon will announce APAC support…) …

*To be fair a year ago when Azure was announced, I don’t think any of us got Azure and I simply ignored it for the most part. Not the case any longer; it makes a ton of sense if they can execute.

Bessemer Venture Partners offers the Winter 2010 Release of Bessemer's Top 10 Laws of Cloud Computing and SaaS in conjunction with a Cloud Computing Practice Overview:

In addition to Bessemer's long history of successful enterprise software investing, we have been particularly focused on the emergence of Cloud Computing. We believe Cloud Computing is the most important trend in the software industry of the decade. We have been fortunate to work with many of the early pioneers in this high growth market segment, and continue to invest actively to grow our current portfolio.

We believe that cloud computing is fundamentally disruptive to IT. While SaaS has defined our practice for the past decade, we are confident cloud computing will define the next and are eager to partner with entrepreneurs who are looking to capitalize on this opportunity.
Please feel free to submit your business plan or executive summary to cloudvc@bvp.com.

Cloud Security and Governance

••• Mark O’Neill’s ENISA Cloud Computing Risk Assessment - Three Initial Thoughts post of 11/21/2009 claims “The document does well by including a focus on SMEs.”

The ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency) today released the Cloud Computing Risk Assessment document.

The document does well by including a focus on SMEs (Small and Medium sized Enterprises) because, as the report says, "Given the reduced cost and flexibility it brings, a migration to cloud computing is compelling for many SMEs".

Following are abbreviated versions of Mark’s initial thoughts:

The document's stated Risk Number One is Lock-In. …
"Customers should not be tempted to use custom implementations of authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) as these can become weak if not properly implemented." …
STRIDE and DREAD …

Mark is Chief Technology Officer of Vordel.

••• Alf Pilgrim claims New Approach Needed to Cloud Security in this 11/20/2009 post:

Arguably the greatest barrier to businesses taking full advantage of cloud computing is the issue of security. Recent high-profile breaches of the cloud (the attack on Twitter being perhaps the most publicized) have only served to heighten concerns.

It's true; the potential consequences of a breach of cloud security are catastrophic, and this knowledge has served to make the debate rage even more fiercely. A cloud security issue within an organization has the potential to be a major business crisis, and against a backdrop of heightened public awareness of data loss and privacy issues such as ID theft, it's understandable.

But there's no denying that cloud computing is gaining momentum and will continue to become more and more mainstream. This year, for example, the UK government announced that it would be developing a cloud infrastructure (the ‘G-Cloud'), and the offer of flexible, low-cost and easily scalable IT means that many businesses are relying more and more heavily on cloud-based applications, storage and security.

The result is that the industry must get to grips with the security concerns. Fast. …

Alf Pilgrim is CTO of content security company, Clearswift.

•• Chris Hoff (@Beaker) analyzes the European Network and Information Security Agency’s 124-page cloud security report in his ENISA launches Cloud Computing Security Risk Assessment Document post of 11/20/2009:

… At first glance it’s an excellent read and will be a fantastic accompaniment to the the CSA’s guidance. I plan to dig into it more over the weekend. I really appreciate the risk assessment approach which allows folks to prioritize their efforts on understanding the relevant high-level issues associed with Cloud.

Very well done. I look forward to seeing how CSA and ENISA can further work together on upcoming projects! I think the European perspective will help bring some balance and alternative views on Cloud in regards to legal and compliance issues specifically.

You can find the document here.

ENISA, supported by a group of subject matter expert comprising representatives from Industries, Academia and Governmental Organizations, has conducted, in the context of the Emerging and Future Risk Framework project, an risks assessment on cloud computing business model and technologies. The result is an in-depth and independent analysis that outlines some of the information security benefits and key security risks of cloud computing. The report provide also a set of practical recommendations. …

@Beaker’s Cloud Security: Dilbert Style delivers a Dilbert strip about cloud computing security.

Cloud Computing Events

•• James Hamilton announced in his ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing post of 11/20/2009:

I’m on the program committee for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. The conference will be held June 10^th and 11^th 2010 in Indianapolis Indiana. SOCC brings together database and operating systems researchers and practitioners interested in cloud computing. It is jointly sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) and the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS). The conference will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD in 2010 and with SOSP in 2011 continuing to alternate between SIGMOD and SOSP in subsequent years.

Joe Hellerstein is the SOCC General Chair and Surajit Chaudhuri and Mendel Rosenblum are Program Chairs. The rest of the SOCC organizers are at: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/events/socc2010/organizers.htm. If you are interested in cloud computing in general and especially if you are interested in systems or database issues and their application to cloud computing, consider submitting a paper (copied below). The paper submission deadline for SOCC is January 15, 2010. Get writing!

--jrh

From the ACM:

The ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2010 (ACM SOCC 2010) is the first in a new series of symposia with the aim of bringing together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners interested in cloud computing. This series is co-sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Groups on Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD) and on Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS). ACM SOCC will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD and ACM SOSP Conferences in alternate years, starting with ACM SIGMOD in 2010.

•• Sift Media, publisher of BusinessCloud9, announce its inaugural Business Cloud Summit, taking place on Wednesday 2 December 2009 at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, London, UK:

Investment in Cloud Computing is set to soar for 2009. A recent Gartner report estimated that worldwide cloud services revenue will increase 21% this year to exceed $56.3 billion, and will rise to more than $150 billion by 2013.

"Much of the growth represents a transfer of traditional IT Services to the new Cloud model, but there is also scope for creation of substantial new businesses and revenue streams," Ben Pring, research vice president for Gartner, said in a statement. "Services supported by advertising are currently, and will remain, the largest component of the overall Cloud services market through 2013."

Channel9 reports that for the First Time Ever! Channel 9 to Broadcast LIVE from PDC09:

As announced in the live broadcast of the Countdown to PDC09 Show, the Channel 9 team will be broadcasting LIVE and unscripted from the PDC Big Room for all three days of the Professional Developers Conference 2009.

The broadcast will be presented in live smooth-streaming, powered by IIS7 and Silverlight. We’ve never done anything like this before, so tune in to see what happens when we go LIVE.

The When/Where/How of Joining us LIVE at PDC09…

Starting at approximately 10:30 AM PST each day (or following keynote address on Nov 17 and 18) the Channel 9 team will interview conference presenters, technical leaders, industry luminaries, partners and the Channel 9 community via live broadcast on microsoftpdc.com.

At any point throughout the broadcast, home viewers and conference attendees can contribute to and help guide the conversation by sending a tweet to @ch9live.

Virtual TechDays’ seventh edition, held in India on 11/11 to 11/13/2009, included Windows Azure and Cloud Computing tracks on 11/11 and 11/13/2009 respectively. Videos of the sessions are expected this week.

Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

•• John Treadway’s Amazon Adding Active Directory Support (mini-scoop) of 11/18/2009 reports:

I was surprised to find an Amazon Web Services booth at the Microsoft PDC yesterday. They had nothing specific to say regarding additional Windows support or capabilities – at least not officially. What I did get was a wink-wink, nudge, nudge when I commented on Azure’s integration with Active Directory and other touchpoints. “This is coming soon,” I was then told. Then they saw that I had a media badge and that ended the discussion…

Looks like the enterprise is the battleground – which was only a matter of time. Following the great enterprise roadmap preview I saw last week at the RightScale user meeting in Santa Clara, this is quickly becoming a great market for business computing.

•• Phil Smith announced in an Access to live demo account (read-only) post of 11/18/2009:

Cloud Testing is giving access to it’s live demo account for a limited time. All you have to do is visit the Cloud Testing live demo launch page for details of how to access the portal.

The access is restricted to being read-only, so you cannot upload or run new tests, however a Free Trial is available if you would like to do this – just sign up for a Free Trial.

The free trial offers these features:

There is no limit on the number of user logins that you can create for your account.
There is no limit on the number of projects.
Your Free Trial account will be provided with 10 Testing Credits, allowing you to perform 10 runs of any script in your account.
There is no limit on the number of scripts that you can record and upload.
The trial is valid for 7 days.
The account provided can be used for both Functional Testing and Cross Browser Testing.

John Moore reports Covisint Jumps onto PaaS Bandwagon in this 11/15/2009 post:

A couple of weeks ago Chilmark Research did a small piece on the need for HIE vendors to move beyond silo’d standalone exchanges to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model. In the write-up, the HIE vendor Axolotl was mentioned for their recent announcement of a third party image viewing app that was now available on their platform. In speaking with Axolotl’s President, Glenn Keet, he stated that this was the first app of many that would eventually be hosted on the platform. As Keet rightly put it; there are far too many needs in healthcare for any one vendor to satisfy and that partnershps wil be critical moving forward.

As a result of that post, Chilmark received several private emails from HIE vendors all stating that they were on a similar track to Axolotl’s. One of those who contacted us was Covisint, who announced their AppCloud last week. (for more background on Covisint, see the piece we wrote over a year ago) written We had a briefing with Covisint late last week and Covisint was kind enough to send us their slide deck from the Healthcare IT Summit where they announced AppCloud. …

Axolotl sounds to me like the name of an Aztec deity or a volcano in Mexico.

Windows Azure Case Studies for PDC 2009 – Part 1

2009-11-20T07:59:00.001-08:00

Microsoft’s public relations team published during the Professional Developer’s Conference 2009 53 case studies that contained Azure as a keyword. Following are links to and abstracts of the first 20 of these case studies, which involve the following firms:

DotNet Solutions
CCH
The Information Store
Site Masher
3M
Acumatica
Archetype
OCCMundial
Lokad
Kelley Blue Book
Invensys
Sopima
TradeFacilitate
AdSlot
Associated Press
TicketDirect
Sugar CRM
Active Web Solutions
Advanced Telemetry
Glympse

The Kelley Blue Book and TicketDirect projects were featured in PDC 2009 workshops, sessions or both.

DotNet Solutions: Systems Integrator Launches Innovative Software with Minimal Capital Investment (11/17/2009)

To improve its own development process, Dot Net Solutions created a virtual project-collaboration application. When the software, called ScrumWall, drew great interest from customers, the company used Windows Azure™ to offer it as a hosted service. The solution made it possible for Dot Net Solutions to bring its new product to market quickly, with minimal investment costs, while offering superior performance to users.

CCH: Financial Services ISV Fosters Flexibility and Cost Savings with Hosted Solution (11/17/2009)

CCH, which provides software for business professionals, adapted its sales tax–calculation application to run on the Windows Azure™ platform. CCH expects its use of Windows Azure to result in greater choice for customers, the ability to scale on demand, and lower costs. The company found the learning curve for the migration experience to be smooth and easy for developers because of the familiar tool set and operating environment of the Windows Azure platform.

The Information Store: Solution Developer Expects to Boost Efficiency with Software-plus-Services Strategy (11/17/2008)

The Information Store® helps global petroleum companies access exploration and production data irrespective of where the data resides and presents it in a useful and familiar form. To maintain its competitive advantage, the company was eager to find a cost-effective way to extend its industry-leading PetroTrek® solutions to independent oil producers. The company evaluated two “software as a service” offerings and selected the Windows Azure™ platform—an Internet-scale “cloud services” platform that is hosted in Microsoft® data centers—as the foundation for its online Digital Oilfield solution, along with Microsoft SQL Azure, the Silverlight™ browser plug-in, and Bing™ maps for enterprise. The company expects to increase the operational efficiency of its customers by reducing upfront capital costs, reducing deployment cycles from months to days, and lowering ongoing operating expenses.

Site Masher: Software Developer Launches Highly Scalable Web Site Platform, Minimizes Costs (11/17/2009)

Sitemasher, developer of an innovative platform for building and managing Web sites, wanted to help Web professionals create scalable, data-driven Web sites faster, and at lower cost. The company also needed to lower its own systems infrastructure costs. Sitemasher used the Windows Azure™ platform to offer its application as a hosted service, delivering an efficient, highly available, and highly scalable Web site development and hosting environment to its customers. By hosting its application on Windows Azure through Microsoft® data centers, the company has minimized infrastructure costs and reduced ongoing maintenance. Finally, with no data centers of its own to manage, Sitemasher will refocus the time its development staff spent maintaining servers to improving and expanding the Sitemasher application, representing a time savings of approximately 20 percent.

3M: 3M Launches Web-Based Visual Attention Service to Heighten Design Impact (11/17/2009)

A recognized world leader in technology research and development, 3M wanted to make its decades of expertise in the workings of the human visual system available as a service to customers. Using the Windows Azure™ platform, 3M created a Web-based application that gives designers the ability to invoke complex algorithms to analyze the effectiveness of a design, based on how the human eye will respond. By hosting its application in Microsoft® data centers, 3M has made an innovative service available to a global audience, while minimizing its investment in hardware infrastructure and ongoing administration. The solution, which permitted developers to evaluate frequent iterations of the application, helped the company speed time-to-market for its service and achieve higher quality results, faster than in a traditional development environment.

Acumatica: Software Company Efficiently and Cost-Effectively Delivers Software-plus-Services (11/17/2009)

Acumatica is a software company that develops enterprise resource planning and business accounting software. Acumatica developed its Web-based software using the Microsoft® .NET Framework and offered on-premises software that required customers to invest in application and database servers. The company wanted to deliver a software-plus-services solution to its customers, effectively hosting and managing its solutions on the Internet through data centers. Acumatica chose to develop its software-plus-services application using Windows Azure™ and Microsoft SQL Azure™. As a result, Acumatica developed its hosted offering in five weeks, reduced capital expenditures, reduced the deployment time for customers while improving their ability to quickly scale up and down, and improved its time-to-market for new services.

Archetype: Interactive Solution Provider Gains Agility, Conserves Costs with Hosted Services (11/17/2009)

Archetype, an interactive technology solution provider, developed the Archetype Media Platform (AMP), which includes the AMP Editor, AMP Portal, AMP Manager, and AMP Analytics applications. The firm faced common challenges with scalability, time-consuming deployments, and high entry costs for its customers. Archetype migrated its existing AMP solution to the Windows Azure™ platform and developed additional components specifically to take advantage of the new system. The firm found it easy to develop for Windows Azure—which facilitates expeditious, direct deployment to the cloud through the Windows Azure portal—and it anticipates greater business and development agility as a result, promoting cost savings and more-timely response to customer needs. The firm’s customers note the increased performance and shorter time-to-value with Windows Azure as compared with traditional solutions.

OCCMundial: Job-Listing Web Site Scales Up Solution, Reduces Costs by More Than U.S.$500,000 (11/17/2009)

The job-listing Web site OCCMundial.com connects job seekers with opportunities and optimizes hiring processes for businesses. Headquartered in Mexico City, OCCMundial.com helps to fill more than 600,000 positions a year in Mexican and international job markets. To provide better value to its customers, the company developed a recommendation system it calls OCCMatch to match job openings to candidate resumes. OCCMundial.com wanted to scale up its OCCMatch recommendation system to connect 1.5 million resumes with 80,000 job listings, but its existing computing infrastructure lacked capacity to meet the demand. To avoid significant hardware and other infrastructure costs, OCCMundial.com used the Windows Azure™ platform to host OCCMatch through a Microsoft® data center, providing easy solution scalability and enhancing value for OCCMundial.com customers.

Lokad: Company Efficiently Delivers Advanced Forecasts with Scalable Software-plus-Services (11/17/2009)

Lokad is a software development company that delivers sales, demand, and call volume forecasts for more than 300 customers—from one-person eCommerce companies to multinational retailers. To improve its forecasting capabilities, the company developed advanced forecasting tools and models. However, the more powerful forecasting models required significantly more computing resources than the company had available. Lokad decided to implement its software-plus-services forecasting application on the Windows Azure™ platform—a quick, efficient process. As a result, Lokad reduced IT maintenance costs compared to traditional approaches, delivered more powerful and accurate forecasts to its customers, and improved its ability to expand into new markets.

Kelley Blue Book: Vehicle Values Provider Saves $100,000 with Easy-to-Manage Software-plus-Services (11/17/2009)

Kelley Blue Book is a premier provider of vehicle pricing information to consumers, automotive dealers, governments, and the finance and insurance industries. The company developed its information-rich, high-traffic Web site using the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 and supports it with two hosted data centers. In an effort to reduce hosting costs and ease management of its infrastructure, Kelley Blue Book decided to implement the Windows Azure™ platform—which proved to be a straightforward process. As a result, Kelley Blue Book is able to reduce capital expenditures for new hardware, increase its competitive advantage by focusing on delivering new features, save U.S.$100,000 annually in hosting costs, and use IT resources more strategically.

Invensys: Firm Uses Internet Service Bus to Enable Smart Grid for Dynamic Energy Savings (11/17/2009)

Invensys Operations Management is out to make it easier and less expensive for small electric utilities in the United States to participate in smart grid, an energy modernization program supported by the U.S. government. Utilities need a high-performance, low-cost way to distribute real-time pricing data to customers so that they can make smarter consumption decisions. Invensys responded by creating a smart grid communications platform using The Service Bus and Access Control Service, both part of the Windows Azure™ platform. The resulting platform enables utilities to immediately embrace smart grid services at affordable prices. Such services will help utility customers save money by using energy more wisely. Invensys developed its pilot solution in just three months as part of a plan to realize increased revenues from selling smart grid–compliant products and services.

Sopima: Software Firm Launches Business Contract Service with Lean Staff, Low Investment (11/17/2009)

Sopima, creator of an online solution for managing business contract life cycles, needed to minimize its capital investment to deliver a viable offering. It also wanted to offer an affordable monthly subscription service to gain new customers quickly. Using the Windows Azure™ platform, the company hosts its application in Microsoft® data centers, providing customers with fast response times and high scalability. With the solution, Sopima has limited its investment in infrastructure and can focus on development rather than hardware administration. Sopima estimates that, without the Windows Azure platform, it would have had to hire additional full-time staff members at an annual cost of approximately U.S.$500,000. Its status as a Microsoft Partner will lend Sopima credibility in a competitive marketplace.

TradeFacilitate: Trade Data Service Scales Online Solution to Global Level with ”Cloud” Services Model (11/17/2009)

TradeFacilitate helps importers and exporters in the European Union to exchange trade data using a paper-free online system. To meet new regulation requirements for preshipment data exchange in the United States, TradeFacilitate sought a solution that would permit the company to scale its applications to a significantly larger market without proportionately adding more personnel and technology resources. The company adopted the Windows Azure™ platform and quickly migrated the code base from its primary application to a “cloud” services model—the hosting and managing of its Web application and services on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers. With Windows Azure, TradeFacilitate quickly developed a scalable and reliable solution that helped the company improve its ability to focus on delivering new services to customers.

