Posts tagged Azure
Microsoft Azure: Open Source Is A First-Class Citizen
Mar 20th
Apple may be that kid who never learned to share, but Microsoft over the years hasn’t been much better. While the company has long had a healthy partner ecosystem, if you really wanted tight integration with one of Microsoft’s products, you pretty much had to work in Redmond. Microsoft Office worked seamlessly with Microsoft Windows worked seamlessly with Microsoft SQL Server worked seamlessly with Microsoft Sharepoint worked seamlessly with… you get the picture.
Of late, however, Microsoft’s underdog status in key markets has made it more amenable to a truly open partner ecosystem, perhaps best exemplified by its open arms to open source.
Nowhere is this more evident than with Windows Azure.
While the old world of Azure looked much like the image above, with Microsoft technology as far as the eye could see, the new Azure looks much different. For one thing, much of the best technology being served up on Azure wasn’t written by Microsoft. Really! I’m not joking.
For example, in partnership with Hortonworks, Microsoft has released its first public preview of Windows Azure HDInsight Service, Microsoft’s cloud-based distribution of Hadoop, the popular open-source Big Data processing tool. Another example of Microsoft’s classic embrace and extend strategy? Nope. This time around, Microsoft promises that HDInsight will be “100% Apache Hadoop compatible now and in the future.”
But Hadoop isn’t the only open-source technology included by the Azure team.
More than Just Hadoop
In the olden days, Microsoft would have put all its engineering into supporting its own technologies on a first-class basis. Others might try to catch the Microsoft train, but they’d reverse engineer their way onto the back of the caboose, with just a slight API tweak away from incompatibility. Now it’s Microsoft Azure that is adding support for Android, not to mention PhoneGap. All of which follows the Azure team’s long-time support for Drupal, various open-source databases, Linux virtual machines, and a range of other open-source software.
“Of course Microsoft supports open-source software on Azure because it’s a platform,” you argue, “and so Microsoft must support third-party technology as a platform provider.”
But that “of course” was lost on Microsoft for years. Through a personal agreement between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Microsoft Office came to Mac OS X, but it still hasn’t touched Linux. Same with SQL Server. You can get the popular database to run on Linux, but not as a first-class citizen. That’s reserved for Windows.
Windows Azure’s Open Community
Beyond directly supporting open-source software on Azure, Microsoft has also opened up its Windows Azure Community Portal to make it easy for partners to add third-party services to Azure, both open and closed. This is a big deal for SMBs and departments within enterprises that have traditionally been Microsoft’s mainstay, as BitNami founder and CTO Daniel Lopez told me:
“For customers who are looking to the cloud to run department or workgroup level apps… and who are already customers of Microsoft, the transition to Azure may be simpler and more cost-effective than moving to Amazon.
“Microsoft has traditionally dominated the SMB market. As SMBs move to the cloud, SaaS cannot meet their customization needs. They need to run their own apps – they just don’t want the hassle of running their own servers. Nobody has figured out the ‘Application layer’ in the cloud yet, but Microsoft is actually in a better starting position than its competitors (Amazon, Google) because it already has a huge installed based and an ecosystem of partners.”
Microsoft, in other words, finally groks “open.” In part Microsoft shows this by embracing leading open-source technology like Hadoop or Android, but it’s just as clear by its willingness to let partners embrace and extend Azure with other offerings. Yes, Microsoft has long done this with Windows, but it was never a level playing field for some kinds of technology, like open source.
Which is not to say Microsoft has won the public cloud. Today that distinction clearly goes to Amazon Web Services. But while AWS is sexy with the Silicon Valley set, the horde of SMBs and enterprises that have traditionally gone with Microsoft will be looking closely at Azure. Microsoft remains the CIO’s top vendor, according to a Piper Jaffray survey. By embracing open source, it stands a chance of being the enterprise developer’s top vendor, too.
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Microsoft Strikes Back At Amazon With Windows Azure Community Portal
Mar 1st
Guest author Daniel Lopez is co-founder and CTO of BitNami.
It is difficult to avoid a weird feeling of Deja-vu when looking at the current cloud-computing landscape. Microsoft is once again battling for the future of the technology industry.
