This article is a translation of a Norwegian article I wrote earlier that got published on IT Pro a few days ago. It’s targeted towards IT decision makers and leaders, does not contain my usual technical focus, but should still be a valuable read for developers not familiar with Azure or want to know more about cloud computing.

Software and services developed by software providers today are primarily deployed on internal servers or made available through hosting providers. The “Cloud” opens a whole set of new possibilities, both functionally and financially. Several providers are shaping this new service and one of them is Microsoft with the Azure Services Platform (Azure).

This article will focus on what the “Cloud” has to offer software providers compared to today’s traditional services with focus on Azure specifically.

Scaling

Today it’s quite common, and almost acceptable, for websites to be temporary unavailable under extraordinary load. Examples can be ticket sales for popular concerts or some other event with limited time for registration. The load on the website is usually limited to a few hours, or even minutes, and the time is known in advance. What if you as a service provider could scale your services dynamically, to handle the increased traffic for that period? This is an example of what Azure has to offer.

Pay per use

Even though Microsoft have not officially revealed the details around the payment model for Azure, it’s natural to expect them to base their model on usage. Examples could be traffic in/out, storage, processing etc. Other providers, like Amazon and Google have similar models and it’s natural to believe that Microsoft will not deviate too much from these to be competitive.

Such a model will also be very attractive for startups. The cost of buying the necessary hardware, disk space, backup and broadband to run the website or service, not knowing how many will use it in advance, is often a good enough reason for not pursuing the opportunity. Taking advantage of a payment model like in Azure, the provider will have several advantages:

• Small or no startup cost
• Cost spread across time
• Scaling on demand
• Pay per use

Microsoft’s biggest investment ever?

There is a lot more behind Azure than software. To support such a scalable unit in the cloud a lot of investment in hardware, new technology and land areas is needed. One method Microsoft have used to build their datacenters, is to have preconfigured containers with server racks from HP and Dell, with built-in cooling and network. A lot of these containers are placed as close to a power plant as possible, where power is easily accessible, and when connected they are up and running in the cloud. All administration are then done remotely.

If one, two or five servers in a container stop working, it will have no effect on data or traffic for the user of the cloud. Azure is designed so that servers can be pulled in and out of the cloud without affecting the service. This says a lot about the size and investment put in place for this to be a reality.

Many datacenters are under construction several places in the world. One reason for Microsoft to build at several locations, and not just in the US, is to avoid the physical laws related to data transfers over the internet. Another important factor is the different regulations on different continents. As an example, some don’t want to have their data stored on servers in the US, in case the government demands to get access to their data. There is also difference in regulations in e.g. the US and Europe, that Microsoft needs to take into consideration.

Built on known Microsoft products

Azure contains quite a few services as illustrated on the image on the left. Even though many of these services have new names, they are based on Microsoft’s existing products.

Liver Services is a cloud service based on Windows Live, .NET Services on Microsoft .NET, SQL Services on SQL Server etc. These services are built on top of Windows Azure, which is a operating system specifically designed for running in the cloud. Windows Azure cannot be accessed as a regular operating system (through e.g. Remote Desktop), but developers can communicate with Windows Azure through a Application Programming Interface (API).

Compared to Amazon’s cloud solution, where the user have direct access to the operating system (Linux or Windows), the user don’t have to worry about security or software updates, backups etc, since this is automatically managed by Microsoft.

Security

Security has been a central part of the development of Azure. The consequences of somebody getting unintentional access to services or data in the cloud would be catastrophically. Microsoft has built in many security mechanisms to avoid this. Some examples are data encryption, Code Access Security and backups to mention a few. It is expected that this is an area where users, developers, owners and Microsoft themselves will focus their efforts on in the time to come. Roy Ozzie, Chief Architect at Microsoft, says it’s extremely important for Microsoft to build trust in companies looking to invest in Azure as a possible solution, and that this is critical for the success of the cloud¹.