AdSlot: Combinatorial Auction Provider Scales Up Quickly, Saves Costs with Cloud Services (11/17/2009)

Tradeslot specializes in designing and building large scale business-to-business and government-to-business (G2B) auctions platforms; its partner company, Adslot, uses the same auction platform to auction online advertising space. The companies use computation-heavy combinatorial auction algorithms to manage their complex conditional bid processes. However, with a lack of compute power with its existing infrastructure, the companies found it necessary to manually add constraints to auctions. Tradeslot and Adslot implemented Windows Azure™ and, as a result, reduced capital costs for customers—from U.S.$60,000 to only $1,000 for each customer, improved their ability to scale up and improve services for customers, saved critical IT resources, and delivered a solution their customers can trust.

Associated Press: Worldwide News Provider Creates New Content Channels with Hosted Computing (11/17/2009)

The Associated Press (AP) is the world’s largest news organization, with bureaus in 97 countries. On average, more than half the world’s population sees news from AP on a given day. AP wanted to broaden its reach by encouraging developers to incorporate AP content into their applications. Using the Microsoft-hosted Windows Azure™ platform, AP created a highly scalable solution that simplifies capacity planning and creates new business opportunities.

TicketDirect: Ticket Seller Finds Ideal Business Solution in Hosted Computing Platform (11/17/2009)

New Zealand–based TicketDirect International has grown into a major ticketing service for venues in Australia and New Zealand. The company’s focus on excellent customer service led it to look for a better way to handle peak system loads during major event ticket sales. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Intergen, TicketDirect has begun redesigning its system to work from a “cloud computing” environment using the Windows Azure™ platform. The company is rebuilding its customer application as a Windows Azure application and migrating its data to a Microsoft SQL Azure™ database. By moving to a cloud solution, TicketDirect is able to easily and cost-efficiently scale its computing resources in response to real-time demand while simultaneously giving up the cost of maintaining its own hardware. This move frees IT resources to focus on more customer-centered needs.

Sugar CRM: CRM Vendor Quickly Adapts to New Platform, Adds Global, Scalable Delivery Channel (11/17/2009)

SugarCRM provides open-source customer relationship management (CRM) software and focuses on its “Sugar Open Cloud” strategy, meaning that the company makes its applications available for a variety of on-premises and hosted service platforms. The independent software vendor recently ported its application to the Windows Azure™ platform to enable its customers and value-added resellers to take advantage of real-time scalability, geographically dispersed Microsoft® data centers, and maximum data availability to gain high end performance without investing in additional infrastructure. The ease of deployment and pay-as-you-go pricing will also help customers control IT costs. Thanks to strong support for programming language interoperability within the Windows Azure platform, SugarCRM was able to complete the porting process with two engineers in about two weeks.

Active Web Solutions: Developer Scales Search-and-Rescue Application to Help Save More Lives at Sea (11/17/2009)

Responding to high numbers of deaths at sea in the fishing industry, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution contracted Active Web Solutions (AWS) to create an automated sea-safety application. AWS developed a location-based service infrastructure, code-named GeoPoint, which transmits position data to a centralized tracking and alerting system. AWS used GeoPoint to build MOB Guardian, a search-and-rescue application for fishing vessels. To extend GeoPoint to more scenarios, AWS migrated it to the Windows Azure™ platform. By hosting GeoPoint in the “cloud,” in Microsoft® data centers, AWS attained massive scalability, richer functionality, and lower infrastructure costs. AWS was able to quickly convert its application to a hosted service and avoid the expense of building and managing a data center. AWS also has the flexibility and scalability to offer GeoPoint to many more markets.

Advanced Telemetry: Energy Monitoring Firm Saves Money, Scales Business with Hosted Computing Platform (11/17/2009)

Advanced Telemetry helps businesses monitor and control energy usage both on-premises and remotely with its EcoView system and EcoView Web application. The company has experienced tremendous growth, encouraging it to reexamine the scalability of its computing architecture. To reduce costs, increase scalability, and improve service, Advanced Telemetry is using the Windows Azure™ platform for hosted application and data storage, plus the Visual WebGui application platform from Microsoft® Registered Partner Gizmox to provide rapid development and run-time efficiencies for cloud applications. Advanced Telemetry developers have been able to use existing programming skills and experience with Microsoft development tools to migrate to Windows Azure. This saves the company money, improves functionality, and enables it to easily scale its computing resources to keep up with its rapid growth.

Glympse: Location-Sharing Solution Provider Gains Productivity, Agility with Hosted Services (11/17/2009)

Glympse provides a Web-based location-sharing solution for use with GPS-enabled phones. The company constantly evaluates available hosting services to ensure that it is taking advantage of all that technology has to offer. Glympse turned to the Windows Azure™ platform because it offered integrated development tools and less of a management burden than the hosting service from Amazon that Glympse was using. Glympse found that the performance and developer effectiveness possible with the Windows Azure platform surpasses those offered by the Amazon service. Glympse also gains credibility by offering a Microsoft-hosted solution, particularly with regard to stability and scalability. Perhaps most importantly, working with Windows Azure means that Glympse can be more responsive to customer needs because it can focus on improving its solution features rather than on infrastructure maintenance.

Technorati Tags: Azure,Windows Azure,Windows Azure Platform,SQL Azure,SQL Azure Database,Cloud Computing,PDC 2009,PDC09,DotNet SolutionsSolutions,CCH,The Information Store,Site MasherMasher,3M,Acumatica,Archetype,OCCMundial,Lokad,Kelley Blue Book,Invensys,Sopima,TradeFacilitate,AdSlot,Associated Press,TicketDirect,Sugar CRM,Active Web Solutions,Advanced Telemetry,Glympse

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 11/9/2009+

2009-11-15T17:07:00.000-08:00

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

••• Update 11/15/2009: Neil MacKenzie: Overviews of new Azure Storage Client v1.0 and Azure Storage v1.0 Queue features; Eugenio Pace: Claims based Identity Guide; James Hamilton: Randy Shroup & John Ousterhout Sessions at HPTS 2009; and Me: SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Sample Databases and Feature Pack; and many others.

•• Update 11/14/2009: Jim Nakashima: Azure SDK and Tools 11/2009 CTP; .NET Services Team: .NET Services November 2009 CTP QFE Breaking Changes Announcement; Geva Perry: Application Lifecycle in the Cloud; MWD Advisors: Advisory service with global survey of Cloud Computing; David Gristwood: Free Windows Azure Fasttrack Architecture Review for [UK] partners; and more.

• Update 11/13/2009: Jim Nakashima: Windows Azure ROI tool; Brent Ozar: Getting Started with SQL Azure and SSMS; Chris Hoff: The PaaSification of Cloud Computing; John Considine: Moving to the Cloud; Amazon Web Services: 11/12/2009 Newsletter; Reuven Cohen: The Role of the CTO & CIO in Cloud Computing; Lori MacVittie: Cloud, Standards, and Pants; Reuven Cohen: Is vendor lock-in a bad thing?; Michele Leroux Bustamante: Claims-Based Authorization with Windows Identity Foundation; and several others.

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

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

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

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

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

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page.
* Content for managing DataHubs will be added when Microsoft releases a CTP of the technology

Off-Topic: OakLeaf Blog Joins Technorati’s “Top 100 InfoTech” List on 10/24/2009

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

••• Neil MacKenzie delivers an overview of StorageClient’s November 2009 CTP in his Azure Storage Client v1.0 post of 11/15/2009:

The November 2009 v1.0 release of theWindows Azure SDK and Tools introduced a completely revamped StorageClient API which is now an integral part of the Azure release instead of being just a sample as before. The StorageClient API includes about 70 classes spread over 3 namespaces:

Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll

The storage client functionality is contained in Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll. This functionality is exposed through about 70 classes spread over 3 namespaces:

Microsoft.WindowsAzure

Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient

Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.Protocol

The Microsoft.WindowsAzure namespace provides storage account functionality. The Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient namespace provides the key storage client functionality. The Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.Protocol class appears to provide low-level functionality related to the actual REST calls to the Azure Storage Service and is not covered in this post.

Microsoft.WindowsAzure Namespace

The Microsoft.WindowsAzure namespace comprises classes related to storage accounts and credentials:

CloudStorageAccount

StorageCredentials

StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey

StorageCredentialsSharedAccessSignature

CloudStorageAccount exposes account and key information and is able to parse the configuration file to retrieve this information. StorageCredentials is an abstract base class for StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey, supporting shared key credentials, and StorageCredentialsSharedAccessSignature used to create shared access signatures for blobs. …

Neil’s Azure Storage v1.0 – Queues post of the same date describes what’s new in Azure Queues:

Azure Queues provided a convenient and simple section to investigate in the new Azure Storage Client v1.0. The funtionality is provided in three classes:

CloudQueue

CloudQueueClient

CloudQueueMessage

The CloudQueue class represents a Windows Azure queue. The CloudQueueClient class provides access to the Azure Queue service – and I’m not really convinced yet that the class is well named. The CloudQueueMessage class represents a queue message. …

CloudQueue

The CloudQueue class has many members allowing operations including: create queue, delete queue, add message, get message, delete message, peek message, etc. These all come in both synchronous and asynchronous form. …

CloudQueueMessage

The CloudQueueMessage class has the following members supporting the creation of and access to messages. …

A CloudQueueMessage instance can be created with a message content that is either a String or a Byte array. In both cases, the message content will be Base64 encoded before the message is sent to the Queue Service.

Note that PopReceipt is null for a CloudQueueMessage object created in response to CloudQueue.PeekMessage() or one of its variations. This is the correct behavior. However, an attempt to delete this message from the queue using CloudQueue.DeleteMessage() leads to a PopReceipt is null error rather than a more direct expression of the problem.

• John Willis includes a link to his “Big Data Defined” NoSQLEast 09 Keynote video in this 11/12/2009 post. NoSQL(East) was held on 10/29 through 10/30/2009 in conjunction with Cloud Camp Atlanta II (2009). The Speakers page has links to videos and slides from many sessions.

Steven Bink reported i365 to provide cloud storage for Microsoft DPM 2010 on 11/10/2009:

In conjunction with the beta release of Microsoft's System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, Seagate's software company, i365, has entered into a partnership to provide cloud-based data protection for DPM 2010.

The companies are currently developing a combined offering that will integrate i365's EVault data protection software and cloud-connected storage infrastructure with DPM 2010. The first configuration will include an appliance-based backup solution, which is scheduled for delivery in the first half of 2010 with the release to manufacturing of DPM 2010.

The joint products will offer SMBs data protection for Windows file servers and applications, and other platforms and applications, including UNIX, Linux, Novell Netware, VMware, IBM i and Oracle, according to George Hoenig, i365's vice president of product operations. …

SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

••• Me: A special release of the AdventureWorks sample databases (updated 11/11/2009) is required for use with SQL Server 2008 R2 November 2009 CTP. It’s available from CodePlex at AdventureWorks 2008R2 November CTP. Here’s a screen capture during the installation process:

This installer appears (to me) to solve the problems reported by users of earlier versions (including me).

The Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 November Community Technology Preview Feature Pack of 11/11/2009 is “a collection of stand-alone packages which provide additional value for SQL Server 2008 R2.” Following is a list of the 20 items available for individual download:

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Report Builder 3.0
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services November CTP Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies 2010
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services November CTP Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies 2007
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 Beta 2
Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Driver 2.0
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 System CLR Types
SQL Server 2008 R2 Remote Blob Store
SQL Server 2008 R2 Books On-line
SQL Server 2008 R2 Upgrade Advisor
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Native Client
Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0 SP 1
Microsoft OLEDB Provider for DB2
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Command Line Utilities
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Broker External Activator
Microsoft Windows PowerShell Extensions for SQL Server 2008 R2
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Objects
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 ADOMD.NET
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services OLE DB Provider
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Management Objects
Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP 1.1

Most items have X86, X64, and IA64 packages and some appear to duplicate items installed by SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP.

Gabriele Bozzi’s Why I think Amazon RDS is not hitting MS Azure under the belt post of 10/30/2009, which I missed when published, even-handedly analyzes competition between Amazon Web Services’ RDS and SQL Azure:

… Amazon needs to evolve their IaaS platform towards PaaS. Why? Basically for three reasons:

IaaS as a business is a transitory phase of Cloud Computing, it will be killed by hybrid systems (meshes of private and public clouds).

Gone are the times when EC2, S3 and friends were just exceeding computing capacity sold at affordable prices because subsidized by the flourishing Amazon commerce. AWS is experiencing a skyrocketing growth that imposes new investments and increases risk: moving towards managed services makes sense as it brings in added value customers and more money for the bang.

PaaS generates user lock-in. Microsoft understood this since the very beginning of their endeavor, the others are realizing this now.

I might seem provocative but, under a deeper scrutiny, Amazon is trailing in the race of providing PaaS.

Don’t get me wrong: Amazon’s Cloud is good, probably the best around, it just lacks the tremendous spin that the .NET community will be able to show off once Azure is released. Nonetheless, Amazon will surely narrow the gap and it will be interesting seeing how Microsoft and Amazon will confront each other in 2010. …

Alex Handy discusses application development with cloud-based relational and entity-attribute-value (EAV) databases in his Databases take a step forward article of 11/15/2009 for SD Times:

… Developing cloud applications on top of virtually hosted databases has created an entirely new set of problems for developers. Database optimization has become an art form, usually the domain of the DBA. But with cloud-hosted databases, such as Amazon's SimpleDB and Microsoft's forthcoming cloud-hosted version of Microsoft SQL Server, the information typically used to judge the usefulness of optimization actions is no longer living in the logs of a company's servers. [Emphasis added.]

The relational database is still vitally important, but there are green shoots abound in the world of non-relational databases. The necessity of speed and scalability in the cloud has spawned dozens of new projects, commercial and otherwise. Projects like CouchDB, Drizzle, MongoDB and Tokyo Cabinet all tackle specific areas of need in modern development environments.

The biggest reason for the move to amorphous blobs of unformatted data is, perhaps, sheer exhaustion. For years, much of enterprise software development has been preoccupied with integrating data, formatting it properly, moving it between databases and preparing it for processing. With new systems like Hadoop adding facilities for normalizing and crunching data in general, the need to build individual data connectors would seem to be destined for the scrap heap.

Of course, clouds also imply scaling, and scaling databases is still not an easy proposition. Thus the need for large key value stores, like Tokyo Cabinet, that focus on this singular task and eliminate the need to run a database with oodles of unneeded features. Pure key value stores lack the potential for SQL injection attacks, while amorphous blobs of data require little data normalization. …

Michael Otey’s SQL Server 2008 R2: 5 Cool New Features article from SQL Server Magazine’s October 2009 issue describes five of the “most important features you should watch for in SQL Server 2008 R2.”

• David Robinson reports the availablity of a new “What is SQL Azure Database” video, which gives a high-level overview of the service:

You can watch it here.

• Brent Ozar’s Getting Started with SQL Azure and SSMS post of 9/13/2009 provides an illustrated tutorial for using SQL Server Management Studio for SQL Server 2008 R2:

The latest build of SQL Server Management Studio for SQL 2008 R2 includes built-in support for SQL Azure. The November CTP is still only a feature-complete preview, not a release candidate, so don’t go installing it willy-nilly on your production desktop.

Topics include:

Create an Azure database and get the connection string.
Open the SQL Azure Firewall
Open SQL Server Management Studio and Connect to SQL Azure
Poking Around in SQL Azure
Things That Don’t Work in Azure

David Robinson announced SQL Server Management Studio Support for SQL Azure!!! in an 11/10/2009 post to the SQL Azure Team blog:

Just a quick post to let you know that the long awaited build of SQL Server Management Studio with support for SQL Azure is available today for MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be generally available for the rest of the world as of tomorrow. The download page can be found here. I will post a link to the tools only install when it becomes available tomorrow.

This support is included as part of the November CTP release of SQL Server 2008 R2. This release not only includes SQL Azure support from within SSMS but a wealth of other SQL Server 2008 specific features. Check out this blog entry for more.

In his SQL Server Management Studio R2 CTP download links post of 11/11/2009, Dave updates the preceding article as promised:

As promised, here are the download links for SSMS in 32bit and 64bit flavors. The full download of SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP can be found here. I’ll post some walkthroughs of SSMS in the coming days.

Dave is a Technical Editor for Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform.

Steve Clayton announced the availability of David Gristwood and Keith Burns’ 00:11:14 SQL Azure & SQL Server playing together video in this 11/9/2009 post:

A few weeks ago I was hounding the SQL Azure product team for a video that showed how SQL Server and SQL Azure could work together to bring the best of on-premises with the best of the cloud. Little did I know that the answer lay pretty close to home with my buddy Keith Burns from our DPE group in the UK.

In this video, David Gristwood chats to Keith about the many SQL Server features will also work against data stored in the cloud, in SQL Azure.

The SQL Server Team’s Announcing the SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP post of 11/9/2009 summarizes the new features of SQL Server 2008 R2’s November 2009 CTP:

At the PASS Summit 2009 last week, Ted Kummert announced the soon-to-be-delivered November SQL Server 2008 R2 Comm Technology Preview. We’re happy to announce that it is available today for MSDN and TechNet subscribers and it will be available to the general public on November 11^th. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx to get more information and to download!

The November CTP is “feature complete” so we encourage you to try out the new features in this CTP release which include:

Support for Windows Server 2008 R2, including Hyper-V with Live Migration

Enhanced data compression with support for Unicode UCS-2

PowerPivot for Microsoft® Excel and Microsoft SharePoint Server *

Report Builder 3.0 with Report Part Gallery and new visualizations (sparklines, databars)

Master Data Services (MDS)

Enhancements to the capabilities delivered in the August CTP:

A Control Point Explorer in SQL Server Management Studio for central multi-instance and application utilization management.

Built-in wizards to help you quickly set up and enroll instances and Data-Tier Application components into central management.

Dashboard viewpoints for quick insight into application and instance utilization.

StreamInsight core technology engine for Complex Event Processing. …

*The PowerPivot downloads for Excel and SharePoint will be available soon. Keep checking back here for an update.

.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

••• Eugenio Pace’s Claims based Identity Guide – New release and PDC goodness post of 11/14/2009 announces:

New updated chapters & samples are posted on CodePlex. The samples are all updated for WIF RC and include new scenarios and technologies (e.g. web services with WCF and web sites with MVC).

If you are going to PDC, lot’s of interesting things are happening there. Of all things, you will have a chance to see (and speak) to the faces behind the blogs: Vittorio Bertocci, Matias Woloski, Keith Brown.