For years, Microsoft dominated the IT landscape with its Windows operating system, providing an industry-standard platform that others built on top of. Regardless of any pricing issues or technical shortcomings, the vast ecosystem of Windows applications and service providers ensured the continued success of the platform for many years and was an insurmountable barrier for competitors. It was not until the Web came along that this dominance was seriously challenged. The book High-Stakes, No Prisoners chronicles the story of the Frontpage acquisition and does a good job of providing a peek into the ruthless ‘battle for the Web’ against Netscape.
Microsoft Is A Cloud Computing Underdog
Microsoft is now waging another platform war: the battle for the cloud. The difference is that this time, Microsoft is the underdog.
Amazon has built not only an automated way to spin up new servers and databases, but an entire platform for building and running a whole new generation of applications. Where in the past you had to write apps using Win32 APIs and third-party OCX controls, you can now write applications using Amazon’s cloud APIs for file storage, database access, message queues and dozens of other services. The launch of the AWS marketplace further solidified Amazon’s move up the stack. If Amazon acquires a critical mass of users and vendors to build on top of its platform, the network effect will make it very difficult to displace that ecosystem.
Microsoft has not been sitting idle. The original version of Windows Azure was architected around a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and was very Windows-specific. It had many shortcomings and attracted little developer and partner support.
Making Windows Azure More Competitive
However, in 2013 Microsoft has refreshed its Azure offering, providing a Virtual-Machine-centric offering modeled after Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The company went out of its way to make sure Linux and open source were first-class citizens. Microsoft has even demoed Azure using Apple MacBook Pro laptops and launching Ubuntu images. Microsoft finally “got it” – the launch of Azure Virtual Images was the first step towards fighting AWS head on.
About a month, Microsoft unveiled the Windows Azure Community portal, which provides dozens of popular open source applications and language runtimes contributed by partners. Even more recently, Microsoft took this a step further and made the images from the portal available directly in the Azure console, so they can be easily deployed onto Azure infrastructure. By making it easier to deploy third-party apps on its cloud, Microsoft is helping to grow its own ecosystem while increasing the utilization of its infrastructure. It also provides a counterpart to the AWS marketplace that, while limited, it is in many aspects simpler and easier to use.
Not Better, But Maybe Good Enough?
Microsoft still offers only a fraction of the functionality of Amazon, but it has a much bigger established user base among small and medium businesses and the enterprise. Coupled with its willingness to aggressively compete on price, Microsoft does not necessarily need to be better than Amazon to win. It just needs to be “good enough” to prevent its own users from switching.
It is incredibly refreshing to finally see viable competition to Amazon in the public cloud arena. Together with Google Compute Engine, Microsoft should be able to give Amazon a good run for its money.
Who will be the big winners of this war? For one, end users, who will benefit from lower prices from increased competition, as the cloud giants fight for market share.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Microsoft’s Rotten Friday: Hack Revealed As Azure, Halo Go Down
Feb 22nd
Microsoft ended the week with a pair of black eyes: a failure to secure a security certificate brought its Azure cloud service tumbling down, and the company also confessed to being the latest corporate victim of a high-profile hacking attempt.
The Azure failure also affected Microsoft’s Xbox game, Halo 4, Microsoft confirmed.
The highest-profile incident may have had the least effect: “a small number” of Microsoft PCs were penetrated by an unknown intruder. No user data was compromised, Microsoft said in a blog post.
“Consistent with our security response practices, we chose not to make a statement during the initial information gathering process,” Matt Thomlinson, general manager of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Security unit, wrote. “During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing.”
The attacks were consistent with other efforts to penetrate computers within Apple and Facebook, Microsoft said. Facebook discovered its attack last week, which followed attacks on the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times via an unpatched exploit within Java, exploited, experts believe, by the Chinese military.
Separately, ZenDesk reported Friday that it too, was hacked, exposing emails that clients Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest used to communicate it with it for service-related requests.
Lack Of SSL Certificate Brings Azure Down
At press time Friday night, Microsoft still had not implemented a fix for the Azure issue, caused by a failure to obtain a new SSL certificate. That brought its Azure storage services down across all of its worldwide regions, as well as services that were dependent upon them.
