Search results matching tags 'Azure', 'Application Architecture', and 'Storage'

Windows Azure – Write, Run or Use Software

BuckWoody — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:47:00 GMT

Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem.

You can click on the graphic below for a larger picture of these components, or download a poster with more details here.

The primary location for Windows Azure information is located at http://windowsazure.com. You can find everything there from the development kits for writing software to pricing, licensing and tutorials on all of that.

I have a few links here for learning to use Windows Azure – although it’s best if you focus not on the tools, but what you want to solve. I’ve got it broken down here into various sections, so you can quickly locate things you want to know. I’ll include resources here from Microsoft and elsewhere – I use these same resources in the Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) I do with my clients worldwide.

There is also a great video series on Cloud Fundamentals here, if you have some time to watch them. It's a great series that covers a lot of ground.

Write Software

Also called “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), Windows Azure has lots of components you can use together or separately that allow you to write software in .NET or various Open Source languages to work completely online, or in partnership with code you have on-premises or both – even if you’re using other cloud providers. Keep in mind that all of the features you see here can be used together, or independently. For instance, you might only use a Web Site, or use Storage, but you can use both together. You can access all of these components through standard REST API calls, or using our Software Development Kit’s API’s, which are a lot easier. In any case, you simply use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Cloud9 IDE, or even a text editor to write your code from a Mac, PC or Linux.

Components you can use:

Azure Web Sites: Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to quickly write an deploy websites, without setting a Virtual Machine, installing a web server or configuring complex settings. They work alone, with other Windows Azure Web Sites, or with other parts of Windows Azure. Read more about deciding to use Web Sites or Roles.

Web and Worker Roles: Windows Azure Web Roles give you a full stateless computing instance with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and configured. Windows Azure Worker Roles give you a full stateless computing instance without Information Services (IIS) installed, often used in a "Services" mode. Scale-out is achieved either manually or programmatically under your control.

Storage: Windows Azure Storage types include Blobs to store raw binary data, Tables to use key/value pair data (like NoSQL data structures), Queues that allow interaction between stateless roles, and a relational SQL Server database.

Other Services: Windows Azure has many other services such as a security mechanism, a Cache (memcacheD compliant), a Service Bus, a Traffic Manager and more. Once again, these features can be used with a Windows Azure project, or alone based on your needs.

Windows Azure Mobile Services: A simple framework service which enables you to quickly develop the back-end for mobile services. For the front-end, check out the iOS SDK, news about the Android SDK, and the Windows Phone SDK.

Various Languages: Windows Azure supports the .NET stack of languages, as well as many Open-Source languages like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, C++ and more.

Use Software

Also called “Software as a Service” (SaaS) this often means consumer or business-level software like Hotmail or Office 365. In other words, you simply log on, use the software, and log off – there’s nothing to install, and little to even configure. For the Information Technology professional, however, It’s not quite the same. We want software that provides services, but in a platform. That means we want things like Hadoop or other software we don’t want to have to install and configure.

Components you can use:

Kits: Various software “kits” or packages are supported with just a few clicks, such as Umbraco, Wordpress, and others.

Windows Azure Media Services: Windows Azure Media Services is a suite of services that allows you to upload media for encoding, processing and even streaming – or even one or more of those functions. We can add DRM and even commercials to your media if you like. Windows Azure Media Services is used to stream large events all the way down to small training videos.

High Performance Computing and “Big Data”: Windows Azure allows you to scale to huge workloads using a few clicks to deploy Hadoop Clusters or the High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes, accepting HPC Jobs, Pig and Hive Jobs, and even interfacing with Microsoft Excel.

Windows Azure Marketplace: Windows Azure Marketplace offers data and programs you can quickly implement and use – some free, some for-fee.

Run Software

Also known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), this offering allows you to build or simply choose a Virtual Machine to run server-based software.

Components you can use:

Persistent Virtual Machines: You can choose to install Windows Server, Windows Server with Active Directory, with SQL Server, or even SharePoint from a pre-configured gallery. You can configure your own server images with standard Hyper-V technology and load them yourselves – and even bring them back when you’re done. As a new offering, we also even allow you to select various distributions of Linux – a first for Microsoft.

Windows Azure Connect: You can connect your on-premises networks to Windows Azure Instances.

Storage: Windows Azure Storage can be used as a remote backup, a hybrid storage location and more using software or even hardware appliances.