We have printed a limited amount of “preview” copies of the Guide. You can get them at Pluralsight’s (#441), patterns & practices and Identity booths.

Eugenio also recommends several PDC 2009 sessions about claims-based identity.

•• The .NET Services Team announced The .NET Services November 2009 CTP QFE Breaking Changes Announcement and Scheduled Maintenance on 11/11/2009 but it didn’t show up in my newsreader until today:

The .NET Services Team will release a QFE on 11/12/2009 (Thursday). Users will have NO access to .NET Services Portal and .NET Services during the scheduled maintenance down time. Please note that any Access Control Service data (i.e. rules, scopes, issuers, token policies) that customers have created will have to be manually restored by customers post this QFE release.

The team published what appears to be an updated version of the .NET Services SDK November 2009 SDK as Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Nov 2009 CTP) on 11/13/2009. The Release Notes contain the following topics:

Prerequisites for using the November 2009 CTP.
Breaking changes in the November 2009 CTP.
Quota limits in the November 2009 CTP.
Known issues in the November 2009 CTP.

(The release notes will be updated periodically. Check back for updates.)

For more details, see the .NET Services Developer Portal.

• Michele Leroux Bustamante’s Claims-Based Apps: Claims-Based Authorization with Windows Identity Foundation article for MSDN Magazine’s November 2009 issue carries this abstract:

Over the past few years, federated security models and claims-based access control have become increasingly popular. Platform tools in this area have also come a long way. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a rich identity model framework designed for building claims-based applications and services and for supporting active and passive federated security scenarios.

• Zulfiqar Ahmed explains AD FS 2.0 in Identity Solutions: Using Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 in Identity Solutions in the November 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine:

This article explains how you can use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0 to claims-enable Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and browser-based applications. The focus is on the token issuance functionality in AD FS 2.0. You’ll find out how to use AD FS 2.0 as an identity provider; set up an AD FS 2.0 security token service (STS) to interact with WCF; federate AD FS 2.0 with your custom STS or another AD FS 2.0; enable Web single sign-on and federation with WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 protocols; and externalize authentication logic through Visual Studio. You’ll come away appreciating how AD FS 2.0 and Windows Identity Foundation make programming identity solutions in Windows less of a chore.

Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

••• Rob O'Neill reports from Auckland, NZ that Intergen takes TicketDirect into the Azure cloud in this article of 11/16/2009 for Computerworld New Zealand, where it’s a day ahead: “Dunedin-based ticketing service a world leader in adopting cloud computing.”

When Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) kicks of[f] in Los Angeles tomorrow, the company's new cloud platform, Azure, will be the centre of attention — and two Kiwi companies are poised to demonstrate how cloud computing can transform real businesses and deliver competitive advantage.

With the help of Microsoft partner and independent software vendor Intergen, Dunedin-based ticketing service TicketDirect is taking to the cloud to allow it to massively scale up its online services to manage even the largest of events.

TicketDirect has been poined to deploy on Azure for some time, but has had to wait for some of the pieces in development to arrive, says Intergen's director of strategy, Chris Auld. One of those key pices is the cloud version of Microsoft's SQL database, SQL Azure. [Emphasis added.]

Chris Auld is presenting PDC2009’s Architecting and Developing for Windows Azure workshop in Petree Hall C on Monday at 10:00 AM.

••• Charlie Calvert reports that he’s temporarily hosting three Videos: Azure Services in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 with Jim Nakashima, Part I:

This is the first of three videos showing how Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 provides support for the development and deployment of Azure Services applications. In these short How Do I Videos, I filmed Jim Nakashima as he demonstrated practical techniques for quickly deploying applications to the cloud. These videos will eventually be published in the How Do I section of the C# Dev Center. I’m hosting them here for now, so that they will be available in time for PDC.

Click the links below to download the videos to your local machine and view them at their native 1024 X 768 resolution.

Azure Services with Visual Studio Part I

Azure Services with Visual Studio Part II

Azure Services with Visual Studio Part III

•• Jim Nakashima’s November 2009 Release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK post of 11/13/2009 complements the Cloud Computing Tools Team’s Windows Azure Tools and SDK v1.0 November 2009 Release post of the same date and time. Here’s the latter’s new feature catalog:

Today we released several new features for Windows Azure through the Windows Azure Tools and SDK. (Use the direct link while the release propagates.) … This release add[s] support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and VWD Express 2010 Beta 2.

What's new for the November release:

Service Model UI: A redesigned and significantly more complete interface for manipulating Role configuration information. To access, double-click on a role node in the Solution Explorer.
Additional role templates: Support for ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010 only), F# worker roles (2010 only), and WCF Service Application web roles.
Support for dynamically creating tables: The Create Tables functionality is now performed automatically; there is no longer a need to right-click and select Create Tables… on the project after your table definitions have changed.
Full support for and installation of the November Windows Azure SDK release:
- The sample storage client has been replaced by a new production quality library.
- New Diagnostics library enables logging using .NET APIs and enables the collection of diagnostic information from the service.
- Service Runtime library updated to support inter-role communication and notification of configuration changes .
- Support for input endpoints on Worker Roles.
- Higher fidelity simulation of Development Storage: supports all current cloud storage features, including dynamically creating tables.
- Ability to choose the size of the VM for a role instance.
- Ability to persist data in local storage even after the role is recycled.
- Ability to manage certificates to install to the role VMs.

Updated and additional code samples are available online [from the MSDN Code Gallery] at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples. The SDK documentation’s What's New In the Windows Azure SDK topic describes the new SDK features in more detail.

Windows Azure instances now scale up and out:

Variable-size Virtual Machines (VMs): Developers may now specify the size of the virtual machine to which they wish to deploy a role instance, based on the role's resource requirements. The size of the VM determines the number of CPU cores, the memory capacity, and the local file system size allocated to a running instance.

Thanks to @DavidBurela, here are the VM sizes, cores, memory and local file system size from the Configuring Virtual Machine Size topic:

VM Size

CPU Cores

Memory

Disk Space

Small

1

1.7 GB

250 GB

Medium

2

3.5 GB

500 GB

Large

4

7 GB

1000 GB

ExtraLarge

8

15 GB

2000 GB

To specify the VM size for your role, edit your service definition file, and set the vmsize attribute on the WebRole or WorkerRole element to Small, Medium, Large, or ExtraLarge. See Service Definition Schema for more information.

So far, I haven’t seen any information on pricing.

•• Geva Perry’s Application Lifecycle in the Cloud post of 11/12/2009 posits:

Cloud computing is having a profound effect on the software application lifecycle.

Almost every phase of creating and rolling out software applications is now addressed by a growing number of cloud services: from prototyping, to development, testing & QA, continuous integration -- and all the way down to staging, deployment and post-production (monitoring and management). All of this can now be done in the cloud.

The vision is compelling. Imagine a world in which programmers can access their development environment from any computer without having to set up anything, collaborate with teams spread around the world, easily push the code to testing and QA, and then to production, where the apps will be automatically monitored and managed.

Although admittedly realizing this vision in full is several years away, we are already seeing many of the components emerging and gaining traction.

Geva goes on to cite examples in the following categories:

Development
Testing and QA
Deployment
Production

and discusses the “The Future of App Development.”

• John Moore analyzes a message of 11/12/2009 from Dr. David Blumenthal, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in his Blumenthal Beats HITECH Drum post of 11/13/2009:

Yesterday, David Blumenthal published a very thoughtful post on the HITECH Act as a foundation for information exchange in which he reflected on his own personal experience as a doctor. That experience included the often frustrating realization that he could not obtain a complete longitudinal record of his patients (customers) due to either (or both) technical or business barriers.

In his post, Blumenthal goes on to elucidate on how the HITECH Act’s language is purposely worded to remove such barriers as the healthcare sector transitions from a provider-centric model to one that is patient (consumer) centric.

Following are our own reflections on Blumenthal’s post based on the reality of the market today and where Chilmark sees it heading in the future. Specifically, we’ll tackle each of Blumenthal’s bullet points in order. …

John continues with a video clip from Microsoft about the deployment of the Amalga Unified Intelligence System 2009 for the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange (HIE) and concludes:

… Despite outlining what are seen as some fairly significant challenges to Blumenthal’s upbeat and positive post, like him, we share in the desire to move the proverbial ball forward and more importantly (what we really, really liked about his post) focus on the patient, the consumer, the citizen. In the end, it is they who are footing the bill for this massive initiative to get doctors, clinics and hospitals wired-up. Therefore, is it not they that should ultimately benefit from the HITECH Act through better care, greater flexibility in physician choice and who knows, maybe even receive lower cost of care. A tall order in deed but certainly one worth working towards. [Emphasis added.]

• John Bodkin’s Gartner seeing huge adoption of software-as-a-service post of 11/10/2009 to NetworkWorld’s Head in the Cloud blog claims “Market hits $7.5 billion in revenue in 2009.”

Customer interest in cloud-based software applications is soaring, with software-as-a-service revenues set to reach $7.5 billion in 2009 – an increase of nearly 18% over last year, according to new research from Gartner.

I don’t find the numbers too surprising – but the success of software-as-a-service is in stark contrast to many other portions of the recession-plagued IT industry.
Worldwide, software-as-a-service revenue will continue growing, totaling over $14 billion in enterprise application markets by 2013, according to Gartner.

“Adoption of the on-demand deployment model has continued to grow as on-demand vendors have extended their services through alliances, partner offerings, and more recently, by offering and promoting user application development through platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities,” Gartner analyst Sharon Mertz says in a press release. “Although usage and adoption is still evolving, deployment of SaaS still varies between the enterprise application markets and within specific market segments because of buyer demand and applicability of the solution.”

The biggest chunk of SaaS revenue is going to content, communications and collaborations applications, which are set to pull in $2.6 billion in revenue in 2009. Customer relationship management tools came in second with $2.3 billion. …

• Michael Jahn describes the relationships between Continuity of Care Document (CCD), Continuity of Care Record (CCR), Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), and Health Level 7 (HL7) standards in the Google Health Developers CCR and CCD thread of 11/9/2009 and later:

… Google Health supports a SMALL SUBSET of the CCR specification - Google
Health does not support anything related to CDA, CCD or HL7 - and one might
be thankful of that as it is quite complex and in the domain of EMR system
vendors who sell things starting at $250,000.00. …

Vaibhav Bhandari’s Understanding CCR post of 10/27/2009 describes HealthVault support for CCR:

Google Health supports only a limited set of entities from the above, while HealthVault supports the entire standard and also allows transformation of some of these entities in to native HealthVault types. You can read more about working with CCR in HealthVault and various input mappings, output mappings, and CCR vocabularies.

• Glenn Laffel, MD and Robert Rowley, MD posted the following articles about Electronic Health Records (EHR) to EHR Bloggers this week:

Feds use Fuzzy Math on EHR Stimulus (11/13/2009)
EHRs can improve health outcomes (11/12/2009
US Physicians Use EHRs Like it's 1999 (11/11/2009)
Cloudburst: The New Frontier for Electronic Health Records (11/10/2009)
EHR Data Predicts Diabetes, CV Disease (11/9/2009)
Med Student Survey: EHRs a Must (11/6/2009)

• Chris Hoff (@Beaker) proposes Silent Lucidity: IaaS — Already A Dinosaur? The Evolution of PaaSasaurus Rex… in this 11/12/2009 post:

Sitting in an impressive room at the Google campus in Mountain View last month, I asked the collective group of brainpower a slightly rhetorical question:

How much longer do you feel pure-play Infrastructure-As-A-Service will be a relevant service model within the spectrum of cloud services?

I couched the question with previous “incomplete thoughts*” relating to the move “up-stack” by IaaS providers — providing value-added, at-cost services to both differentiate and soften the market for what I call the “PaaSification” of the consumer. I also highlighted the move “down-stack” by SaaS vendors building out platforms to support a broader ecosystem and value proposition.

In the long term, I think ultimately the trichotomy of the SPI model will dissolve thanks to commoditization and the need for providers to differentiate — even at mass scale. We’ll ultimately just talk about service delivery and the platform(s) used to deliver them. Infrastructure will enable these services, of course, but that’s not where the money will come from. …

• Jim Nakashima’s Windows Azure Platform TCO/ROI Analysis Tool post of 11/12/2009 describes an online Web-based worksheet application which “will provide you with a customized estimate of potential cost savings you (or your company or organization) may achieve by building on the Windows Azure Platform. Upon completion of the TCO and ROI Calculator profile analysis, you will be presented with a detailed report which shows estimated line item costs for an accurate TCO and a 1 to 3 year ROI analysis for you or your company or organization.”

Following is part of the Windows Azure Services page displaying default data for the initial response to questions posed on the Questionnaire page (click image for full-size screen capture):

Strangely, I specified that the application would use an SQL Server database, but the worksheet didn’t include a charge for SQL Azure Web or Business Edition.

Alinean, Inc. created the application, which you access here.

• Amazon Web Services’ Newsletter of 11/12/2009 announces:

AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) for .NET Now Available
The AWS SDK for .NET makes it even easier for Windows developers to build .NET applications that tap into the cost-effective, scalable, and reliable AWS infrastructure services such as Amazon S3, EC2, and SimpleDB. With the AWS SDK for .NET, developers get started in minutes with a single, downloadable package complete with Visual Studio project templates, the AWS .NET library, C# code samples, and documentation. Learn more about the AWS SDK for .NET.

David Linthicum delivers Application design guidelines for cloud computing in this 11/12/2009 post to InfoWorld’s Cloud Computing blog. He claims “Well-designed applications for use on cloud computing platforms will provide more value in the long run.”

During a move to cloud computing, people talk about porting applications to cloud computing providers such as Microsoft and GoGrid. They even build new applications in the clouds on platforms such as Google App Engine and Engine Yard, but they've yet to focus on good application design for use on cloud computing platforms. Perhaps it's time we all put some thought into this.

Thought leadership around application design/architecture for cloud computing typically centers on a particular cloud provider. While that's certainly important, there should be some provider-neutral general application design guidelines. Also, I assert that most of the best practices for designing and creating applications for cloud computing platforms are consistent with, well, good application design practices in general -- in other words, nothing radically different, even though it feels like it should be.

Dave elaborates on the following four guidelines:

Leverage a three-tiered architecture when possible.
Leverage a loosely coupled architecture.
Consider the chatter.
Avoid proprietary features.

SearchSOA.com’s Jack Vaughn interviewed Dave in this Cloud computing and SOA with David Linthicum podcast of 11/13/2009 about his recently published Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise book.

Jim Nakashima’s Tips and Tricks for Visual Studio + Windows Azure at PDC ‘09 post of 11/10/2009 describes his PDC 2009 presentation of the same name:

The session will share a number of tips and tricks and show some cool new tools in Visual Studio for Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

The tips and tricks will be presented in the context of 2 walkthroughs:

Creating a new cloud service application

Migrating an existing ASP.NET Web Application to Windows Azure and SQL Azure

With this format I hope to make the session interesting and useful for developers that are new to Windows Azure as well as those who have been using Windows Azure for a while and want to learn some neat tricks and tips and some “under the hood” aspects of the tools.

Hope to see you there! Wednesday at 1:30 PM in 515A

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC53

Here’s the abstract:

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.

The Windows Azure Team recently posted links to four new Azure Services Platform Virtual Labs:

Test drive Azure Services Platform solutions in a virtual lab and see how you can quickly and easily develop applications running in the cloud by using your existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Virtual labs are simple, with no complex setup or installation required.

Azure Services Platform Virtual Labs:

MSDN Virtual Lab: Building Windows Azure Services with PHP

MSDN Virtual Lab: Getting Started with Windows Azure Storage

MSDN Virtual Lab: Building Windows Azure Services

MSDN Virtual Lab: Using Windows Azure Tables

You get a downloadable manual and a 90-minute block of time for each module. You can sign up for additional 90-minute blocks at any time.

Lee Messenger posted an MsWord file he found on Live Office as this Step By Step Guide To Creating A Simple Web Site On Windows Azure on 10/19/2009. (I missed it when published originally):

Now I’m not sure who actually did this tutorial, and would LOVE to credit them – But I was [G[G]oogling around and found this amazing tutorial stuck in a Word file on ‘Live Office’. I thought it was a waste being tucked away, so would post it here for everyone to use? If anyone knows who wrote this please let me know as I’ll give them all the credit here, as its a great tutorial!!

In this tutorial you will:

Register for an Azure account

Install the requisite Web services, SDK and software

Claim your Azure token after the invitation code is received

Create a Hosted Service in Azure

Create a Visual Web Developer ASP.NET “cloud” project

Create or use existing .aspx website files and folders

Copy your created or existing .aspx website files and folders to the Azure WebRole

Upload your project to the Hosted Service in Azure

Stage the Web site on Azure

Test the Web site on Azure

Publish the staged project into production

Accept and Deploy your project in the Azure “cloud”.

The tutorial is unusual because it’s fully illustrated with screen captures. Thanks to @IrishChieftan for the heads-up.

Return to section navigation list>

Windows Azure Infrastructure

••• James Hamilton offers notes about sessions presented by Randy Shroup & John Ousterhout at HPTS 2009 in this 11/14/2009 post:

HPTS has always been one of my favorite workshops over the years. Margo Seltzer was the program chair this year and she and the program committee brought together one of the best programs ever. Earlier I posted my notes from Andy Bectolsheim’s session Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 and his slides Technologies for Data Intensive Computing.

Two other sessions were particularly interesting and worth summarizing here. The first is a great talk on high-scale services lessons learned from Randy Shroup and a talk by John Ousterhout on RAMCloud a research project to completely eliminate the storage hierarchy and store everything in DRAM. …

• Reuven Cohen asks Is Vendor Lock-In Really a Bad Thing? in this 11/13/2009 post:

When you look at the success of some very proprietary solutions and the loyalty with which customers defend them, you have to wonder if vendor lock-in is really as bad a thing as we sometimes make it sound.

The subtext in the discussions around data portability and interoperability in general in cloud computing is really about vendor lock-in. Those driving efforts to come up with solutions that allow customers to pack up their data and head to another provider are primarily concerned about the dangers of being locked-in to a single vendor solution.

But given the loyalty to some brands and products that are unapologetically proprietary and inherently create a vendor lock-in situation, one has to wonder whether vendor lock-in is really a bad thing and if it is, for whom?

Take the iPhone. Really, you can take it because I don’t have one and don’t want one. But millions of people do and they are incredibly loyal to this proprietary device. Apple does not apologize at all for its business practices that support a locked-in user base, and it is unlikely that consumers even consider this to be a negative when purchasing an iPhone. Indeed, the proprietary nature of the iPhone is not what keeps me from purchasing one. …

Ruv claims The Future of The Cloud Belongs to Asia in this 11/12/2009 post.