At 9:30 PM UTC (4:30 PM ET), Microsoft discovered that “HTTPS operations (SSL transactions) on Storage accounts worldwide are impacted,” the company said. By 9:45 PM UTC, the the management portal, WindowsAzure.com, and the service bus, plus the websites that Azure serves were also down. By 10:15 PM, the company had begun validating steps to repair the problem, but hadn’t formally announced a fix. After users began circulating screenshots of what appeared to be an expired SSL certificate, the company acknowledged its error.
“Windows Azure Storage has been affected by an expired certificate,” a spokesman said in an emailed statement. We are working to complete the restoration as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused our customers. For more information please go to http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/service-dashboard/.” Microsoft also apologized to customers via Twitter.
Microsoft also reported problems with its Compute services, preventing users from creating new virtual machines. That left users who needed to create those virtual machines to host new apps scratching their heads. “Most of our apps are screwed up now!” pinvoke.in, one commenter, complained. “WHATS NEXT? All compute instances die because someone at the data center switched them off?”
Unfortunately for Microsoft, this sort of thing has happened before. At the end of February 2012, Microsoft failed to account for the leap day at the end of the month, Feb. 29. As a result, the Azure services was down for more than 12 hours before Microsoft could issue a fix. Microsoft hasn’t said whether or not the recent outage was a result of an oversight, or a more serious technical error.
Oddly enough, Netflix began reporting problems of its own on Friday night, leading to the intriguing possibility that two cloud services may have been failing at the same time. But although Netflix has gone down before when Amazon’s AWS service failed, Amazon’s own AWS service dashboard didn’t indicate any problems.
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Microsoft Wins Big with Windows Azure Internet TV Deal in China
Aug 6th
Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform won a strong endorsement Monday when PPTV, which claims to be China’s leading Internet TV service provider, signed on to launch its platform on top of Windows Azure’s new Media Services offering.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform won a strong endorsement Monday when PPTV, which claims to be China’s leading Internet TV service provider, signed on to launch its platform on top of Windows Azure’s new Media Services offering.
Specifically, PPTV will launch its PPTV Asia TV Networks (ATN) platform on Windows Azure, marking both an important design win for Microsoft as well as its first cloud-based collaboration with a local Chinese new media company.
PPTV will adopt Windows Azure as the core infrastructure platform for PPTV ATN. The service will provide a cloud-based Internet TV solution, while exploring the collaboration opportunities with Microsoft on online TV, media service platform and Content Delivery Network (CDN) for its next generation domestic market needs, the company said.
That’s important.
While Microsoft has marketed Azure as its public cloud technology, capable of deploying both Windows Server and Linux virtual machines, the company has also positioned it as a challenge to existing content-delivery networks. In April, for example, at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show, Microsoft announced Windows Azure Media Services, most likely the next step beyond the partnership Microsoft struck with PPTV. And video service providers like Netflix and Google’s YouTube are also establishing (or have established) their own content-delivery networks.
Microsoft Plays the China Card
Building ties in China is also key, both for economic and legal reasons – the Chinese government encourages joint ventures with Chinese partners, although the requirements to do so have loosened. The economies of the so-called BRIC regions (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are growing strongly, fueled by their need to catch up to the rest of the world’s infrastructure. Microsoft chief financial officer Peter Klein told analysts in January that Microsoft sees a “particular strength” in the BRIC markets, one that could be a “driver of growth” for the company.
Chuck Tao, the chief executive of PPTV, said that the costs to roll out a dedicated video infrastructure were prohibitive, and that it had turned to Microsoft to fill the gap. From a content perspective, Tao said, the Azure platform lets global content providers upload content to the library, and to license it to service providers through revenue sharing.
“PPTV chose Windows Azure platform because of its reliability, scalability, and global availability, which can accelerate PPTV’s international expansion. PPTV ATN creates an innovative user experience, to deliver to global audience with global contents, live and VoD, across screens,” said Tao in a statement. “PPTV ATN is also the first to deliver complete video cloud service on Azure. With Windows Azure, we can offer scale and flexibility not found anywhere else. We can also avoid unpredictable resource and demand fluctuations globally. PPTV ATN can thus pass on these benefits to our partners, and in the end to our global customers. This is a new competitive edge for our business.”