Decision Matrix

With all of these options, you can use Windows Azure to solve just about any computing problem. It’s often hard to know when to use something on-premises, in the cloud, and what kind of service to use.

I’ve used a decision matrix in the last couple of years to take a particular problem and choose the proper technology to solve it. It’s all about options – there is no “silver bullet”, whether that’s Windows Azure or any other set of functions. I take the problem, decide which particular component I want to own and control – and choose the column that has that box darkened. For instance, if I have to control the wiring for a solution (a requirement in some military and government installations), that means the “Networking” component needs to be dark, and so I select the “On Premises” column for that particular solution. If I just need the solution provided and I want no control at all, I can look as “Software as a Service” solutions.

Security, Pricing, and Other Info

Security: Security is one of the first questions you should ask in any distributed computing environment. We have certification info, coding guidelines and more, even a general “Request for Information” RFI Response already created for you.

Pricing: Are there licenses? How much does this cost? Is there a way to estimate the costs in this new environment?

New Features: Many new features were added to Windows Azure - and you can keep up to date with community information released monthly here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidmcg/

Windows Azure Cookbooks: Great resource for architecture solutions - http://www.notsotrivial.net/blog/category/Architecture.aspx

Support: Software Support on Virtual Machines, general support, support plans

Hands-On Labs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/jj618399

Windows Azure Capability Discussion Presentation and Windows Azure Solution Implementer Guide and Windows Azure Business Priorities Guide

Which Azure Cloud Storage Model Should I Choose for my Application?

BuckWoody — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:59:51 GMT

Most applications have four parts – input, computation, storage and output. I’ll write about all of these over time, but today I want to focus on how to choose the storage part of the equation. This won’t be a full tutorial, full of detail and all that, but I will put forth some “rules of thumb” that you can use as a starter. I’ll also try and include some good pointers so you can research more.

NOTE: Utility Computing, or “the cloud”, or platform/software/architecture as a service, is a young discipline, and most certainly will change over time. That’s its advantage – that it can change quickly to meet your needs. However, that means information (like this blog entry) can be out of date. Make sure you check the latest documentation for Azure before you make your final decision, especially if the date on the post is older than six months or so. I’ll try and come back to update them, but check them nonetheless. Always start your search on the official site: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

Let’s start out with your options. You have four types of storage you can use for your applications:

· Blobs

· Tables

· Queues

· SQL Azure databases

Here are some rules of thumb for when you use each – and again, these are only guidelines. I’ll point you to some documentation for more depth.

Blobs: Use these for binary data (in other words, not text), and think of them like files on your hard drive. There are two types – block and page.

Use block blobs for streaming, like when you want to start watching a movie before it even completes the download. You can store files up to 200GB at a pop. And they parallelize well.

Use page blobs when you need a LOT of storage – up to a terabyte – and pages are stored in 512KB, well, pages. You can access a “page” directly, with an address.

Tables: Massive text blocks accessed using Key/Value pairs. If you’re used to “NoSQL”, you have the idea. You get one index on that pair, so choose the sort or search wisely. Not relational, but large, and fast.

Queues: This storage is used to transfer messages between blocks of code. If you think of the stateless-programming web-world, you need a way to tell one application something that isn’t event-based. This is how you do that. Since it’s a queue, it helps you with something called “idempotency”, which means that a single message on the queue will get processed once, and only once.

SQL Azure Databases: If you need relational storage, want to leverage Transact-SQL code you already have, or need full ACID, this is for you. There are size restrictions here, but I’ll not detail them so this information lives a little longer. Check out http://microsoft.com/sqlazure for specifications, whitepapers, the lot.

OK – I’ll end with a chart. This has some more information that you might find useful in your decision process:

If you need:	Blob	Table	Queue	SQL Azure
Structured Data		Y		Y
Relational Database				Y
Server Side Processing				Y
Access from outside Azure	Y	Y	Y	Y
Messaging Infrastructure			Y
Persistent Storage	Y	Y		Y
Size Limit	200GB/1TB	100TB	100TB	50GB

More info on Azure Storage:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee924681.aspx

http://www.azurejournal.com/2008/10/windows-azure-data-storage/

Many thanks to my teammates, Stephanie Lemus and Rick Shahid for help with the information in this post. Thanks for the help!