• Lori MacVittie’s Cloud, Standards, and Pants post of 11/12/2009 posits:

These three things have a lot more in common than you might think and all three tend to evoke similar levels of frustration.

A very real problem women face when shopping is this: no two brands define a size the same. If you usually wear a size 8 in “Brand X” you might actually wear a size 10 or 6 in “Brand Y”, depending on how the brand decided to define its sizing. Customers, women in this case, cannot count on consistency in sizes across brands. This makes shopping annoying because every time you change brands you’re never quite sure what you need and if the size increases across brands, well, it becomes obvious that perhaps brand lock-in is in part the reasoning behind these differences in sizing.

Now, consider the differences in the definition of “The Cloud”. We have IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). We have PaaS (Platform as a Service). We have SaaS (Software as a Service). All three have very different definitions of what makes it “a cloud” and there is very little consistency across those definitions. Oh, there are vague similarities: elasticity, automation, easy provisioning. But those are nebulous terms that are about as useful as slapping a “Size 8” on a pair of jeans and expecting a woman to know what that means. She doesn’t, and neither does the consumer of “cloud.” …

• Reuven Cohen explains The Role of the CTO & CIO in Cloud Computing in this 11/13/2009 post and asks: "Does the CTO matter any more with the rise of Cloud Computing?"

Recently I asked a question on twitter, one I figured would stir up some debate. (Which was the point) The question was "Does the CTO matter any more with the rise of Cloud Computing or is it all about the CIO with data reigning supreme?"

As the founder of a cloud software company, I am the self imposed CTO. I have no formal CTO training other then a passion for emerging technology. In a company full of PHd's, I have probably the least technical credentials with no formal post secondary education. As a CTO I view my job as the technical leader. My job is to stay ahead of the curve, spotting trends or even sometimes helping to create the trends based on what I see as a continued evolution occurring in computing. In this new information driven world, ideas have become the new currency and in this, I see my role as not only the technical leader but also the creative leader. I continually try to educate myself on the various emerging technologies with an eye toward their practical implementation within either our cloud software platform or within our customers infrastructures.

• John Considine’s Moving to the Cloud: Managing your Environment post of 11/12/2009 is the second of five parts for his Moving to the Cloud series

One of the advantages of cloud computing is that someone else is managing the infrastructure – including the servers, network devices and storage systems, not to mention the data center power conditioning, cooling and fire suppression equipment. One of the costs of offloading this infrastructure is that the cloud becomes something different and separate from your data center. In most deployments today, the cloud is almost completely isolated from your data center, and this often requires changes in how you manage and interact with your applications.

So what does “management” mean in this context? I look at it in terms of provisioning resources and managing the infrastructure, operating systems and applications. Over the years a remarkable set of tools and processes has been developed to handle these tasks in the data center, and the challenge now is how you integrate all this investment with the new cloud deployments. …

John is founder and CTO of CloudSwitch.

David Linthicum’s Cloud computing: Why the 'elastic waistband' promise falls on deaf ears post of 11/11/2009 posits: “Providers make a big deal how the cloud can scale up and down as you need it, but most enterprises already have that capacity in-house -- and are looking for something else instead.”

I got a kick out of an eWeek article covering the recent fourth annual Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which took place last week in Santa Clara, Calif. I mean specifically the comments by Jonathan Bryce, CTO and founder of Rackspace's cloud service, "who likened cloud computing to an elastic waistband."

Not to pick on Bryce, but perhaps speaking at a conference is not the best thing to do when it was just revealed that the Rackspace cloud suffered its third outage since June. While not making the big-time press like Gmail and Twitter downtimes, Rackspace is a cloud-based infrastructure provider that maintains a good deal of mission-critical public cloud computing resources.

"With the cloud, it's not just scaling up or out, but it's also scaling back down. Before clouds, you always had to buy more infrastructure than you needed; you could never buy just the right amount. That's what elasticity in waistbands and in the cloud is all about the right fit," Bryce said. …

That's a very apt example when considering that many of us are breaking out the stretchy pants for Thanksgiving. However, we could be overselling that benefit.

Dave goes on to stress the importance of down-scaling capabilities.

Lori MacVittie claims Virtualization Changes Application Deployment But Not Development in this 11/9/2009 post:

Cloud computing management functionality and standards are right now laser-focused on virtual machines, and most APIs include the ability to stop,start,launch,etc…at that level of the infrastructure. This is because the application is still insulated by its virtualized environment. The “depth” of management and standards efforts today stops at the hard shell of the virtualization layer and leaves the soft, chewy application center alone. This means nothing is really all that different for developers. But it could, and some might argue should, be different.

Ellen Rubin summarized last week’s Cloud Computing Expo in her Reality Check at the Cloud Computing Expo article of 11/9/2009: “To a large extent, cloud computing is a victim of its own somewhat out-of-control hype cycle.”

The talk at the Cloud Computing Expo this week in Santa Clara was all about enterprise cloud adoption. Is it real? Is it already happening? If so, who’s doing it, which applications are they running and which clouds are being tested?

To a large extent, cloud computing is a victim of its own somewhat out-of-control hype cycle. Since so much has been written and discussed about the cloud in 2009, there is now a growing impatience for actual results. The fact that 2000 people showed up at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara this week (double the number from last year’s show) suggests that at the very least, interest in enterprise cloud computing remains very real, and the need for practical solutions and use cases is growing more urgent.

There was a growing concensus about a number of issues:

The hybrid model of on-prem[ises] data centers combined with the use of public clouds and cloud offerings from managed service providers is emerging as the new model for enterprise computing. Enterprise users would like to keep some applications behind the firewall (within an internal cloud or more traditional environment) and put others in the right cloud environment outside the data center.

The first applications to move to the cloud are development and test environments, business continuity solutions (“poor man’s DR,” not full active-active scenarios) and web applications. These are more easily separable from other applications and infrastructure within the data center, and tend to be lower risk for moving off-prem.

Major hurdles for enterprise cloud adoption remain the same as last year: security, loss of control, lack of integration with the enterprise data center and fear of cloud lock-in. The lock-in concerns have become more pointed as new cloud offerings come into the market beyond Amazon. (As an aside, Rackspace had a strong presence at the show, but surprisingly, Amazon, Terremark, Savvis, Microsoft and other providers were noticeably absent. Many Asian companies appear to be gearing up for new cloud offerings in 2010.) …

Ellen Rubin is the founder and VP for products at CloudSwitch.

Liz MacMillan’s Special Report on the Emerging Cloud Computing Trend post of 11/9/2009 claims “[Paul] McWilliams has displayed uncanny accuracy in predicting the ebb and flow of the markets this year.”

Next Inning Technology Research (http://www.nextinning.com), an online investment newsletter focused on semiconductor and technology stocks, announced it has published a special report on the emerging cloud computing trend covering companies including Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) and Motorola (NYSE: MOT). …

McWilliams covers these topics and more in his recent reports: How does "cloud computing," now the domain of companies like Google, have its roots in technology trends going back 40 years?

Andreas Bechtolsheim has published the slides for his Technologies for Data-Intensive Computing session at HPTS 2009. If you’re interested in the future of data center hardware, don’t miss his prognostications for 2012 and later. (Thanks to James Hamilton for his heads-up of 11/12/2009).

Cloud Security and Governance

••• Vinnie Mirchandani takes on The Economist’s “Cloud Computing Can't Be Entirely Trusted” debate in his The Economist Debate on Cloud Computing post of 11/14/2009:

The magazine is running a debate on cloud computing between Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com and Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division. …

I commented as follows: “How do you recover from someone saying “Have you quit beating your spouse?” Say yes, and you acknowledge you did it in the past. Say no, and it implies you are still doing it.

The title of this debate is similar. “Cloud Computing Can't Be Entirely Trusted” You put it at a disadvantage with a negative connotation then expect it to defend it on why it should be trusted.

Vinnie continues with a litany of thanks to the incumbent (premises) hardware vendors for the disservices they deliver and …

••• Phil Wainwright seconds Vinnie’s motion in his Can the Economist entirely be trusted? post of 11/15/2009 to ZDNet’s Software as Services blog:

I think a publication with the renowned integrity and impartiality of The Economist would have the sense to put its hand on its heart and say, ‘We try our best and we’re the best there is, but no, you can’t entirely trust any source.’ But if it were put in a position of asserting its trustworthiness against alternative publications it would surely have no choice but to speak out with a resounding voice in its own favor.

Thus I ask all my readers to vote a resounding ‘no’ to the proposition in the current Economist Debate, “This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.” I’ve written here about many of the pitfalls to be avoided in the cloud, as with any computing platform, but the alternatives to a good cloud provider are far too flaky to be worth considering.

As fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani recently posted to the debate (and to his own blog), “the incumbent, on-premise establishment … can overprice, under-deliver, cause massive overruns, suck out 80% of our IT budgets for routine work — but we need to keep trusting them.” It is no surprise that the heritage of buggy, unproven and unwarrantied software that businesses and individuals have been saddled with by the established vendors over many years has led us to instinctively mistrust any computing that forces us to rely on a third party. …

•• MWD Advisors announced a New MWD advisory service launches with global survey of IT architects on Cloud Computing on 11/10/2009 with the following headlines:

54% of respondents highlighted that their organisations are already investing in Cloud Computing, or are planning to planning to invest at some point in the coming year.
61% of those with current investments are investing to support IT development and testing work.
Despite market immaturity, 22% of those with current investments already report receiving ROI.
Proven ability to scale and support for standards are top supplier selection concerns.

• Amazon Web Services’ Newsletter of 11/12/2009 announces:

AWS Completes SAS70 Audit
Amazon Web Services has successfully completed a Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS70) Type II Audit, and has obtained a favorable unbiased opinion from its independent auditors. SAS70 certifies that AWS has had an in-depth audit of its controls, specifically as it relates to operational performance and security to safeguard customer data. We have updated our security overview whitepaper to reflect the results of our SAS70 Audit, as well as other additions. You can download the whitepaper at the AWS Security Center.

Cloud Computing Events

•• David Gristwood announced Free Windows Azure Fasttrack Architecture Review for [UK]partners on 11/5/2009:

Our team - the Microsoft Developer and Platform Group - are offering a limited number free half day Fasttrack Architectural / developer Reviews focused on the Windows Azure platform for partners. These will take place at the Microsoft offices in Reading, [UK], and will run from Monday 30^th November to Friday 4^th December, 2009.

A fasttrack review is an opportunity for a partner to lay out their technical, business and architectural problems in front of some Microsoft experts, and gain advice and guidance on choosing the best path for their future development. These are interactive, conversational engagements which typically last for around 3 to 4 hours, and have proved very successful and useful for participants in the past. For these specific sessions, the focus is on Cloud computing, and in particular Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Azure platform.

•• Steve Marx previews his PDC09 sessions in Channel9’s 00:11:02 Countdown to PDC09: Steve Marx on Cloud Development video posted on 11/12/2009:

One of our most popular PDC speakers, Steve Marx, joins us today to talk about Azure and the cloud as he teases his PDC sessions. Think there isn’t much new in the last year, or that the news around Azure is purely going to be about the business model? Think again, and let’s get nerdy!

Steve also suggests PDC09 attendees watch for:

Yet Another Thing… Shhhhhhhh! (Tushar Shanbhag and Mohit Srivastava)
This is another session that hasn’t been published yet. It’s a talk that may surprise you, but you’ll have to wait until PDC to find out what it is.

and “Building Advanced Applications with Windows Azure,” which isn’t on the schedule. Both will be announced after the Tuesday keynote.

My Suboptimal PDC 2009 Scheduling of Windows Azure and SQL Azure Breakout Sessions post of 11/12/2009 demonstrates bunched scheduling of Azure-related sessions:

You can download the above calendar as RJ’s PDC2009 Calendar in Excel (.XLS) and VCalendar (.ICS) format from my SkyDrive account (exported from Outlook 2007).

Microsoft’s Fasttrack ISV Virtual Design Review Team posted How Azure is being used in the real world - Azure Deep Dives in the UK video on 11/12/2009:

Microsoft runs occasional Azure Deep Dive events, with a small numbers of customers and partners, to help accelerate their progress building real world solutions on the Azure Platform, and providing feedback to the product team. This video looks behind the scenes at one of these 5 day Azure Deep Dives, meets the Microsoft folk mentoring the sessions, and the customers and partners building their solutions.

Check out the video to discover:

The features in the Azure Platform that early adopters are finding most compelling
The emerging architectural patterns being used, such as the use of queues for durable messaging
Discussion of recently released features for Windows Azure, and some hints for new features being announced at the PDC
Real customer and partner solutions that are being built on the Azure Platform.

Yousef Khalidi offers a preview of his PDC2009 session in this C9 Conversations: Yousef Khalidi on Cloud Computing abstract from Channel9 on 11/10/2009:

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer with a rich history in both operating system design and distributed computing. Yousef is responsible for the overall design of Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud operating system (which includes the Azure development platform in addition to the "OS", aka Windows Azure). Windows Azure is an operating system in the sense that it supplies a host of core services, process scheduling and management, identity management, etc, that we typically expect from a general purpose operating system.

In this first installment of C9 Conversations (we sit down with various Microsoft technical leaders to discuss a wide range of topics related to general purpose computing; all in high quality video and audio (big thanks to Tina Summerford for producing this new series)), the topic is cloud computing. What is it, exactly? Why does it matter? What are the challenges involved in taking software to the cloud? What does that mean, exactly? Is Windows Azure an operating system by analogy? What is Windows Azure, exactly? And more..

Yousef will be presenting his ideas on cloud computing and its future at PDC09 as part of the Technical Leaders track. Make sure to attend his talk if you're interested in how Microsoft thinks about the future of cloud computing.

Steve Gilmore interviews Bob Muglia on Azure, Silverlight, and Realtime earlier this summer and posted the transcript on TechCrunch IT on 11/11/2009:

Earlier this summer I traveled to Redmond to meet with a number of Microsoft executives, including Bob Muglia, President of the Server and Tools Business. Muglia’s group has grown rapidly to become the critical swing vote in Microsoft’s transition to the cloud, now closing in on almost a third of the giant’s overall revenue. And as Silverlight and realtime become the strategic heart of the integration of cloud and on-premise solutions, what Muglia had to say then will resonate much more clearly when he takes the stage next Tuesday with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to open the PDC in Los Angeles.

A video of the second half of the conversation is embedded below the transcript.

Joseph Hofstader will present a Webcast, Designing Multi-Tenanted Applications on Windows Azure, on 11/25/2009 at 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM PST, according to this 11/6/2009 post by the Architect Innovation Cafe blog:

Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in information technology today. With all the confusion surrounding acronyms ending in ‘aas’ like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) it can be intimidating for even seasoned IT professionals. This presentation will briefly discuss the different types of cloud platforms and then address one of the key business scenarios for the cloud: Software as a Service.

Software as a Service is a business model for making applications available over the Internet. One of the key tenets of SaaS is multi-tenancy, or software designed to be used by multiple parties. Designing SaaS applications touches on many of the technologies that comprise the Azure platform: Processing, Storage, Workflow, Database and most importantly security. This presentation will discuss how each of technologies can be utilized to define a flexible architecture for multi-tenant solutions.

Event ID: 1032432981. Register here.

Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

••• Peter Coffee recounts his “journey from the cushy VIP skybox of the technology trade press, down to the windy (and often muddy) playing field of the IT marketplace” in his Guest View: Cloud platforms for profit article of 11/15/2009 for SDTimes:

… Toward the end of my time at "eWeek," I found that I was generating many fewer reviews of development tools than I had in my earlier years. An evaluation timeline that had once required only a morning to get a tool installed, and to build at least a few functional demonstration applications, had stretched into a process that took several days merely to get a new tool wired into the cumbersome stack of data resources and middleware layers that typify modern business app development.

If it took me this long to do anything, I wondered, what was it like in an enterprise environment, where a new tool had to become a robustly integrated part of everything?
I saw the beginning of a better way when I saw Web-based applications evolving into open application platforms. I don’t mean “open source,” at least not necessarily, but rather “open to innovation”: platforms on which you could define a domain-specific data model, devise custom logic to wrap a business process around that data, and design a user experience to turn that business logic into an approachable and convenient tool.

The question, of course, was whether developers and the people who pay them would ever accept the idea that a valuable business application—perhaps a crown jewel of intellectual property—would ever be placed on someone else’s systems, running under someone else’s administration, being provisioned back to its authors or to its authors’ customers as a service. Was the developer marketplace ready for that change of the game? …

Peter Coffee, a former columnist for PC Week and eWeek, is now Director of Platform Research for Salesforce.com.

••• James Governor’s Linux and The Enterprise Cloud: A Canonical Gig post of 11/13/2009 begins:

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to present to Canonical customers and prospects about what’s going on with the enterprise Cloud market. I was a little nervous because Simon Wardley was on the same agenda, and his cloud presentation is a masterpiece. Luckily he came after me though.

My basic thesis is that Amazon Web Services remains the de facto standard for cloud computing. There are three kinds of economics you can’t compete with – Open Source, The Web, and Simplicity. Well: AWS embodies all three of those economic justifications. So what can the enterprise learn from Amazon? …

and continues with a Enterprise Clouds With Canonical slide deck. James concludes:

I would say that the decision by Ubuntu to mirror AWS for the enterprise using the Eucaluptus architecture, based on Amazon’s AWS APIs, makes a great deal of sense. Rather than delivering more complexity to enterprises for their enterprise needs, Ubuntu is essentially saying: keep it simple. This is opinionated web oriented ops, rather than all singing all dancing all enterprise knobs and dials enterprise ops we’re hearing other vendors pitch. The demo by John Willis of the new Canonical Landscape monitoring and provisioning tool spoke clearly to less is more. More on that later.

His earlier What’s in store for 2010? 9 Trends, Quick Take includes these two takes:

Hybrid Cloud and On Premise models for the enterprise. Hybrid is now just the reality of how we get things done. Just as open source began as a fringe activity, but captured the mainstream, so SaaS and Cloud are increasingly just an economic and technical reality. Cloud doesn’t replace on premise, it augments it.
That said, the Big Cloud Backlash will be in full effect in 2010, after all the hype in 2009.