Tao’s reference to multiple screens is probably further evidence that the company could shift to Windows Azure Media Services (WAMS)in the future. With WAMS, content can be delivered to virtually all clients, including HTML5, Silverlight, Flash, Windows 8, iPads, iPhones, Android, Xbox and Windows Phone devices, developer Scott Guthrie noted at the time of the offering’s launch.
“Cloud computing is widely recognized as the nerve center of the next generation of information technology. And cloud-based services for most of the cases are well-connected to local markets,” said Ya-Qin Zhang, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and the chairman of Microsoft’s Asia-Pacific R&D group, in a statement.
Content Delivery Networks Go Global
In 2011, Microsoft disclosed that it had placed six content delivery network nodes in the Asia-Pacific region. None are located in China, however; according to Microsoft, nodes are available in Hong Kong and Singapore, but not within the Chinese mainland.
Meanwhile, rival Netflix said in June that it had begun establishing its own content delivery network, which it dubs Open Connect. The company also uses third-party CDNs to stream video, with partners believed to include Level3, Akamai and Limelight. Netflix also uses Amazon Web Services.
“Given our size and growth, it now makes economic sense for Netflix to have [its own CDN] as well,” Ken Florance, vice president of content delivery for Netflix, wrote in a June blog post. “We’ll continue to work with our commercial CDN partners for the next few years, but eventually most of our data will be served by Open Connect.”
Big Deal For Microsoft?
What does the PPTV deal mean for Microsoft’s future success in content deliver networks? According to Diya Soubra, the managing partner for SCH Consulting in France, Microsoft has already demonstrated the capability of offering multiple languages and subtitles for the same movie, a key requirement for a CDN offering with global aspirations. That technology was sucessfully used by the Vatican to translate its weekly radio address into multiple languages. The Azure platform also now allows users to “bookmark” their progress when watching movies, allowing them to pick up where they left off, even if they continue watching on another screen.
“If this ecosystem really does deliver all these elements it promises, IPTV infrastructure providers should pay very close attention, as Microsoft, with their immense buying power, may yet have the potential to displace some of the biggest names in the industry and become a CDN frontrunner in their own right,” Soubra wrote.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Microsoft Trying Hard to Match AWS, Cuts Azure Pricing
Mar 9th
This should be fun. Just a few days after Amazon announced its 19th price cut, Microsoft is announcing its own price cuts for Azure Storage and Compute. If you’re looking at running a smaller instance with a 100MB database, you can now get one for less than $20 a month. If you’re doing heavy computing, though, Azure still seems a bit behind AWS.
The cuts are 12% to Azure Storage (now $0.125 per GB), and the extra small compute instance for Azure has been dropped by 50% to $0.02 per hour. If you’re buying the six month plans, Microsoft has reduced storage prices by “up to 14%.”
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Comparing Azure to AWS
Microsoft breaks their prices down by month rather than by compute hour on their pricing calculator, so it’s not as simple as one might hope to compare pricing. But here’s how it breaks down, assuming 732 billable hours per month:
- Microsoft Extra Small (1GHz CPU, 768MB RAM, 20GB Storage): $0.02 per hour, $15.00 per month
- Microsoft Small (1.6GHz CPU, 1.75GB RAM, 225GB Storage): $0.123 per hour, $90.00 per month
- Microsoft Medium (2 x 1.6GHz CPU, 3.5GB RAM, 490GB Storage): $0.25 per hour, $180.00 per month
- Microsoft Large (4 x 1.6GHz CPU, 7GB RAM, 1,000GB Storage): $0.49 per hour, $360.00 per month
- Microsoft Extra Large (8 x 1.6GHz CPU, 14GB RAM, 2,040GB Storage): $0.98 per hour, $720 per month
How does that stack up with AWS EC2 pricing? I took a look at the pricing for Windows instances on EC2, without any reserved pricing bonuses:
- AWS Micro (Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units in bursts, 613MB RAM, EBS Storage Only): $0.03 per hour, $21.96 per month
- AWS Small (1 EC2 Compute Unit, 1.7GB RAM, 160GB Storage): $0.115 per hour, $84.19 per month
- AWS Medium (2 EC2 Compute Units, 3.75GB RAM, 410GB Storage): $0.23 per hour, $168.36 per month
- AWS Large (4 EC2 Compute Units, 7.5GB RAM, 850GB Storage): $0.46 per hour, $336.72 per month
- AWS XL (8 EC2 Compute Units, 15GB RAM, 1,690GB Storage): $0.92 per hour, $673.44 per month
The EC2 compute units are described as “the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor,” so it doesn’t look like you’re getting quite the same horsepower out of an AWS compute unit, and AWS is more stingy with storage. AWS instances have a wee bit more RAM, though. Pricing-wise, AWS is coming in cheaper if you accept the instances as roughly equivalent.