Microsoft have also made available a service they call .NET Access Control Service, that aims to support many of today’s identity providers. By integrating the common identities that customers use or are common in a region (like a country or EU), this service can solve some of the identity issues we have today. Many are tired of having to create a new id every time they access a new website that has some type of identification, to display user specific information. What if the user could use only one, ore a handful identities, and choose which one to use towards a given website? By implementing .NET Access Control Service the user can do this and the web application can decide to trust it or not.

Development tools with support for Azure

Microsoft have made available a range of tools aimed for developers creating applications running on Azure. Already today developers can create and deploy application on Azure by using Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and develop in ASP.NET. The only requirement is for the developer to register in order to get access to the Azure services.

In addition to the normal development tools, Microsoft has made it possible to develop and test on a local variant of the cloud on the developer’s computer. This will enable debugging of code during development and not have to deploy to the cloud every time a new functionality needs testing.

When will Azure go live?

Azure is available for developers today in Beta, so that they can already now try out the service and look at the potential possibilities. The service is however limited in this first Beta release, which makes it unattractive for production use. Steve Ballmer have stated that Azure will go live under Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) that is scheduled for 17th of November 2009³.

Conclusion

With this new service, together with Microsoft and others investments in the technology, possibilities will arise that before was either very difficult or economically irresponsible to target. Examples where startups and smaller companies can bet big without enormous investments, where scaling opens up completely new possibilities and data processing taken to new heights, makes the cloud an attractive service for the future. It’s still too early to predict if this is going to be a success or not, but it’s clear in which direction the biggest providers are going.

Sources:

¹Ozzie: Success of Azure comes down to trust – http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39532953,00.htm

²Introducting the Azure Services Platform by David Chappell – http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/4/3/e43bb484-3b52-4fa8-a9f9-ec60a32954bc/Azure_Services_Platform.pdf

³Ballmer: Azure ready for release by end of year – http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/02/24/Ballmer_Azure_ready_for_release_by_end_of_year_1.html

A couple of months ago I wrote an article about Azure Services Platform that just got published on ITPro. It’s in Norwegian, but I plan to post it here in English as soon as I find some time to translate it.

The article is targeted towards IT decision makers, meaning a lot of the technical details are missing. However, I still think it will be an interesting read for most techies as well.

Scrum has been very popular and still gains popularity around companies and individuals world wide. That’s good! Scrum keeps bringing Agile to the masses. What’s not good is teams doing Scrum only, not focusing on good development practices that XP are built around. In my talk I’ll be looking at some of the misconceptions around XP, how XP is compared to Scrum and why XP is superior to Scrum in many ways. Also why Scrum has become so popular the last few years and XP has not (in comparison).

This talk will be a introduction to XP, but it helps if you have experience with Agile in general and Scrum in particular.

My goal as of today is to bring XP to the masses! :-) Sign up for the meeting at NNUG Bergen.

In the meantime you can order The Art of Agile Development, read my review of the book and have a look at eXtremeProgramming.org.

Before my talk John Arthur Berg from it’s learning will give us an introduction to Cloud Computing. Don’t miss out on this, cause it will be a good background to have when Christian Weyer will go into the details of Azure Services Platform in April.

See you all there.

Scott Hanselman suggests a new term to use among us geeks to save time. Scott propose:

We need a word that says "I know tech" when you’re on the phone with tech support, you’d just say "Fizzbin" and they’d know.

His preferred conversation would go like this:

"Hi, Internet Tech Support…what’s your issue?"

"Fizzbin."

"You have an IP?"

"No. Your DHCP isn’t passing out IPs. Am I banned?"

"Looks like your MAC is xxxx, you’ve been running a torrent?"

"Yes, I’ll stop."

"Cool. You’re un-banned. Fizzbin."

"Sweet. Catch you later."

Neat! :-)

I’ve had some problems with my ATI display driver on Windows 7 on my HP Compaq 6910p. I did a search and found some new display drivers specifically for Windows 7. The installation didn’t work on my computer (it froze), but I found the MSI for the driver at this localtion:

C:\ATI\beta_w7-32_8-56-1-081203a-72489\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH_INF

That seamed to work.

I also have a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 (nice short name) which didn’t work properly when presenting stuff in Power Point (the next button didn’t work). I found a Windows 7 driver for the mouse at Microsoft along with many others you might find interesting.