• Amazon Web Services’ Newsletter of 11/12/2009 announces:

AWS has successfully completed a SAS70 Audit of our operational procedures and security
Our commitment to the Asia-Pacific market with plans to provide multiple AWS Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010
The 2009 Startup Challenge Finalists are announced
Developers can now utilize the new AWS SDK for .NET to make it even easier to build .NET applications on AWS
Customers with sensitive data can use Amazon CloudFront's new private content feature
AWS Multi-Factor Authentication compatible devices are now available worldwide

• Charles Babcock reports Amazon Bids For Windows Developers On Eve Of Azure's Launch in this 11/12/2009 post to InformationWeek’s Plug into the Cloud Blog:

Four days before Microsoft launches its Azure cloud platform to developers at a conference in L.A., Amazon has come up with a .Net software development kit to help Windows developers produce code that runs in Amazon's EC2. It's probably just coincidence. But let's see what they're getting with AWS SDK for .Net.

Late Wednesday the Amazon Web Services unit posted the availability of AWS SDK for .Net on its Web site. The SDK "makes it even easier for Windows developers to build .Net applications that tap into the cost-effective, scalable and reliable AWS cloud," it said.

I wasn’t aware that Amazon had made the EC2 environment especially easy for Windows developers in the past. If anything, I would have assumed that it left those developers to their own devices, particularly during the two-year beta phase of EC2 when you could only run Linux virtual machines in the Amazon Web Services cloud. I would concede that Amazon did add Windows as a choice for your virtual machine a year ago, and that made things easier for Windows developers, if they were targeting EC2. …

• Bruce Guptil’s Data Center Dance-cards Fill Up: HP to Acquire 3Com Research Alert of 11/12/2008 for Saugatuck Research (site registration required) begins:

What is Happening? The competitive landscape for data centers and Cloud Computing is being changed by another major IT acquisition. On Wednesday 11 Nov. 2009, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced an agreement to acquire 3Com Corp. for $7.90 per share, or approximately $2.7B. 3Com’s most recently-reported annual revenues were $1.6B, with an operating margin of 2.3 percent. HP said that 3Com products will be integrated into HP's existing ProCurve network equipment business.

Bruce continues with his analysis of:

Why is it Happening?
Market Impact

Clint Boulton claims Google Storage Price Cut Shows Cloud is Competitive, Maturing in this 11/12/2009 post to eWeek’s Data Storage … blog:

Google slashed the costs of hosted storage for its Picasa and Gmail applications, offering 20 gigabytes (GB) of storage for $5 per year, or twice as much for one quarter of the previous price. Will users begin entrusting more e-mail and photos to Google server farms? It's hard to say, but certainly cutting storage costs for its Picasa photo-sharing and Gmail applications is a sign the cloud computing market is maturing. Was the cost cut a competitive gesture? Google's cut came one days after Cisco Nov. 9 launched its Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail app for $3.50 per user per month with 5 GB of storage.

Yeshim Dentz’ The Power of Google and the Promise of Cloud Computing post of 11/12/2009 reports “Evans Data says that as the computing landscape evolves with the Cloud, so will the adoption of surrounding technologies.”

Evans Data Corp announced that use of the Python scripting language has increased by 45% since Spring 2008 according to the most recent North American Development Survey to be released this week to subscribers. Only 13% of developers used Python before Google announced its App Engine platform in Spring 2008, which at the time only supported Python, but that number has increased to 20.3% today. Other scripting language use remained relatively constant, with only small gains or losses in popularity among languages such as Ruby, PHP, Perl and Actionscript.

Amazon Web Services announced plans to open an Asian front in its Amazon Web Services Announces Expansion into Asia in the First Half of 2010 press release of 11/9/2009:

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced an expansion of its services into an Asia-Pacific region in the first half of 2010, enabling businesses to deploy compute and storage resources in close proximity to their end-users in the region. Software developers and businesses will be able to access AWS’s infrastructure services from multiple Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010, then in other Availability Zones within Asia over the second half of 2010. AWS services available at the launch of the Asia-Pacific region will include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon CloudFront. To get started using Amazon Web Services, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Windows Azure Platform,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Azure Database,SADB,SDS,.NET Services,Cloud Computing,Google App Engine,App Engine,Electronic Health Records,EHR,Personal Health Records,PHR,HealthVault,Amalga,Google Health,HP,3Com,Salesforce.com,Ubuntu,Eucalyptus

LINQ and Entity Framework Posts for 10/26/2009+

2009-11-15T15:48:00.001-08:00

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

Entity Framework and Entity Data Model (EF/EDM)

Julie Lerman offers An Improved Entity Framework Tip for EF4 thanks to Zeeshan on 11/13/2009:

In my EF Tips & Tricks talk that I just did at DevConnections, I have a suggestion to reduce redundant methods where you might expose queries to generate reference lists. …

Instead I have a single generic method, GetRefernenceList<TEntity> that uses some tricks with Entity SQL and MetadataWorkspace to dynamically build the query and return the requested list.

This is still the right way to do it in VS2008. However, Zeeshan Hirani suggested to me that with EF4, there’s a better way – the new CreateObjectSet method.

This let’s me pass in the entity type and create a queryable set.

Alex James continues his EF Tip series with Tip 43 – How to authenticate against a Data Service of 11/13/2009 by describing the problem:

When writing code against a Data Service, like say SharePoint, the client application must provide a valid set of credentials, or you will see a dreaded “401 Unathorized” response.

For Silverlight applications hosted on the same site as the DataService, this is generally handled for you automatically.

But WPF applications, for example, need manual intervension.

Thankfully, he also describes the solution, which is “to set the Credentials property on your DataServiceContext before you issue any queries or updates.”

Alex also points out an Interesting series of Posts exploring Code-Only posts by Alan Wertheim “about using Code-Only to write clean code.”

Danny Simmons’ AttachAsModified revisited post of 11/9/2009 describes how the ObjectStateManager.ChangeObjectState method has reduced the complexity of setting an entity’s properties state to modified:

It seems like on a fairly regular basis these days I encounter a question or an issue about the EF to which the answer is “I know I wrote a blog post about that…” Then when I go search my blog and find the post I discover that the post was written before EF4 and things are now a lot easier than they used to be. Here’s another one of those situations:

About a year ago I wrote a post presenting a little extension method AttachAsModified which was designed to make a few small n-tier scenarios easier to write by hand. You can read the post for more background on the situation, but the issue which came up today is that in EF4 the code in that post can be made much simpler. The hardest part of the code before was iterating over an object’s properties and telling the ObjectStateManager to mark each property as modified. It wasn’t all that many lines of code, but it was pretty obtuse. The reason for this code is that the ObjectStateManager had two relevant methods—one marks the whole entity as modified but not any of its properties, and the other marks a single property as modified. What was missing was something that would set all of the properties to modified, and the trick for that was to use metadata from the EF to get the list of persisted property names.

As part of our effort to improve n-tier support in general for EF4, though, we added the method ChangeObjectState to ObjectStateManager, and if you use that method to change an object’s state to “Modified”, then it will do the work of mark each property as modified for you. So my AttachAsModified method becomes trivial—just one call to attach the entity and another call to change its state. …

Alex James’ Tip 42 – How to create a dynamic model using Code-Only of 11/9/2009 explains how to overcome lack of a strongly typed Context class:

What if you make a determination at runtime that you need a model, there isn't an appropriate strongly typed Context class lying around.

and explains:

It turns out you can use ObjectContext directly. When you do this though Code-Only knows nothing about the model. But that isn’t that bad all you need to do is explicitly tell Code-Only about all the things it would normally learn from the strongly typed context.

He concludes with an “end-to-end” code sample.

His Tip 41 – How to execute T-SQL directly against the database of 11/7/2009 notes:

Sometimes you’ll find you need to issue a query or command that the Entity Framework can’t support. In fact this problem is common to most ORMs, which is why so many of them have a backdoor to the database.

The Entity Framework has a backdoor too …

and delivers Tip 40 – How to materialize presentation models via L2E on the same day.

Julie Lerman discusses MSDN Guidance on ASP.NET MVC vs WebForms and its Impact on my EF + ASP.NET Work in this 11/7/2009 post:

Last year at the fall 2008 DevConnections conference, I was very happy to hear Scott Guthrie providing a clear message about web forms vs. MVC in ASP.NET 4.0.

Now, I am seeing something that is new for MSDN Documentation, not only similar clarity but actual guidance on when Microsoft suggests to use one over the other.

You’ll find this in two places.

First, in the ASP.NET MVC Overview topic. In this document, their is a list of advantages of MVC and a list of advantages of web forms apps.

Next, in the topic titled Compatibility of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC, there is a short list of strengths of web forms and another of the strengths of MVC. Following this are short lists of asp.net features that are compatible with MVC and then those that are incompatible with MVC. …

Danny Simmons says It’s time to rip up EntityBag and throw it away in this 11/5/2009 post:

A couple of years ago when the overall shape of what we would ship in the first release of the entity framework became apparent, I realized that one of the biggest issues users of that release would fight with was creating N-tier applications. So I started a project to explore the space by creating something I called EntityBag. In spite of the fact that I wasn’t too thrilled with the overall approach, I thought it would be a good exercise and if nothing else it would help illuminate the issues with building this kind of application on the EF and demonstrate to folks what techniques they could use with the EF to solve these problems. The result of this investigation was a series of blog posts and a sample project which I uploaded to code gallery. You can check out the project at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/entitybag/ That site also has links to each of the relevant blog posts which is where the real interesting data lives.

At the time that I created EntityBag (mostly January 2008), the version of the Entity Framework was called “beta 3”, and it was before the first RTM of the product. Unfortunately, when the first version was finally released we included a change to by default generate classes which would serialize an entire graph of related entities as one (at beta 3 only one entity would serialize at a time) which ended up breaking EntityBag and the fix involved fairly major surgery. From the beginning this project had never been intended as a full-quality production solution—I just wanted to teach people how they could use the EF to build the right solutions for their particular projects. In addition I wanted to work with the team to produce a much better, long-term solution for N-tier apps, so whatever time I had available for this topic I poured into the next release of the EF (EF4) rather than into updating the EntityBag project.

and then goes on to describe the new features in EF Feature CTP 2 that make coding n-tier EF projects simpler. Danny also provides the following links to related articles:

Entity Framework: Anti-Patterns To Avoid In N-Tier Applications

Entity Framework: N-Tier Application Patterns

N-Tier Apps and the Entity Framework: Building N-Tier Apps with EF4

So, death to EntityBag! Long live EF4!

Julie Lerman analyzes New Entity Framework Feature CTP for VS2010 Beta 2 in this 11/5/2009 post:

The EF team just released the newest version of the Feature CTP that is now compatible with VS2010 Beta2. Hooray for compatibility, but more importantly, we can now work with a greatly enhanced version of the Code Only feature and Self-Tracking Entities. Code-Only is the API that allows you to use EF without a model at all. Self-Tracking Entities provides tracking for entities across WCF Services and their clients .

I’ll talk a bit about Code Only here, which will be of great interest to Domain Driven Developers.

Matthieu Mezil’s ADO.NET Data Services Client context post of 11/4/2009 begins:

One of the great points with EF is the eco-system around it. Even if it can be used without EF, I think that ADO .NET Data Services is one of the technologies in this eco-system. Indeed, using ADO.NET Data Services with EF implies almost no code to write some LINQ queries in the client tier or to save the changes.

However, when we use the generated proxy in the client tier there are some bad points.

Matthieu continues with an elucidation of the “bad points,” which he fixes with a T4 template.

Julie Lerman explains Designer Support for One-Way navigations in Entity Framework 4 on 10/29/2009:

In EF v1, it is possible to have one way navigations where you have an association between two entities but a navigation in only one of them. But the designer didn’t support this. If you deleted a navigation, the association was automatically removed.

You could, however, go into the XML and remove the navigation property manually, leaving the association, association mappings and the partner navigation property in tact.

The new designer now supports one way relationships – both for models with foreign keys and models without foreign keys.

Here is a model that does not use foreign keys. The associations, by the way, are called “independent associations” when there is no foreign key involved.

Matthieu Mezil shows you how to Generate a WCF service from an edmx with T4 v2 in this 10/26/2009 article:

I recently published a T4 template to generate a WCF service. I updated it to be able to load its relationships from an entity.

When the template is written (what I’ve already done), it generates the WCF service for us (you just have to set the end point in the config file).

As I explained in my previous post, the great point with it is the fact that the code writing time is not dependant of the number of entities on the model. Moreover, the template is generally (it’s the case here) not dependant of the model so we can use it with another model and more generally with another project.

See Julie Lerman discusses Self-Contained Entity Framework Models and ASP.NET Dynamic Data in the “ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD) section.

LINQ to SQL

Ayende Rahien’s Some observations on Linq to Sql & Entity Framework codebases post of 11/25/2009 observes:

So, I have to do a lot of L2S and EF work recently, while trying to create L2SProf and EFProf. The interesting tidbit is that I got a totally different approach to using them than almost anyone else.

I don’t really care for either as an OR/M (I have my own, thank you very much), I only care for plugging into them deeply enough that I can get the information that I want.

With L2S, that was fairly easy, all I needed to do was figure out how to get access to the logging that it was already doing, and I was pretty much done. With EF, there isn’t any logging, and I was left having to write my own EF provider (and then plugging that in). I am going to talk about how I plugged myself into EF at some length some other time.

Ayende reports Linq to Sql Profiler is now on public beta on 11/13/2009:

Well, after talking about it quite often recently, I think it is just about time to make this public.

The Linq to Sql Profiler is now on public beta, and it is even more awesome than you could imagine.

We are able to get a tremendous amount of information out of Linq to Sql, so from profiling behavior it is quite on par with NH Prof or Hibernate Profiler.

Here is a screen shot:

Please note that the UI color scheme is still under development, we would love to hear feedback about that as well.

Like NH Prof, L2S Prof is currently offered in a 30% discount for the duration of the beta period.

LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, et al.

Jim Wooley’s LINQ tools [i]n the Toolshed post of 11/5/2009 reports:

This summer at the Jacksonville Code Camp, I had the pleasure of being part of the taping of Russ' Fustino’s Toolshed. Finally, the episode has been posted on Channel9 for you to enjoy. Here’s the overview of the episode: Toolshed: Episode 5 - Its All About The Tools TV Show

Episode 5 has killer content on Deep Zoom, Expression Web 3, a codeplex project on a Snippet Editor for Visual Studio, LINQ Tool Samples, LINQ Pad, Link To Twitter, Expression Blend 3 Importing Adobe assets, and an incredible codeplex project must see on a solid Silverlight website starter kit using best practices! This is Russ's Tool Shed's best effort yet! Grab a beer and hope you enjoy this most educational, enlightening and entertaining instant classic video!

The LINQ Tools segment starts at 44:35 if you want to jump ahead.

ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)

The ADO.NET Team Blog’s Updated Feature CTP Walkthrough: Code Only for Entity Framework of 11/12/2009:

[C]overs Code Only improvements in the CTP2 release for VS 2010 Beta2. This walkthrough shows how you can change the default model like specifying property facets and navigation property inverses as well change the default mapping by changing the default inheritance strategy and table and column names. You can learn more about the CTP2 Code-Only improvements from our blog post on the EFDesign blog.

Code Only ships as part of the Microsoft Entity Framework Feature CTP 2. The CTP works on top of the latest version of the Entity Framework released as part of .NET 4.0 Beta 2.

Requirements

This walkthrough requires Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

The Microsoft Entity Framework Feature CTP2, that can be downloaded from here.

A local SQL Server 2008 Express instance has to be installed as SQLEXPRESS.

Download and extract the initial solution attached to this post. …

and its Automatic Generation of Stored Procedure Return Types post of the same day describes:

A new feature of the Entity Framework in .NET 4.0 is the ability to return collections of complex type instances from stored procedures. In the next public release of the designer, we have enriched this functionality by adding the ability to automatically create these complex types by querying stored procedure metadata from the database server. To demonstrate this feature, we will use the Northwind database, and we will focus on a stored procedure called “CustOrdersDetail”.

The Foreign Key Relationships in the Entity Framework post of 11/6/2009 begins:

Last March Alex James posted to our design blog about our plans for adding foreign keys to the entity framework. Since then we’ve pushed forward with implementing FK associations and properties and have included them in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This article offers a walkthrough of foreign key relationships in the EF and how they’re useful in VS2010 Beta2. For more information, the documentation and a number of blogs offer useful background about the logic behind adding EF foreign key relationships; here are a few links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2009/03/16/foreign-keys-in-the-entity-framework.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/archive/2008/10/27/foreign-keys-in-the-conceptual-and-object-models.aspx

Defining and Managing Relationship MSDN documentation

and continues with a detailed walkthough.

Model First with the Entity Framework 4 of 11/5/2009 demonstrates new designer features in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2:

In a previous post, we walked through the designer’s “out of the box” database schema generation experience. In this post, we show how some new designer features in VS2010 Beta 2 integrate with this capability, then we pop the hood and show how easy it is to replace or extend parts of the generation system.

We will begin with a simple model that contains two newly supported constructs: Employee.EmployerId is a foreign key that references Company.Id, and Person.Address is a complex type.

ADO.Net Entity Framework Community Technology Preview Released! celebrates on 11/4/2009:

We’ve released an update of the Entity Framework Feature CTP! The updated CTP includes many requested improvements and added features we’ve gathered from the community since the release of our first CTP and supports installation with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 as well. Some of the improvements and added features added since the last CTP include:

Enhancements to Code Only, including-
- Fine Grained Control over model
  - Specify Navigation Property Inverses
  - Specify Property Facets
  - Complex Types
- Customizable Mappings
  - Change Table Name, Column Names
  - Specify Custom Inheritance Strategy
  - Entity Splitting
  - Join Table Mapping
The Self-Tracking Entities template, allowing code generation of EF entities that facilitate ease of use in WCF/N-Tier scenarios-
- Foreign Key associations: Self-Tracking Entities can take advantage of the Foreign Keys in the Model feature added in .NET 4.0 Beta 2 and can contain both navigation properties and Foreign Key properties for the same association. Fix-up logic has been tidied up to be aware of FKs.
- Support for Silverlight 3: Generated entity types can be compiled to target Silverlight 3 and can be used in combination with Silverlight-enabled WCF services.
- Databinding support: Generated entity types now implement INotifyPropertyChanged and use ObservableCollections allowing them to work better with WPF and Silverlight databinding.
- Richer concurrency control support: Self-Tracking Entities now support the same variations for optimistic concurrency control as the Entity Framework. Original values are preserved for all required properties according to their concurrency mode in the Entity Data Model.
- Improved independent association support: The approach for managing entities with dangling references has been reengineered to avoid unnecessary database round-trips.
- New and improved methods: AcceptChanges, StartTracking, StopTracking where added and the existing MarkAsX methods are now extension methods.
- Generated code improvements and refactoring: The ApplyChanges implementation has been moved to the Context template so the template has no binary dependencies besides Entity Framework. Generated code for entity types have been refactored.