Where it gets trickier is if you opt for longer-term pricing with Azure. You can buy six month plans with Azure for “up to 20%” less on a monthly basis. Amazon has several tiers of reserved instances, and additional discounts for big spenders as we covered earlier this week.
SQL Server Pricing
What gets trickier is adding in SQL server. If you want, specifically, Microsoft’s brand ‘o SQL, then you’re looking at Microsoft’s SQL Azure Database or running AWS EC2 Instances with SQL Server. Here you must choose large or XL instances, as AWS doesn’t offer micro, small or medium instances with SQL Server. You can run SQL Server Express Edition on any of the instance types, but for the full package you’re only going with the two higher-end instances.
That inflates the pricing to $1.06 per hour for large instances, and $1.52 per hour for XL instances.
Azure, on the other hand, charges by the size of the database and the number of databases. So comparing the two services gets pretty hairy if you factor in SQL Server.
If you’re looking at a lot of compute instances, Amazon still seems to have the edge in pricing. One might also be tempted to look at AWS after the Azure meltdown at the end of February, though AWS has had its own issues.
Microsoft does have plenty of money to throw at this, so this is unlikely to be the last price cut we see in 2012 from either vendor.
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Cloud9 IDE to Enable Node.js App Posting to Windows Azure Cloud
Jan 25th
As the Windows Azure platform began branching out last year from support for purely Microsoft frameworks like .NET, going so far as to incorporate Java, one possibility that was overlooked at the time was to support JavaScript. The reason seemed obvious: JavaScript, as its creators would tell you, is a client language. Well, that’s no longer true, now that Node.js makes it about as easy to write JavaScript for the V8 interpreter on the server as it is for V8 in Google Chrome on the client.
Last month, Azure demonstrated how much both its platform and its proprietor’s attitude had matured by opening up support for Node.js. Today at a summit of Node.js developers in San Francisco, the maker of a SaaS-based IDE for developers, announced it has added the ability for developers to deploy Node.js apps to Azure.
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Cloud9 began supporting Node.js on the Joyent cloud last July, and then added Node.js support for Heroku just last September.
The Cloud9 IDE provides all the basic functions that a developer would expect from an “Express” IDE, except it doesn’t have to be installed anyplace. Taking a cue from cloud-delivered word processors, it provides a full development and debugging console, including the ability to set breakpoints and run immediate JS instructions using a console window. Previous editions of Cloud9 bore a greater similarity to Visual Studio, but the latest edition deployed now utilizes a more distinct style, with functional icons along the left side, a column for logging events in the middle, and the editor window as the rightmost two-thirds.
The development team released a set of videos this morning (part 1 of which appears above) showing how deployment and execution of a task remains a one-click process for Azure, just as it has been for Heroku and Joyent.
Cloud9 is typically available to developers through a kind of voluntary subscription model. A developer can opt to use the product for free, so long as he makes his source code available to others through an open source license shares his code with others through the Cloud9 public project. Developers who wish to retain the right to use their own proprietary licenses pay $15 per month. A Cloud9 spokesperson confirmed to RWW this afternoon that both options remain available for developers deploying to Azure.
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Windows Azure Adds Node.js Support, Hadoop Preview
Dec 13th
When Windows Azure was launched in 2008, it was with the intention, Microsoft said, of running .NET Framework applications from the cloud. What ended up happening was that the PaaS market matured much faster than anyone in 2008 could have anticipated, so any cloud apps platform that needs to stay competitive must run with the languages the development world is using.