The Astoria Team’s Enabling X-Domain access to your Data Services post of 11/5/2009 explains:

In the Astoria V1.5 CTP2 release, we introduced support for X-Domain and Out Of Browser access to Data Services in our Silverlight client library.

This blog post talks about how to enable Cross-Domain access to Data Services from the Silverlight client library. …

and its Using Data Services over SharePoint 2010 – Part 2 – CRUD post of 10/29/2009 begins:

In part 1 you learned how to get SharePoint 2010 and Astoria working together, how to add a Service Reference to your Client Application and how to do a basic insert.

In this installment you will see full CRUD, so you’ll learn how to do queries, data binding, updates and deletes. …

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD)

Julie Lerman discusses Self-Contained Entity Framework Models and ASP.NET Dynamic Data in this 11/15/2009 post:

In an earlier post, I wrote about the new awesomeness that ASP.NET 4.0’s Dynamic Data brings to many to many relationships.

I frequently notice that most DD demos demonstrate creating the data model within the same project as the DD website.

Even though a typical Dynamic Data app is for RAD development and isn’t focused on application architecture (come on, the data access is buried in the UI), I still can’t bare to store my model inside of the UI project. All of my EF Entity Data Model’s are housed in their own projects.

This is not a problem at all for a Dynamic Data site. Like any other project that leverages an EDM in a separate project, you only need to perform three steps to point to the external model:

Add a reference to the project that contains the data model

Add a reference to System.Data.Entity.dll

If it’s the executing app (in this case it is), provide the EntityConnection string, most typically by adding it into the web.config file

For Dynamic Data, there is one additional consideration that I was torn over.

I have my model in it’s own project because I like to be able to reuse it in other applications. …

Julie Lermon discusses ASP.NET 4.0 Dynamic Data and Many to Many Entity Framework Entities on 11/7/2009:

Even though I’m a much bigger fan of distributed apps than using UI bound data binding, it’s still important for me to know how these various tools work – especially since I need to write about them in my updated E.F. book. ;)

I did not play much with Dynamic Data controls in VS2008 and just made a cool discovery in VS2010 Beta 2. This may not even be new, but as I’m sitting 30,000+ feet over the Atlantic ocean, I don’t have access to VS2008 at the moment to check.

She was “surprised when [she] chose to Edit the person and saw how brilliantly the Dynamic Data templates handled the Entity Data Model’s many to many relationship.”

Steve Naughton’s Conditional UIHint post of 10/30/2009 begins:

Long time no posts but I’m posting again should have some DDv2 and ASP.Net 4.0 samples soon.

I just had need of a conditional UIHint for a project I was working. …

and provides listings for the required code.

Technorati Tags: Entity Framework,Entity Data Model,EDM,LINQ to SQL,LINQ,ADO.NET Data Services,Astoria Project,SharePoint 2010

Technorati Makes Breaking Change to Multi-Word Tag Syntax: Hyphens Replace Plus Signs – Epic #Fail

2009-11-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

Update 11/15/2009: Multi-word tags with “+” word separators and search feeds now seem to be working. The following capture resulted on 11/15/2009 from a SQL Azure Database (SQL+Azure+Database) tag:

Update 11/13/2009: @TechnoEric said “[W]e really should get the old tags working with our new system; you may not need to change.” in an 11/9/2009 tweet.

Update 11/12/2009: Brandon Turner of the Windows Live Writer (WLW) team responded to my tweet regarding updating WLW as follows in an 11/9/2009 email:

Sadly, we don’t have a work around in our code right now, if this is a problem for you, then you might want to look into a 3^rd party plugin.
It’s strange they want to use dash instead of a plus sign, when all other blog tag aggregators seem to still use a plus sign. This is probably because URL encoding requires spaces be convert to a + sign or %20.

None the less, I have filed a bug to look into the issue. We’ll see what we can do.

While testing Technorati tags generated by Windows Live Writer in my recent blog posts, I discovered that multi-word tags, such as Windows Azure (Windows+Azure) were returning hundreds of links to posts apparently tagged Windows.

Similarly, posts tagged SQL Azure (SQL+Azure) or SQL Azure Database (SQL+Azure+Database) returned links to posts having no conceivable relationship to Microsoft’s new cloud-based relational database (click image for full-size capture):

Following is a transcript of my Twitter conversation with @TechnoEric about this problem:

From @rogerjenn 11/8/2009: @technorati: Tag-based search with phrases (word1+word2) ignore the second and higher terms. Try any link on http://bit.ly/2wAQGC. #Fail.
From @rogerjenn 11/8/2009: @technorati: The http://technorati.com/tag/W... URL returns mostly Windows 7 posts, neglecting the Azure restriction. Epic #Fail.
From @TechnoEric 11/9/2009: @rogerjenn @technorati:for multi-word tags try dash: http://technorati.com/tag/W... Not perfect, but better.
From @rogerjenn 11/8/2009: RT @TechnoEric: Dash for multi-word tags is better, but requires manually editing tags created by Windows Live Writer. Why the change? #Fail

Substituting hyphens (-) for plus signs (+) does, indeed, improve the results, as indicated by SQL Azure (SQL-Azure) or SQL Azure Database (SQL-Azure-Database) links:

As I mentioned in my reply to @TechnoEric, this unannounced (and unwarranted, in my opinion) change requires manually editing the Technorati tags generated by Windows Live Writer, my preferred blog editor. However, this gratuitous change renders non-functional about 10,000 tags in my earlier blog posts.

I’ve contacted wlw-team@microsoft.com to request the option of changing the space separator to and from plus signs in new posts. I’ll update this post, if and when I hear from @TechnoEric or the Windows Live Writer team. I’ve temporarily reverted to Google Alerts for cloud-related blog posts.

Technorati TagName Articles Pages Are Missing the RSS Feed Icon: Another #Fail

Another issue I encountered after Technorati overhauled their site was the loss of an RSS feed icon on the page(s) returned by tag URLs. Previously, I was able to add feeds to my reader that returned links to updated tag-specific pages, which Technorati calls “search feeds.” Clicking Internet Explorer 8’s RSS feed icon returns an “All Items” feed, which, of course, is totally useless:

There are several recent @TechnoEric tweets that mention “Technorati search feeds went away w/redesign. Back soon. You're getting original articles feed” or the like.

Technorati has invested thousands, perhaps millions, in an attempt to upgrade its service. The foolishness described in this post indicates a lack of attention by Technorati to the needs of the majority of the site’s contributors.

Technorati Tags: Technorati,Tags,Tagging,Search Feeds

Suboptimal PDC 2009 Scheduling of Windows Azure and SQL Azure Breakout Sessions

2009-11-12T11:11:00.001-08:00

PDC 2009’s session schedulers have created a choice crisis for Windows Azure and SQL Azure developers who are attending the conference in Los Angeles next week. Here’s what my schedule looks like in Outlook 2007 (click image for full-size version):

It’s clear that the schedulers missed the opportunity to fill all 8:30 AM and 4:30 PM slots with Azure-related sessions. Hopefully, they’ll repeat the most popular sessions based on attendees’ current schedule selections.

You can download the above calendar as RJ’s PDC2009 Calendar in Excel (.XLS) and VCalendar (.ICS) format from my SkyDrive account.

Technorati Tags: PDC2009,PDC09,PDC 2009,Windows Azure Platform,Windows Azure,SQL Azure Database,SQL Azure,.NET Services. Sync Services,Sync Framework,Cloud Computing. IBM

Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 11/2/2009+

2009-11-08T14:51:00.000-08:00

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

•• Updated 11/8/2009: Vittorio Bertocci: Identity Developer Tranining Kit November 2009 Release; Wade Wegner: Preview of his PDC 2009 Migration to Azure session; Stephen Elop and Marc Benioff: Will participate in an Economist Debate starting on 11/10/2009; Arshad Ali: Moving databases to SQL Azure; Judith Hurwitz: Why all workloads don’t belong in the cloud; ChristophDotNet: WcfTestClient with Windows Azure Problems; Tony Bishop: Secure Enterprise Clouds; and Herve Roggero: SQL Azure - Auditing Choices.

• Updated 11/7/2009: Jim Nakashima: Using SQL Server Management Studio with SQL Azure; Me: Corrected location for downloading the LIMOGv2 VB.NET 2008 source code; Tim Fischer: Enterprise Apps in Windows Azure - Calling the Internet Service Bus; Microsoft Research: Azure Library for Lucene.Net; and many more.

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

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

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

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

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

Discuss the book on its WROX P2P Forum.

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

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

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

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

HTTP downloads of the two chapters are available from the book's Code Download page.
* Content for managing DataHubs will be added when Microsoft releases a CTP of the technology

Off-Topic: OakLeaf Blog Joins Technorati’s “Top 100 InfoTech” List on 10/24/2009

Azure Blob, Table and Queue Services

• My updated Azure Storage Services Test Harness: Table Services 5 – Generating Classes/Collection Initializers with LIMOG v2 post of 11/7/2009 corrects the download location for the LINQ In-Memory Object Generator version 2 (LIMOGv2) code generator for Azure entity-attribute-value (EAV) tables:

As of 11/7/2009, you can download the VB.NET 2008 source code for LIMOGUtilityV2 from Windows Live SkyDrive. After I remove the obsolete code to generate SQL Data Services classes, I will include the source code in the comprehensive download available from Wrox’s Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform site.

Mary Jo Foley reported in her Microsoft puts more Azure cloud plumbing in place post of 11/6/2009:

Microsoft … rolled out on November 5 a new CDN capability that extends the storage piece of the Windows Azure cloud operating system. …

Mary Jo continues:

The new Windows Azure CDN is designed to allow developers to deliver high-bandwidth content more quickly and efficiently. …

She also offers:

[M]ore details from a November 5 blog post by Brad Calder, who is a leader of the Windows Azure Storage team. …

Steve Marx’s Using the New Windows Azure CDN with a Custom Domain post of 10/6/2009 delivers the details for implementing the new CDN:

Today we announced a new service in Windows Azure: the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN). You can read about the details over on the Windows Azure blog. In short, you can now tap into our global CDN to cache your content close to your users. The Windows Azure CDN is a free preview for now, and we’ll announce pricing information in the future.

As we all know, my blog is an international sensation, and I sometimes include images in my posts. Now I have the opportunity to boost the performance of my blog by serving those images from the Windows Azure CDN. In this post, I’ll show you how I enabled the CDN under a custom domain name for images on my blog.

He explains some of the updates to his original post in this Why my latest blog post didn't work for a while post to his new new microblog.

Randy Cooper compares the two primary content deliver networks (CDNs) for cloud-based blob storage in his Azure CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront/S3 post of 11/6/2009:

… Note that the latest addition to the Azure family is in CTP release only. All we know is that the Windows Azure platform launch, PDC 2009 is expected to release new features later this month, followed by its official launch in January and first billing cycle in February; it’s likely that the CDN will be available along those timelines as well.

Like CloudFront, Microsoft’s CDN does not solve the HTTPS issue in the first release either. In terms of pricing, if Windows Azure platform pricing is any indication, you can expect to pay ~0.17/Gb for each targeted zone. …

Brad Calder announces a new capability for Accessing Windows Azure Blobs Using Custom Storage Domain Names in this 11/5/2009 post to the Windows Azure Team blog:

Today we are releasing the ability to access Windows Azure Blobs using custom domain names. Windows Azure Blob storage enables applications to store and manipulate large objects and files in the cloud.

The custom storage domain name feature allows you to register a custom domain name for a given storage account for anonymous blob access using that domain name. Currently we provide access to blob storage using the following domain name:

http://<account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<blobname>

But if I owned a domain called “toddlers.wingtiptoys.com”, I may instead want my blobs accessible via:

http://toddlers.wingtiptoys.com/<container>/<blobname>

When registering a custom storage domain name, you can use that domain name to access the contents of a public container instead of http://<account>.blob.core.windows.net/. For example, given a public container “images” for a storage account named “toys”, we register the custom domain name “toddlers.wingtiptoys.com” for that storage account. …

SQL Azure Database (SADB, formerly SDS and SSDS)

•• Herve Roggero’s SQL Azure - Auditing Choices post of 11/7/2009 begins:

As I am digging more into SQL Azure, it seems choices for auditing will become a little bit more restricted.

Generally speaking there are four ways to audit SQL Server statements; these mechanisms are used by various software vendors to deliver auditing capabilities for compliance mandates and for security reviews. However as we will see, many of the products will stop from working for SQL Azure due to some limitations imposed by the database.

Herve explains the four auditing methods and concludes:

At this point at least, there appears to be no real silver bullet for auditing a SQL Azure database; at least not yet...

Still, most applications using the SQL Azure platform will not likely store any sensitive data, initially. As the SQL Azure platform grows in its use, I would expect some of the options above to be enabled, or new options to become available.

•• Arshad Ali describes Moving your database to the cloud with SQL Azure - Part 1 in this 11/5/2009 article for the MSSQLTips Community:

There has been lots of buzz about cloud computing lately and looking at the benefits it provides (in terms of cost savings, high availability, scalability (scale up/down) etc.) it is now evident that cloud computing is the future for next generation applications. Many of tomorrow's applications will be designed and hosted in the cloud. Microsoft realizes this potential and provides a cloud computing solution with Windows Azure. Windows Azure platform, which is hosted inside Microsoft data centers, offers several services which you can leverage while developing your application if you target them for the cloud. One of them is Microsoft SQL Azure, it's a cloud based relational database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. In this tip series, I am going to show how you can start creating databases and database objects on the cloud with SQL Azure.

• Jim Nakashima details Setting Up SQL Server Management Studio with SQL Server Express 2008 Installed for use with SQL Azure in his 11/2/2009 post:

One of the things I’ve been playing with lately is SQL Azure. I’ll post about my experience using Windows Azure and SQL Azure together shortly, this post is all about setting up SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) with SQL Server Express 2008.

In order to use SSMS with SQL Azure, you need to have the 2008 version of SSMS installed. I had the 2005 version and it failed to connect.

The reason I’m posting about this is that I ran into a few non obvious things. Now the thing is, I’m not that savvy with SQL Server and I’m sure that contributed to my confusion. On the other hand, I figure other folks may be in my situation and could find this to be useful – if I can save a couple of people’s time, then I’m happy :) …

Dave Robinson reported an SQL Azure Portal issue this week in this 11/6/2009 post:

We received an inquiry earlier this week about a user who was trying to access the SQL Azure Portal and was unable to log in. I want to take a quick moment to respond broadly just incase anyone else had the same experience.

There were no issues with the SQL Azure Database service this week. There was, however, an availability issue with the SQL Azure Portal while some configuration changes were being made in preparation for the launch of SQL Azure Database at PDC on November 17th. The issue we experienced was with our portal only – not the actual service. No one trying to connect to the service or their database(s) were impacted at all.

The portal is different than the service end point. The current portal is a placeholder tool (CTP only) used for signing up for the SQL Azure service prior to go-live. It also offers capabilities for creating and deleting databases within a provisioned SQL Azure Database server but, it is only one of several tools that are used to do this. Other tools, such as SSMS and SQLCMD, are routinely used for these create/delete operations. The use of these tools was not impacted at all due to the portal issue. Your data was, and is, safe, sound and accessible in our highly available service.

Bill Zack announced ORM Comes to SQL Azure! in this brief 11/6/2009 post:

It was only a matter of time before Object Relational Mapping tools were extended to work with SQL Azure.

Telerik recent announced the availability of Open Access, the first ORM that works seamlessly with SQL Azure relational databases in the Windows Azure cloud.

More ORMs that work with SQL Azure may come out in the future, but to my knowledge this is the first one.

OpenAccess will have full wizard support, forward and reverse database mapping, and data services support via the Telerik Data Services Wizard. Read more [by Stephen Forte] here…

Mary Jo Foley reported Billing system testing behind Microsoft's SQL Azure outage this week in this 11/5/2009 post to her ZDNet All About Microsoft blog:

Testers of Microsoft’s SQL Azure service experienced a three-plus hour unplanned outage this week — just a couple of weeks before Microsoft is set to remove the beta tag from its Azure cloud service.

During prior Azure outages (planned and unplanned), the team made sure to blog about the causes. This week’s outage, which occurred on the opening day of Microsoft’s SQL PASS user group conference, received no mention (other than a brief acknowledgment on the MSDN SQL Azure forums).

A tester wondering what happened sent me a note. From his e-mail:

“Microsoft didn’t formally acknowledge the problem until the outage was almost resolved. That’s 3+ hours wondering when the cloud would recover. Still no details on what happened.”

When I asked about what was behind the outage, I received the following note back from an Azure spokesperson:

“We were doing testing on the connection of the central billing platform yesterday and unfortunately experienced some downtime with SQL Azure. When discovered, we notified (Community Technology Preview) CTP customers right away and within a few hours had the service back online.”

Yes, Azure and SQL Azure are still in the test phase. But Microsoft is trying to lay the groundwork to get consumers, developers and enterprise customers to trust the availability, reliability and privacy guarantees of the service. Speaking of privacy guarantees, Microsoft published today a white paper outlining the company’s privacy policies for cloud computing.

James Hamilton claims One Size Does Not Fit All in this 11/3/2009 post, which analyzes Amazon’s RDB and SimpleDB:

Last week AWS announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and I blogged that it was big step forward for the cloud storage world: Amazon RDS, More Memory, and Lower Prices. This really is an important step forward in that a huge percentage of commercial applications are written to depend upon Relational Databases. But, I was a bit surprised to get a couple of notes asking about the status of Simple DB and whether the new service was a replacement. These questions were perhaps best characterized by the forum thread The End is Nigh for SimpleDB. I can understand why some might conclude that just having a relational database would be sufficient but the world of structured storage extends far beyond relational systems. In essence, one size does not fit all and both SimpleDB and RDS are important components in addressing the needs of the broader database market.

Relational databases have become so ubiquitous that the term “database” is often treated as synonymous with relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, or DB2. However, the term preceded the invention and implementation of the relational model and non-relational data stores remain important today.

Relational databases are incredibly rich and able to support a very broad class of applications but with incredible breadth comes significant complexity. Many applications don’t need the rich programming model of relational systems and some applications are better serviced by lighter-weight, easier-to-administer, and easier-to-scale solutions. Both relational and non-relational structured storage systems are important and no single solution is appropriate for all applications. I’ll refer to this broader, beyond-relational database market as “structured storage” to differentiate it from file stores and blob stores.

George Huey shows you how to take advantage of Chunking BCP output to upload lots of data into SQL Azure, thanks to a guest post of 11/2/2009 on Wade Wegner’s blog:

One of the things that we found out during a series of Windows Azure Platform Migration Labs held in the Chicago MTC is that you cannot upload hundreds of thousands of records without giving SQL Azure time to catch up. Consequently, you have to chunk your data and give SQL Azure time to process each chunk before uploading the next chunk of data.

The tool that we used for migrating our customer databases to SQL Azure was the SQL Azure Migration Wizard. The migration wizard uses BCP to download data from an on premise SQL Server database and then uses BCP to upload the data to SQL Azure. BCP allows you to specify the first row (-F), the last row (-L), and the batch size (-b). These options will allow you to chunk the data beginning uploaded to SQL Azure. For example:
BCP MyDb.dbo.Transactions out Transactions.dat -E -q -n –T 
The above command extracts data from table Transactions in the database MyDb. At the end of the BCP output, you will find the number of records copied to file (for example: 2,524,520 rows copied). …

George then shows how to upload data in chunks with time delays for Azure to store the chunk before executing the next request.

Kathleen Richards’ Re-Architecting Azure feature article of 11/1/2009 for Visual Studio Magazine’s November issue describes the changes expected in the release to Web (RTW) versions of SQL Azure and Windows Azure: “A year after the first technical previews of Azure, Microsoft is launching a less-ambitious platform with forklift revisions based on developer feedback.”

.NET Services: Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow

•• Vittorio Berocci (Vibro.NET) recommended on 11/6/2009 that you Download the November 2009 release of the Identity Developer Training Kit:

Let’s close the WIF RC day with the November refresh of our Identity Developer Training Kit.

The new version of the Identity Developer Training Kit ported forward the three WIF labs (web site, web services, ASP.NET Membership provider) to the RC, and improved support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

The ACS labs have been temporary removed, to give us the time to accommodate the new REST scenarios it now supports, but it will be back in in no time.

In addition to that, we’ll also be adding some new interesting content very soon… but I won’t spoil the surprise ;-) …

Vibro also reported that the ClaimsDrivenModifierControl has been updated to WIF RC:

Following the route of FabrikamShipping, the Claims-Driven Modifier Control is now ready to influence the behavior of your federated sample websites… using WIF RC :-) …

• Tim Fischer describes writing Enterprise Apps in Windows Azure - Calling the Internet Service Bus (.NET Services from Azure) in this fully illustrated 11/7/2009 post:

In the last days I implemented a typical enterprise cloud app on Windows Azure.

WARNING: Beyond this step no Hello World scenarios! Watch your step!

The scenario is based on the famous TimeTracker SL3 Sample which you can find in the Expression Gallery. It is a vendor management system where I can track my vendors time and [I] can approve the tasks and then have them sen[t] over to SAP to create a Purchase Order. …

Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft 'Geneva' identity wares approach the finish line in this 11/6/2009 post:

Microsoft is making available for download the near-final Release Candidate (RC) test build of its “Geneva” framework, the technology officially known as Windows Identity Foundation.

(For all you Microsoft codename trackers out there, “Geneva” is the next version of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). The programming framework supporting the next version of ADFS originally was codenamed “Zermatt,” then, later, also took on the “Geneva” codename. Microsoft’s Windows Cardspace is the third component of what Microsoft calls “Geneva.”)

On November 6, Microsoft released the RC bits of the framework, which are designed to provide developers with a new programming model and software development kit for creating identity-aware .Net applications. According to a blog post on the Forefront Team Blog, Windows Identity Foundation “provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) applications.

Geneva and the Geneva framework also are related to Microsoft’s Azure environment, as the next version of ADFS is part of the Azure Services layer in Microsoft’s cloud. (Microsoft’s current Azure diagrams don’t show ADFS as part of Azure, but I hear any new ones we see at the Professional Developers Conference in mid-November will include it.) The goal of Geneva is to provide developers and users with a single, secure sign-in capability across both cloud-based and on-premise applications. [Emphasis added.]

The .NET Services Team has released the Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Nov 2009 CTP) for download. There was no announcement in the teams blog as of 11/5/2009 10:30 AM PST. The following articles are repeated from the previous (Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 10/26/2009+) post for convenience:

The The .NET Services November 2009 CTP Breaking Changes Announcement and Scheduled Maintenance post of the same date announces the following changes:

NET Services Portal address

Subscription migration

Solution migration

Solution region migration

Services Bus will undergo the following changes (a.k.a., a complete transmogrification):

Queues changes

Routers removal

RelayBinding Security Default

Service Namespace replaces Solution name

TransportClientCredentialType update

EndToEndWebHttpSecurityMode.

TransportCredentialOnly is removed

HttpBufferClient is not public

TcpRelayConnectionMode.Direct is removed

Service publishing feed address aligns with service transport

WSHttpRelayBinding is removed

WS2007FederationHttpRelayBinding is removed

Access Control Service will undergo the following modifications:

Solution credentials replaced with Issuer credentials

WS-Trust STS replaced with Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP) STS

Access Control Service data will not be migrated

Access Control Management Portal replaced with a SDK Command-line Tool (acm.exe)

In other words, it’s start over from ground zero. It will be interesting to hear the .NET Services team’s explanation for such a complete product makeover at this late date (about two weeks from the Azure Services Platform’s commercial release. Like Gregor Samsa, it might turn into a giant beetle. I left the following comment to the .NET Services Team blog’s empty The .NET Services November 2009 CTP Breaking Changes Announcement and Scheduled Maintenance post of 10/30/2009:

Will .NET Services be commercially available when the Azure Services Platform (including SQL Azure) is released at PDC 2009? A transmogrification of this scope within about two weeks of Platform CA seems to me to be premature (and perhaps ill-advised).

The justification for rearchitecting .NET Services would make an interesting read.

--rj

Thanks to Wade Wegner for the heads-up.

Live Windows Azure Apps, Tools and Test Harnesses

•• ChristophDotNet’s WcfTestClient with Windows Azure post of 10/30/2009 describes issues with running Azure Windows Communication Framework (WCF) Web Services in Azure’s local Development Fabric:

One of my customers is working on an Azure WCF service. When wanted to test the service with WcfTestClient, but we ran into some issues. We started the dev fabric and had the WebRole running on port 81. When we went to the WCF service metadata page at http://mybox:5101/ProdKService.svc, we got the expected web page, which states:

“To test this service, you will need to create a client and use it to call the service. You can do this using the svcutil.exe tool from the command line with the following syntax:

svcutil.exe http://mybox:5101/ProdKService.svc?wsdl

This will generate a configuration file and a code file that contains the client class. Add the two files to your client application and use the generated client class to call the Service.”

Note that the instructions point you to port 5101 in the service URL. That’s the port where the Azure instance is running in my local development fabric. It is not as we would expect the address of the Azure dev fabric which is running on port 81. We tried to follow the instructions and point WcfTestClient to the address on the page, but instead of testing the service, we got [a] not so friendly error message. …

Christoph goes on to describe the error message and its culprit.

• Microsoft Research released Azure Library for Lucene.Net without fanfare on 7/28/2009:

Lucene works on top of an abstract store object called Directory. There are several Directory objects, including FSDirectory, for file systems, and RAMDirectory, for in-memory store. Azure Library for Lucene.Net implements a smart blob-storage Directory object called AzureDirectory which enables the use of Lucene.NET on top of Azure Blob Storage. AzureDirectory automatically creates a local cache of blobs and intelligently auto-uploads them on the fly.

The EULA restricts the library to non-commercial use.

Bill Zack claims The SQL Azure Tools Keep Coming! in this 11/5/2009 post:

SQL Azure is now feature complete for it’s launch at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Some of the other products in the Microsoft platform suite (like SQL Server Management Studio) have not yet caught up to SQL Azure. Hopefully that will be by PDC. :-)

In the meantime here is another excellent tool that can be used to fill the gap. In his blog post Stephen Forte talks about Gem Query, the SQL Azure query tool from Microguru.

According to Microguru the tool: provides an intuitive user interface to connect to and work with SQL Azure databases. Gem Query Tool supports execution of any DDL and DML script supported by SQL Azure. To facilitate authoring of SQL queries, Gem Query Tool for SQL Azure displays tables and columns in your database.

Read more here…

Wade Wegner’s Leveraging WMI in an Azure Web Role post of 11/4/2009 describes and demonstrates how to take advantage of Windows Management Instrumentation to collect information about the Windows 2008 Server instances that run Windows Azure:

A few weeks ago I threw out a teaser on Twitter:

This got the attention of a few folks, and I promised I’d follow-up on this with some details on how I got this to work. Of course, I completely forgot to do so, and was only recently reminded (thanks, Roger Jennings).

You can still take a look at that application here (if nothing else, I find it interesting to look at the specifications of the CTP machines for Windows Azure): http://wmi.cloudapp.net/

In actuality, the solution is really quite straightforward – I used WMI. …

Another of Wade’s 11/4/2009 posts, How to Leverage the RoleEntryPoint in an Azure Web Role post, begins:

One of the advantages to the approach our teams building the Windows Azure Platform have taken is flexibility. Recently, when I spoke at the Day of Cloud presentation, I recall Don Schwarz from Google making these two points (you can see video of his talk here):

You can’t spin up your own threads in Google App Engine.

You build your applications according to how Google thinks your apps should be built (the argument being that Google knows how to run highly available services at scale, which I think is a fair statement).

Now to be fair, there are good reasons for this – the Google App Engine has a number of very good use cases (Don Schwarz demonstrated one of them when showing the audience a multiplayer game running on Google App Engine).

Note: I’d like state for the record that I mean no criticism of other cloud vendors (i.e. Amazon, Google, and SalesForce). I think each of them have a place in the market, and exhibit various strengths. That said, I do believe that the Windows Azure Platform stands out as the only real platform that can bridge the chasm between cloud services and on-premises software. (Note to self: back this statement up in a future blog post.)

I would argue, however, that most enterprise developers require a little more flexibility when building out enterprise class applications. The Windows Azure Platform provides this flexibility (I mean, come on – sometimes you just want to execute some native code!).

I decided to test how far I could take this flexibility in Windows Azure.

Return to section navigation list>

Windows Azure Infrastructure

•• Judith Hurwitz describes Why all workloads don’t belong in the cloud in this 11/2/2009 post to her Cloud-Centric Weblog:

I had an interesting conversation with a CIO the other day about cloud computing. He had a simple question: I have an relatively old application and I want to move it to the cloud. How do I do that? I suspect that we will see a flurry of activity over the coming year where this question will be asked a lot. And why not — the cloud is the rage and who wouldn’t want to demonstrate that with the cloud all problems are solved. So, what was my answer to this CIO? Basically, I told him that all workloads do not belong in the cloud. It is not because this technically can’t be done. It can. It is quite possible to encapsulate an existing application and place it into a cloud environment so that new resources can be self-provisioned, etc. But, in reality, you have to look at this issue from an efficiency and an economic perspective. …

• Microsoft’s White Paper: The Time to Move to the Cloud is Now post of 11/6/2009 points to a Microsoft-funded whitepaper, A Sense of Urgency for Software Companies: Partnering for Success in the Cloud by Saugatuck Research:

“The challenge for software vendors is no longer about when to include or even shift entirely to SaaS, software-plus services, or other Cloud-based solutions. The time is now. The challenge is how to make it happen,” according to [the] white paper. …

[B]y year end 2010, nearly half of firms worldwide will be depending upon SaaS as part of their regular business operations.

The paper concludes, "The Cloud is the next stage of business solutions development and delivery. For on-premise software vendors the time to move to the Cloud is now.”

• Jay R. Galbraith asks Will Microsoft become the General Motors of software? in this 11/6/2009 post to Fortune Magazine’s BrainstormTech blog:

It has near-monopoly status and nimble, disruptive competitors. We’ve seen this movie before. …

Microsoft also suffers from the incumbent’s curse during a technological transition. The curse is well described in Clayton Christensen’s research. Cloud computing, in which software and other applications are housed in a central location and delivered over networks to end users, could lead to a shift away from desktop-based computing and from complicated operating systems. As Microsoft adapts to it, will it promote cloud computing or protect Windows? Will the team leading Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing business have the freedom to cannibalize the desktop? Or will it be integrated into Windows, where the desktop mafia will slow, modify and dilute the efforts to convert to a new business model?

The General Motors scenario does not have to happen. Ballmer can focus inward on transforming the desktop mafia to the new computing paradigm. Or, better yet, appoint a hands-on, change-experienced chief operating officer who can do it with him.

Galbraith is founder and president of Galbraith Management Consultants. Thanks to MiniMicrosoft (@whodapunk) for the heads-up.

• Hosting.com presents its 2009 Cloud Computing Trends Report eBook for public download (site registration required):

During December 2008 and January 2009, Hosting.com surveyed nearly 700 individuals regarding Cloud Computing industry and purchasing trends. The resulting Cloud Computing Trends Report introduces new data into the cloud marketplace and is available for download below.

The survey provided insight into the expectations small, medium and large businesses have of Cloud Computing, their intended uses, reasons for adopting, and expected time-frames for implementing cloud-based solutions. The eBook reveals that there is little difference between how larger companies and small businesses will utilize Cloud Computing. [Emphasis by author.]

The survey appears dated to me, which might be the reason for its public release.

Darren Cunningham posits If It’s Not Multitenant, It’s Not Really SaaS in this 11/6/2009 post:

Last year Gartner came out with a SaaS revenue forecast that made the following statement:

“It is important to differentiate SaaS from hosting or application management or application outsourcing. Because the SaaS/on-demand market is ‘hot’, many suppliers are rebranding their hosting or application management or application outsourcing capabilities as SaaS/on-demand. The core proposition behind SaaS/on-demand is the delivery of multi-tenant service from a remote location over an internet protocol (IP) network via a subscription-based outsourcing contract.”

If your hardware and software appliance is hosted in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environment like Amazon EC2 , can you call it software-as-a-service (SaaS)? If it’s single tenant, the answer should be no.

Darren goes on to explain why “the answer should be no.”

See Kathleen Richards’ article of 11/1/2009 in the SQL Azure Database (SADB) section.

Cloud Security and Governance

•• Tony Bishop’s Secure Enterprise Clouds post of 11/7/2009 to Cloud Security Journal begins:

There is so much waste in the data centers of Fortune 1000 companies today that a CIO – as an officer of the company – could be considered in breach of their fiduciary duty to stockholders given the dollars in question. Of course that requires costs transparency, so sadly most are safe for now. It seems that every new technology innovation brings the promise of greater efficiencies and cost savings but in reality tends to leave a mess of ‘legacy’ infrastructure on the floor that results in a net higher TCO than the CIO had in the first place.

So what does this have to do with Cloud Computing? While there is no shortage of companies trying to ply their wares as the ideal enabler for Cloud, I am surprised by the lack of attention from vendors that have the most to gain – the Cloud providers themselves. …

Tony is the founder and CEO of Adaptivity.

•• Judith Hurwitz asks Is cloud security really different than data center security? in this 10/30/2009 article that I missed when posted:

Almost every conversation I have had over the past year or so always comes back to security in the cloud. Is it really secure? Or we are thinking about implementing the cloud but we are worried about security. There are, of course, good reasons to plan a cloud security strategy. But in a sense, it is no different than planning a security strategy for your company. But it is the big scary cloud! Well, before I list the top then issues I would like to say one thing: if you think you need an entirely different security strategy for the cloud, you may not have a comprehensive security strategy to start with. Yes, you have to make sure that you cloud provider has a sophisticated approach to security.

However, what about your Internet service provider? What about the level of security within your own IT department? Can you throw stones if you live in a glass house (yes, that is a pun…sorry)? So, before you start fretting about security in the cloud, get your own house in order. Do you have an identity management plan? Do you ensure that one individual within the data center can’t control all of the data within a single environment to minimize risks? If you don’t have a well executed internal security plan, you aren’t ready for the cloud. But let’s say that you have fixed that problem and you are ready to really plan your cloud security strategy. So, here five of the issues to consider. If you have others, let’s start a conversation.

This post complements her earlier Unintended consequences of the cloud – part II (10/29/2009) and What are the unanticipated consequences of Cloud Computing- Part I (10/28/2009) posts. Read all Judith’s recent Cloud-Centric Weblog posts at http://jshurwitz.wordpress.com/.

Dave Rosenberg reviews Microsoft's weak cloud privacy position on 11/6/2009 for CNet News’ BusinessTech blog:

Microsoft released on Thursday a new position paper, "Privacy in the Cloud Computing Era: A Microsoft Perspective," that includes information about the remote storage and processing of personal information.

Privacy and security concerns continue to be a primary argument that cloud naysayers use against storing data and applications on the Internet. Big IT vendors and service providers like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard will sooner or later be forced to take the cloud seriously or risk missing out on the whole next wave of IT consumption. And their large enterprise customers will expect them to offer cloud services with the appropriate levels of privacy and security measures in line with their business needs.

The interesting thing about this paper is that Microsoft takes surprisingly minimal responsibility for the data it will manage:

“Unlike our consumer business, in which Microsoft has a direct relationship with consumers and directly controls the policies that govern their data, our cloud services for business customers defer to the policies of those customers. In this case, Microsoft has no direct relationship with the business's employees or the customers to whom the hosted data may pertain. Policies relating to the business's handling of this data in the cloud environment are controlled and set by that business rather than by Microsoft. Our role is to handle and process the data on behalf of the business, much like third-party telephone call centers process customer inquiries, orders, and data for their business customers.

“The division of responsibility between an enterprise or government and its cloud services provider is similar to that of a company that rents physical warehouse space from a landlord for storing boxes of customer or company files. Even though someone else might own the building, access to those files and the use of information within them is still governed by the policies of the company that rents the space. These same principles should apply in the cloud environment.” …

Microsoft's privacy principles are well documented, but as I read through this position paper, I found myself expecting more substantial assurances, especially considering Microsoft wants to be a cloud services provider for not just consumers but for enterprises and governments as well.

Mary Jo Foley reports in her Billing system testing behind Microsoft's SQL Azure outage this week post of 11/5/2009:

Microsoft published today a white paper outlining the company’s privacy policies for cloud computing.

Here’s the start of the “Cloud Computing and Privacy” preamble on page 1:

A new generation of technology is transforming the world of computing. Internet-based data storage and services—also known as “cloud computing”—are rapidly emerging to complement the traditional model of software running and data being stored on desktop PCs and servers. In simple terms, cloud computing is a way to enhance computing experiences by enabling users to access software applications and data that are stored at off-site datacenters rather than on the user’s own device or PC or at an organization’s on-site datacenter.