Hosted JavaScript certainly was in Microsoft’s original plans, but JavaScript that runs as a host, was not. For a company that has historically been incapable of turning on a dime, though, it’s executing a pretty impressive course change with Azure. Last June, the company helped the Joyent open source team to port its Node.js stand-alone JavaScript server to Windows. And yesterday, Microsoft announced it has competed its addition of Node.js support to Azure, meaning that any developer can launch a server-based JavaScript app from Microsoft’s cloud in minutes.
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Node.js is designed to be almost instantaneous, with its contributors demonstrating fully functional app deployments in mere minutes. One of the facilitators of this rapid time-to-deployment is a set of frameworks called Express, which make the deployment of a Node.js server almost turnkey in nature. It lets you generate the principal framework in just seconds, and from there build public functions that get resolved as RESTful API calls via HTTP.
Though Azure has its own, “wizard-like” way of deploying apps that’s more familiar to long-time Windows developers, that’s a new dance entirely for folks in the open source realm. So yesterday, Microsoft published a set tutorials featuring two methods to deploy a Node.js application in Azure, the second of which features the tools and frameworks with which Node.js devs are already familiar, including Express.
Both deployment methods utilize the new Node Package Manager (npm) for Windows, which is designed to be installed using Microsoft’s command-line tool of choice (at last), PowerShell. This tool was released yesterday, along with Microsoft’s complete SDK for Node.js on Azure, not on CodePlex – which is the company’s own distribution source for open source software – but instead through GitHub, which is more widely embraced by the OSS community.
That little concession, along with the fact that Microsoft’s demos did not involve a single branded, commercial development tool (outside of Windows itself, of course) suggests that the company is learning that the way to invite open source devs into their house is to accept their invitations into their own.
Yesterday’s Node.js news was coupled with Microsoft’s simultaneous release of its limited technology preview of Apache Hadoop for Azure and Windows Server. This in keeping with the company’s Hortonworks partnership announcement last October. The warning posted to the Microsoft Connect distribution point for this CTP made it very clear that this particular build was not ready for prime time.
It was never actually impossible for folks to deploy Hadoop to Azure, as this blog post last May by Microsoft’s Mario Kosmiskas. For now, the company continues to point to this post as its official instructions for installing and deploying Hadoop to Azure, although it’s clear that this could probably change in the coming months.
When Azure was first conceived, it was with the idea that enterprise-class applications would relocate to the cloud and, in so doing, adopt the .NET Framework. In a statement to RWW this morning, IDC’s program director for applications development software Al Hilwa said he believes something else is happening instead, and that it’s a good thing after all for Microsoft and everyone involved.
“Microsoft realizes that we are still in the early stage for cloud application platforms adoption, and a pragmatic approach to appeal to a wider chunk of the developer community is important,” remarks Hilwa. “Azure is an innovative platform which takes a fresh approach towards programming models from the traditional on-premise model. But this very exact innovation has made it hard for existing enterprise workloads to take advantage to Azure. Instead, PaaS platforms from other vendors are battling for new workloads that are the back-ends of new-age mobile, social, content and gaming apps, which are being driven by a much broader ecosystem of developers and ISVs than Microsoft’s traditional base of developers. The new capabilities in Azure, such as Node.js and Hadoop support, are designed to appeal to this new audience, as well as cash in on a more immediate opportunity, rather than wait for the pie in the sky migration of enterprise apps – which will take a lot longer.”
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Manage Amazon AWS, Azure BLOB Storage Like a Hard Drive
Oct 7th
When you’re developing services in the cloud, you often deploy them directly from your development environment – in the case of Windows Azure, from Visual Studio. When your services involve massive files like videos, those services will need to support what the cloud calls binary large objects – a phrase created just so we can call them BLOBs. Inevitably, you will find yourself having to manage BLOBs. Writing one-off programs just to send commands to the cloud service to manage your files, isn’t exactly the way self-service should work.