E-mail, instant messaging, business software, and Web content management are among the many applications that may be offered via a cloud environment. Many of these applications have been offered remotely over the Internet for a number of years, which means that cloud computing might not feel markedly different from the current Web for most users. (Technical readers will rightly cite a number of distinct attributes—including scalability, flexibility, and resource pooling—as key differentiators of the cloud. These types of technical attributes will not be addressed here because they are outside the scope of this document.)

Cloud computing does raise a number of important policy questions concerning how people, organizations, and governments handle information and interactions in this environment. However, with regard to most data privacy questions as well as the perspective of typical users, cloud computing reflects the evolution of the Internet computing experiences we have long enjoyed, rather than a revolution.

Microsoft recognizes that privacy protections are essential to building the customer trust needed for cloud computing and the Internet to reach their full potential. Customers also expect their data and applications stored in the cloud to remain private and secure. While the challenges of providing security and privacy are evolving along with the cloud, the underlying principles haven’t changed—and Microsoft remains committed to those principles. We work to build secure systems and datacenters that help us protect individuals’ privacy, and we adhere to clear, responsible privacy policies in our business practices—from software development through service delivery, operation, and support. …

Cloud Computing Events

•• Stephen Elop (President, Microsoft Business Division) and Marc Benioff (Chairman & CEO, salesforce.com) will debate the Economist’s Cloud Computing: This house believes that the cloud can't be entirely trusted topic proposition on 11/10/2009:

There is nothing the computer industry likes better than a big new idea. Cloud computing is the latest example, and companies large and small are already joining the fray. The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered as a service, over the internet, from vast warehouses of shared machines. Many things work this way already, from email and photo albums to calendars and shared documents. Albeit more slowly, companies are also moving some of their applications into the cloud. But is this a good idea? Can providers of these computing clouds be trusted? Are these mainframes in the sky reliable enough? What happens if data get lost? What about privacy and lock-in? Will switching to another cloud be difficult?

This debate will happen online, and starts on November 10th 2009. You can sign up for email alerts to be notified when this debate begins.

These two should be on the same side. However, Stephen might be debating from the the Microsoft Office, rather than the Windows Azure perspective. Elizabeth Montalban’s MS Office battles Google in the cloud post for Network World of 11/6/2009 provides more background with a recent Elop interview.

•• Wade Wegner’s Preview of “Lessons Learned: Migrating Applications to the Windows Azure Platform” post of 10/7/2009 begins:

It’s hard to believe that the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 is less than two weeks away. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I sat behind the stage at PDC 2008 providing support for the RedPrairie keynote with Bob Muglia and spoke in a breakout session with Jack Greenfield on Multi-Enterprise Business Applications. I’ll be back again this year, and I’m giving another talk – this time on lessons learned when migrating applications to the Windows Azure platform.

Rather than present this session entirely on my own, I decided to invite some of my customers to come and talk about their own experiences. I am extremely excited that the following three customers will join me at PDC:

CCH, a Wolters Kluwer Company …

Accenture …

Secret mystery company …

I will provide additional information regarding the “mystery company” as soon as I am able. Suffice to say, you know ‘em, and they’re doing some really cool stuff with Windows Azure.

SC Magazine reminds cloud practitioners that its free SC eConference and Expo starts on Tuesday, 11/10/2009 at 8:00 AM PST:

This innovative virtual conference will address the following pertinent issues:

What are the risks of cloud computing applications?

How should organizations better protect against these?

How can organizations implement authentication or access controls?

What can they do prevent data leakage?

How do they ensure that their end-users aren't introducing even greater problems?

Bill Zack announced a Webcast: Designing Multi-Tenanted Applications on Windows Azure in this 11/5/2009 post:

November 25, 2009, 11:00am – 12:30pm PST

Speaker: Joseph Hofstader

Abstract: Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in information technology today. With all the confusion surrounding acronyms ending in ‘aas’ like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) it can be intimidating for even seasoned IT professionals. This presentation will briefly discuss the different types of cloud platforms and then address one of the key business scenarios for the cloud: Software as a Service.

Software as a Service is a business model for making applications available over the Internet. One of the key tenets of SaaS is multi-tenancy, or software designed to be used by multiple parties. Designing SaaS applications touches on many of the technologies that comprise the Azure platform: Processing, Storage, Workflow, Database and most importantly security. This presentation will discuss how each of technologies can be utilized to define a flexible architecture for multi-tenant solutions.

Event ID: 1032432981

Link to Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032432981&Culture=en-US

Joseph Hofstader is an architect/evangelist in Microsoft Communications Sector.

Dave Robinson summarizes SQL Azure at PASS Summit 2009 in this 11/1/2008 post:

This upcoming week, PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) will be holding its annual summit in Seattle, WA. The summit runs from November 2nd through the 5th and, as described on the website, provides:

In-depth technical sessions all focused on SQL Server

Unparalleled access to the industry’s top SQL Server experts and the Microsoft SQL Server development team

Unique opportunity to network with your peers, share challenges, and get answers and advice

Return to work with new skills and knowledge to do your job better, faster, easier – right away.

This year the SQL Azure team will be presenting the following sessions:

What’s new in SQL Azure - Patric McElroy

Building Applications with SQL Azure and Windows Azure – David Robinson and Liam Cavanagh

Roles and Responsibilities Managing a Microsoft SQL Azure Database - Nino Bice

Dave’s post includes brief descriptions of the sessions.

Sanjay Jain’s Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows Azure @ Atlanta 09Nov09 post of 10/28/2009 announced:

We are inviting nominations from BizSpark Startups interested in Windows Azure Platform that target one or more of the following:

Windows Azure

Microsoft .Net Services

Microsoft SQL Azure

Live Services

Microsoft SharePoint Services

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

The Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows Azure will be held at Microsoft Technology Center, Atlanta, GA from Mon 11/09/2009 to Fri 11/13/2009. This event consists of ½ day of training, 3 ½ days of active prototype/development time, and a final day for packaging/finishing and reporting out to a panel of judges for various prizes.

This event is a no-fee event (plan your own travel expenses) and each team can bring 3 participants (1 business and 1-2 technical). To nominate your team, please submit the following details to Sanjay Jain (preferably via your BizSpark Sponsor). Nominations will be judged according to the strength of the founding team, originality and creativity of the idea, and ability to leverage Windows Azure Scenarios.

Other Cloud Computing Platforms and Services

• Sebastian Rupley lists his 11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing in a 11/6/2009 post to GigaOm:

Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. The following are 11 top open-source cloud applications, services, educational resources, support options, general items of interest, and more. …

• Reuven Cohen’s The Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) for Collaborative Open Cloud Standards post of 11/6/2009 reports:

As part of a new initiative at the Open Web Foundation -- a group dedicated to the creation of community-driven specifications & standards. David Rudin along with several other individuals & organizations have crafted a new simple and easy to understand Open Web Foundation agreement (OWFa) targeting collaborative specification development and publishing. You can think of OWFa as similar to the Creative Commons license. But unlike the a CC license the OWFa was developed with the specific needs of spec & standards developers covering aspects such as patents, copyright/trademarks and other issues that most contributors (including open source developers) are concerned about.

More specifically it was created with an open collaboration model in mind where both large companies and individuals can equally collaborate without fear of legal ramifications. Using the OWFa the actual spec development can be done in any forum the participants choose (Unincorporated Google groups / Social Networks, non-profits, startups, Enterprises, etc.)

You can download a copy of the v9 draft here.

• Reuven Cohen reports ISO Forms Group for Cloud Computing Standards in this 11/6/2009 article:

Big news on the Cloud Standards front, I was just informed that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) - JTC 1 have formed a new Subcommittee (SC) at their Plenary last week that includes working groups for SOA and Web Services as well as a Study Group for standardization of cloud computing. (This information has not yet been made public, my source has indicated that I am allowed to share this)

The scope will include Standardization for interoperable Distributed Application Platform and services including Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Cloud Computing. SC 38 will pursue active liaison and collaboration with all appropriate bodies (including other JTC 1 subgroups and external organizations, e.g., consortia) to ensure the development and deployment of interoperable distributed application platform and services standards in relevant areas.

Similar to other ISO initiatives each member country that’s interested in participating in this group will come up with their own structure to provide feedback on work items and establish voting positions, including the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) who will be the US TAG.

Ruv’s post includes the complete text of Resolution 36 ‐ New JTC 1 Subcommittee 38 on Distributed Application Platforms and Services (DAPS).

• Jim Ericson interviews John Willis (@botchagalupe) in the Overheard: Cloud Computing - Learn It Or Lose post of 11/6/2009 for the Information Management blog:

… Do you see the cloud as more than another evolutionary step in IT?

As I picked it up from others, I also came to think that the cloud is kind of a Cambrian explosion that may mark this time in IT history as a spectacular moment. You could say it started with computers and IBM or PCs or the Internet, but the convergence of massively scalable commodity computers, open Internet protocols and our understanding of it looks different than everything I’ve seen in the last 30 years. There’s plenty of hype, but the stories are extremely real and you can’t ignore them. …

James Urquhart reported IBM launches development and test cloud in his 11/4/2009 article for CDNet’s The Wisdom of Clouds blog:

With a nod toward the heterogeneous application development environments that exist in most enterprise IT departments, IBM on Wednesday launched a pair of services targeted at building cloud applications.

The first, the IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, is a cloud service hosted in IBM's data centers that provides tools and interfaces designed to support developers using Java, .NET, and Open Source environments. This service provides computing and storage capacity, and support for WebSphere middleware, Rational Software Delivery Services, and its Information Management database. It also provides "pre-configured integrations" of some Rational services based on IBM's Jazz framework, its collaborative software platform.

There are no pre-configured integrations announced for third-party or open source tools or languages. …

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Windows Azure Platform,Azure Services Platform,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services,Azure Blob Services,Azure Queue Services,SQL Azure Database,SADB,SDS,Bulk Copy Process,BCP,O/RM,Object-Relational Mapping.NET Services,Cloud Computing,IBM,Amazon RDB,Amazon SimpleDB,PDC2009,PDC09,Lucene.Net

Azure Storage Services Test Harness: Table Services 5 – Generating Classes/Collection Initializers with LIMOG v2

2009-11-07T09:41:00.001-08:00

Update 11/7/2009: This is a revised version of the original post post of 11/21/2008 (updated 11/23/2008 and 1/31/2009) with the corrected download information for the LIMOGUtilityV2 code generator. (Thanks to Simon Hatchard for the heads-up.)

This is the fifth of a series of articles about a ASP.NET 3.5 C# test harness for Azure Storage Services that I discussed in my “Retire Your Data Center” cover story for Visual Studio Magazine’s February 2009 issue. The test harness generates code to create mock data from relational tables in Azure’s Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) format. This article describes an application to generate the TableNameDataModel class in my Azure Storage Services Test Harness: Table Services 4 – Programming the Table Services API (11/20/2008) post.

As of 11/7/2009, you can download the VB.NET 2008 source code for LIMOGUtilityV2 from Windows Live SkyDrive. After I remove the obsolete code to generate SQL Data Services classes, I will include the source code in the comprehensive download available from Wrox’s Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform site.

Preceding episodes of this series are:

LINQ In-Memory Object Generator (LIMOG) v2

The LINQ In-Memory Object Generator (LIMOG) v1 is a Windows Forms project that writes C# 3.0 or VB 9.0 code for classes that represent database tables and collection initializers to populate the classes. It’s described in Chapter 4, “Working with Advanced Query Operators and Expressions,” of my forthcoming Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework book from Wiley, which will be published in January or February 2009. Several of the book’s sample projects use code generated by LIMOG v1 to test LINQ to Object queries against simulated relational data.

I updated the LIMOG v1 project to generate C# code (only) for similar classes with the added members (PartitionKey and RowKey) required to emulate Azure Tables Services entities and SQL Data Services entities (Id and Kind). Here’s the project’s UI for the Northwind sample database’s Orders table (click for full-size screen capture):

You can select the database name or table name as the PartitionKey or SDS’s Kind value; database name places entities for all tables in the same partition, rather than using a separate partition for each table.

You can select the table’s primary key value (the default) as the RowKey or SDS’s Id value; string values are used directly, numeric keys are converted to a 10-character, zero-padded string Alternatively, you can select increasing (auto-increment/identity) or decreasing 19-character zero-padded numeric string (to accommodate long/bigint values) or GUID values.

After clicking Generate Code, clicking the two buttons at the bottom, right of the window copies the code to the clipboard for pasting to your VS 2008 project.

Here’s the complete autogenerated OrdersDataModel class code:

You can download from SkyDrive a pair of class and collection initializer text files with code for the eight original Northwind tables. (Image fields are omitted from these files, which are 7 kB and 870 kB in size.)

Special-Case Fields in Collection Initializers

To initialize a System.DateTime field from a supported DateTime format, use the DateTime.Parse(DateTimeString) method, as in:

..., ModifiedDate = DateTime.Parse("2004-06-01T00:00:00"), ...

To initialize a Guid structure from an input string, create a new Guid structure as in:

..., rowguid = new Guid("{e3a1994c-7a68-4ce8-96a3-77fdd3bbd730}"), ...

Updated 11/23/2008: Autogenerated class code image and “Special-Case Fields in Collection Initializers” sections added; minor edits.

Technorati Tags: Windows Azure,Azure Table Services,ADO.NET Data Services,Astoria Project,Cloud Computing,Azure Test Harnesses,Entity-Attribute-Value,EAV,Amazon S3

“Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform” Short-Form Table of Contents and SQL Azure Chapters

2009-11-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

Updated 11/1/2009: Moved live sample projects from the Quincy, WA (US North West) to San Antonio (US South Central) data center, forthcoming .NET Services changes.

Updated 9/27/2009: Added “Live Windows Azure Demonstration Projects by Chapter” section

The Wiley/Wrox Web site’s page for my Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform Title that released on 9/21/2008 offers a long-form table of contents (ToC) with all headings. If that’s more than you want to know about the book at this point, here’s the short-form TOC that has part and chapter titles only:

Part I: Introducing the Windows Azure Platform

Chapter 1: Surveying the Role of Cloud Computing, p. 3
Chapter 2: Understanding Windows Azure Platform Architecture, p. 19
Chapter 3: Analyzing the Windows Azure Operating System, p. 4
Chapter 4: Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage, p. 63

Part II: Taking Advantage of Cloud Services in the Enterprise

Chapter 5: Minimizing Risk When Moving to Azure Cloud Services, p. 115
Chapter 6: Authenticating and Authorizing Service Users, p. 151
Chapter 7: Optimizing the Scalability and Performance of Azure Tables, p. 187
Chapter 8: Messaging with Azure Queues, p. 209

Part III: Tackling Advanced Azure Services Techniques

Chapter 9: Authenticating Users with .NET Access Control Services, p. 239
Chapter 10: Interconnecting Services with the .NET Service Bus, p. 273 *
Chapter 11: Exploring .NET Service Bus Queues and Routers*, p. 295 *

Update 11/1/2009: * Chapters 10 and 11 will be affected by the dramatic transmogrification of the .NET Service Bus Queues and Routers that will occur in the .NET Services November CTP. See The .NET Services November 2009 CTP Breaking Changes Announcement and Scheduled Maintenance post of 10/30/2009.

Part IV: Working with SQL Azure Services (Online Only)

Chapter 12: Managing SQL Azure Accounts, Databases, and DataHubs
Chapter 13: Exploiting SQL Azure Database’s Relational Features

Index

Live Windows Azure Demonstration Projects by Chapter

Instructions and sample code for creating and running the following live demonstration projects are contained in the chapter indicated:

Chapter 4: OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project *
Chapter 4: OakLeaf Systems Azure Blob Services Test Harness *
Chapter 5: OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Test Harness (Secure Sockets Layer, Personally Identifiable Data Encrypted with AES-128) *
Chapter 6: OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Test Harness: HTTPS, Encrypted, with ASP.NET Membership Provider
Chapter 7: OakLeaf Systems Azure Test Harness with Windows Live ID Authentication
Chapter 8: OakLeaf Systems: Photo Gallery Azure Queue Test Harness

Update 11/1/2009: * Moved from Quincy, WA to San Antonio, TX data center.

These sample projects will remain live as long as Microsoft continues to subsidize Windows Azure demonstration accounts. See my Lobbying Microsoft for Azure Compute, Storage and Bandwidth Billing Thresholds for Developers post of 9/8/2008.

Detailed TOCs for Online Chapters 12 and 13

Chapter 12: Managing SQL Azure Accounts, Databases, and DataHubs*

Tracking SSDS’s Migration to a Relational Database
Reviewing Current SQL Azure Database Documentation and Resources
Obtaining and Redeeming an Azure Invitation Token for an SADB CTP
Creating a User Database
Connecting to SADB Master and User Databases with SSMS 2008 [Express]
Using the sqlcmd Utility with SADB
Comparing SADB with SQL Server 2008 R2 Databases
Summary

* Details of and new code samples for synchronization and DataHubs will be updated on line when the .NET Services or Sync Framework team releases them.

Chapter 13: Exploiting SQL Azure Database’s Relational Features

Creating and Populating SADB Databases
Generating the Northwind Sample Database in SADB from the instnwind.sql Script
Using SSIS to Populate a local AdventureWorksLT2008 Database from SADB
Migrating Schemas and Data from the On-Premises AdventureWorksLT2008 Database to SQL Azure
- Using SSMS to Migrate Schemas and Data
- Creating and Populating tables with the SQL Azure Migration Wizard
Using the Bulk Copy Process to Populate SADB Tables*
Populating Tables with the INSERT … BULK Command*
Sharding Tables to Overcome Database Size Limits
Creating SADB Logins and Users, and Assigning Roles
[Querying Sharded SADB Data with SSMS]*
Summary

* Details for BCP, INSERT … BULK, and SELECT queries against sharded data will be updated when the SQL Azure team implements the features or patterns & practices provides “Best Practices” details for testing.

I’ll add a thread to the book’s Programmer-to-Programmer (P2P) forum when the online chapters are ready to download.

Chapters 12 and 13 PDF files should be available for downloading shortly. Chapter 13 sample code is included in the current sample code download. (Chapter 12’s examples use files from MSDN and the chapter doesn’t have sample code.)

Update 11/1/2009: Sample code in *.zip format and Chapters 12 and 13 can be downloaded as *.doc Office Word files from here now. They will be updated after PDC 2009 and chapters converted to *.pdc format.

VM Size	CPU Cores	Memory	Disk Space
Small	1	1.7 GB	250 GB
Medium	2	3.5 GB	500 GB
Large	4	7 GB	1000 GB
ExtraLarge	8	15 GB	2000 GB