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Until Microsoft comes up with a background service that ties Azure directly to Windows Explorer, developers say on MSDN, they’ve been using a tool called CloudBerry Explorer. It’s a fairly simple, dual-pane environment in the vein of the old Norton Commander, and the present day third-party tool Total Commander. Each column is an independent file system navigator which by default points to local storage. But you can shift the source location for either or both panes from local storage to a cloud-based storage account (in the example above, Windows Azure).
In cloud-based storage, BLOBs were created to handle any-length strings of bytes, and were originally intended for containing large databases whose contents the system should preferably leave alone. What distinguishes a BLOB from an ordinary file is its variable degree of accessibility through simple HTTP. Almost immediately they became the perfect storage containers for things like small videos, which conceivably can be managed in the browser rather than being streamed. In any event, an HTTP address does point to a BLOB – not specifically to where it’s stored (because remember, this is the cloud) but rather to an address which the server may resolve dynamically to determine where it’s stored at the moment.
But from CloudBerry Explorer’s vantage point, the BLOB is analogous to a file and its container analogous to a folder. Once you give the program the shared access key to your cloud storage on Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or Azure (depicted at right), you can create a container (or what S3 calls a bucket, as depicted below) and then drag-and-drop files into that container (you can’t just drag a folder into open space, I found out, because creating a container is a drawn-out process for the server).
This is not a substitute for file hosting services like Dropbox or Skydrive, which are already supremely convenient and some of which tie in directly to Windows. Instead, CloudBerry makes BLOB management simpler for developers to write C# functions to do these same things. The freeware version offers basic file management functions and the ability to generate capacity reports – pie charts representing the total storage utilization for your containers. Meanwhile, the Pro version ($39.95) also enables you to synchronize a local storage folder and a cloud-based container, although the sync process is mainly convenient when you run CloudBerry in the background.
One feature added to the Pro edition for Azure is support for Microsoft’s Storage Analytics tool, which lets Azure developers monitor and report on how efficiently their storage and bandwidth are being used. Storage Analytics provides reports on such metrics as number of object requests per hour, average server-side and end-to-end latencies, and total number of successful and failed requests.
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Azure Tops Cloud Provider Performance Index
Oct 6th
Yes, you read that right: Microsoft’s cloud service Azure topped the list of 25 different providers by CloudSleuth in a report out this week, just slightly edging out Google’s App Engine. CloudSleuth uses the Gomex performance network to gauge the reliability and consistency of the most popular public IaaS and PaaS providers. They run an identical sample ecommerce application on a variety of popular cloud service providers and measure the results over at least six months of historical data.
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(A summary graph from the report is above.)
The report, which is available here, shows a marked difference between Azure servers running in the US (near Chicago) and those running in Singapore (which lagged the list).
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Build 2011: Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie on Scaling Azure for Everyone
Sep 15th
The scale of computing is expanding, enabling greater power on smaller devices on one end, and tremendous compute power and connectivity on the other. Somewhere in the middle are the devices which got us all interested in this industry to begin with, but perhaps because we’re all parents at heart, “smaller” has a special place for us, and small devices a special appeal.
Which makes it all the more difficult for the leader of the big side of the scale to garner attention at a show devoted to all the transformation happening on the small side of the scale. Microsoft did not give away coupons for compute instances or VMs on Windows Azure this week at Build 2011. Which is sad, because in a way the more important stuff – the developments that will have a much greater impact on your life than a slick, sliding Start Screen – are taking place on the big end of the scale.
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Scott Guthrie is one of the heroes of every Microsoft conference. Now the Senior VP in charge of Windows Azure, he became well-known and also very well-liked for being the tall, slim, soft-spoken champion of Silverlight, the lightweight app development platform that started Microsoft on the course of mobile apps. He’s a believer in the power of the small scale. And yet here he is leading the big scale, letting Silverlight move on to its eventual destination, whatever that may be.
Guthrie spoke with me at length at Build 2011 on Wednesday afternoon.
RWW: When Windows Azure started, it was the .NET programming platform. What it seems to be now is the all-purpose repository for server functionality – the data store, identity management, connectivity. This seems to be as much the back end of Windows, in the modern age, as any other component of Windows.
Scott Guthrie: I’m not sure I’d go quite that far.
RWW: Well, we’ve seen demonstrations here of porting SQL Server databases whole into the cloud. But we’re also seeing utilization of that by Metro apps on tablets. So it’s the type of service that 10, 15 years ago, at that scale, would have been provided by a [Windows Server] library. Well, here it is provided through connectivity in the cloud. It gives me a sense of a global diagram of Windows where Azure’s at the base.
SG: I think one interesting this is, seeing us take Azure a couple of different directions. One is, there’s a huge TCO cost savings. [We're thinking], “How do you enable companies to run their infrastructure cheaper, their applications cheaper, and just make developers’ lives better?” There’s a whole element of what we do in the cloud that’s around that; there’s immediate cost savings and benefits provided by that.
“We often think of IaaS as a kind of important step along the way, but it’s not the destination.”
I think the more interesting part about the cloud in the next couple of years is not how we make existing scenarios better. It’s going to be about opening up new scenarios that, frankly, all of us struggle to conceptualize even today, because they feel like science fiction. We showed a few of those off today in the keynotes, showing identity, integration, and single sign-on with notification services integrating with Windows 8 devices, and we showed off games using Windows Azure as a back end for storage. I think over the next couple of years, there’s going to be this steady number of scenarios that are going to be enabled by cloud-based computing, that are going to be really exciting.
Not just cloud apps, cloud data
SG: One of the things we talked about today, and I think you’ll see us talking more about over the next couple of years, is the move from structured to unstructured data. The cost of data storage has plummeted to a point where it’s almost cost-effective to store anything now because you can get economic value out of that gigabyte of storage, that easily pays for the actual cost of storing it.
RWW: In the development toolkits for Azure being distributed this week, will there be ways for new developers and small application developers in small businesses to take advantage of a contracts-like system, if you will, so that they can get a leg up into utilizing these new data schemas and platforms, as we saw in the Day 2 keynote?
SG: A couple of things we’re going to see with Azure going forward: One is the getting-started experience. I come from a developer framework, tooling background. But one of the things I’ve always strived for in terms of things that might be built is, how do you have that initial concept count be really easy, and how do you pay-as-you-go in terms of concept counts on top of that? To your point of, how does a small business or new developer get started? How do we make it so that you can say, “Hey, go to our Web site, and in five minutes you can build and deploy an app, and then in a few more minutes you can take advantage of a new feature, and in a few more minutes another new feature?”
Is Azure moving to infrastructure-as-a-service?
RWW: A few years ago when Azure premiered, and I asked what service class it belonged to – application as a service, platform as a service – it was described to me as a PaaS, at that time. Do you see, in the evolution of Azure, this becoming a lot more of Infrastructure-as-a-service?
SG: I think you’ll see us support more infrastructure scenarios. We have a VM role today that we’re in the process of bringing out, there’s a public beta. I think we’ve certainly heard from customers who’ve said, “I’ve got code that I want to port easily into the cloud without having to do much work.” So there’s a benefit of having VM roles. Certainly, look at what Amazon’s achieved. “Take this OS image and run it!” There’s benefits to that, and we want to make sure customers can do that with Windows Azure easily in the future.
At the same time, I think we often think of IaaS as a kind of important step along the way, but it’s not the destination. That’s why we’ve always been focused on Platform-as-a-service, as the end state that we think people want to get to. It can either be PaaS or SaaS. Those types of solutions tend to lend themselves much better from a cost savings perspective, and you can really take advantage of that elastic capability.
I don’t think of IaaS as replacing PaaS. I think of it as complementary. If I was talking to an enterprise that was rebuilding a system today, an ISV or a startup that wanted to basically go big in a big way, the thing I would encourage them to do is think about, how can you have stateless roles, how can you elastically scale out and build on an architecture that you know isn’t going to come back to haunt you when you go big? That’s one of the things we’ve done with Windows Azure, and I think we’ve done a good job [of addressing the question,] “How do we guide you toward the pit of success?” There’s a set of design patterns that we push pretty hard in Azure that really do give you that flexibility to scale out, that really does give you 99.95% SLAs, and makes it difficult, in some cases, to inadvertently shoot yourself in the foot. That’s why we’re still big believers in PaaS.
Next page: Democratizing Azure…
