Hooking Stuff Together

The Cloud Hack event is a celebration of all that is good about Web 2.0 development on the Microsoft stack. To paraphrase great all-round architecture dude and high priest of SOA, Microsoft’s Pat Helland, it’s really all about Hooking Stuff Together.

Microsoft Windows Azure gives us a great fabric upon which to deploy services and applications that make the best of Hooking web services Stuff Together. When you sign up for The Cloud Hack, you’ll get a 30-day free subscription to Azure.

The three APIs we’ll be working with on the day include National Rail, Bing Maps and Fantastic Tavern. At the very least, there should be enough API goodness there to plan an impromptu pub crawl. And if that’s not good use of Web 2.0, then feel free to leave comments at the end of this blog post and tell me what is.

Getting There

If you’re reading this before the event, you can get free tickets here: http://www.thecloudhack.com/pages/get-a-ticket/

The location for the day is the Vibe Bar at the THE BREWERY, 52 CHISWELL STREET, EC1Y 4SD.

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The schedule for the has been published too:http://www.thecloudhack.com/pages/schedule/

Technorati Tags: Azure, Cloud, Development, Microsoft Architecture, Microsoft Azure

But what if you can’t countenance the thought of your data being in Somebody Else’s hands? If your applications and data are sufficiently secret and confidential that you just have to keep them inside the firewall, then you can still take advantage of the cloud philosophy, and go for a Private Cloud.

One really cool example of application fabric for the Private Cloud is Microsoft’s on-premise Azure appliances.

This video from Microsoft discusses the ethos behind the Private Cloud, and how the virtualisation tools that we already use can make the Private Cloud a reality.

For more details check out the Microsoft Private Cloud portal (http://bit.ly/ff1w3C), System Center Virtual Machine Manager self service portal (http://bit.ly/e3vgyG) and Hyper-V (http://bit.ly/ikrKGw).

Technorati Tags: Azure, S plus S, SaaS, Virtualisation

Microsoft’s vision of Software plus Services takes the basic offering of SaaS and augments it with on-premise productivity software such as Office.

In this TechNet video Brian Prince talks about cloud computing terminology, the role of the IT professional in cloud computing and Microsoft’s approach to the topic.

Brian also discusses the spectrum from on-premise, through hosted, cloud services and SaaS hosted applications.

• In an on-premise scenario, I would be in charge of managing, feeding and watering my servers, with all the IT people that required.
• In a hosted scenario, I would out-source some of that basal responsibility to my hosting provider, but I would probably be tasked with looking after the operating system and above.
• In a cloud scenario, such as Azure, I delegate all the running and maintaining, patching and potentially even scaling of my solution to Microsoft or other third parties. If you’re interested in automatically scaling your Azure applications have a look at the Windows Azure Dynamic Scaling sample application (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/azurescale) and also at one service provider that’s offering this funcitonality as a service for Azure (AzureWatch from http://www.paraleap.com).
• Traditional SaaS solutions are geared towards one-size-fits-all approaches, such as shared CRM, email or productivity solutions (for instance Office 365 and SharePoint Online).

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Microsoft Architecture, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, S plus S, S+S, SaaS

I’ve been following the Microsoft cloud service offerings for a couple of years since the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008. What started as SQL Server Data Services and the nascent BizTalk Services, has now grown into an offering that in my opinion does not just complete with Amazon and Google cloud services, but far exceeds the capabilities of their model.

Here’s a screenshot of a really simple ASP.NET page that I’m going to run in the local Azure test harness. You need to make sure it’s running as Administrator, or you can’t launch the Azure Simulation Environment.

If I’ve done all that, I can hit F5 and get this:

Shortly followed by the web application as if it were running in the cloud:

In the video, Jason builds a quick application connecting some .NET entity classes to a SQL Azure instance and shows how quickly a simple web service can be deployed to the cloud.

You also get to see the developer tools for Visual Studio 2010 and Azure, including local simulations of the App Fabric and Dev Fabric infrastructure of Azure. In other words, you can test your Azure apps by running them on your local machine without needing to actually deploy them.

Instead of deploying an ASP.NET Web Application like I did above, Jason shows you the newly released Visual Studio Express and he walks through the steps to build a Silverlight mobile application to consume the service he just deployed on Azure.

The key takeaway here is just how easy it is to build and consume cloud services and applications across a broad spectrum of platforms. Follow this link for more information about Microsoft Azure, or give us a call a JFDI Phoenix in the UK.

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Mirosoft Azure, Mobile, Videos, Visual Studio 2010

VoIP Advantage on YouTube

Technorati Tags: SIP, Telephony, VoIP

The slides for all the sessions for the conference are available here. Or you can go straight to my slide deck from my SkyDrive page here:

Nice :)

And here’s the 6x 10-minute clips as a single YouTube play list:

Co-presenting with me was my good friend and colleague Pete Jenkins, Managing Director of Feed My Guests Ltd down in Brighton. Many thanks to Pete for contributing such a quality case study section. There’s not many customers that would do that :) You can jump straight to Pete’s section here.

Many thanks to Matt Deacon at Microsoft and his team for running such a cool event. Thanks also to the Sales and Marketing folks at Valtech who helped organise our session and videoed the event for us!

For anyone on Facebook who still hasn’t added the Feed My Guests application, you can add it here!

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Microsoft Architecture, SaaS, Software as a Service, Software plus Services

www.microsoft.com/uk/architectinsight

Valtech is sponsoring this year’s Architect Insight Conference. The theme for 2008 is “The Future of IT” – specifically focusing on the concepts of Disruptive IT and Software plus Services. The conference runs from April 28-29, in Windsor, UK. And there are still tickets left :) so go and register today!

We’ve got two speaking slots this year – one from my colleague Michael Barker on Service Oriented UI, and one from me on Software plus Services.

Maybe see you there!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Architecture, S plus S, S+S, SaaS, Software as a Service, Software plus Services

I’ve been hosted with WebHost4Life for a couple of years now. They give me a couple of GB of space, SQL Server, albeit highly contended, and ASP.NET – once again, on a server with a high contention ratio of other people hosted on the same box. In return, I give them money. About $250 US per year.

It’s just my blog, and maybe the personal web sites of a few friends, some email, and that’s it. A few thousand hits per month if I’m lucky. Maybe 1000 unique users. That means I’m spending about 25c, or 12p per user. Quite a lot really.

Web 2.0 Goodness

So I’ve had enough paying for this. Google, Microsoft and other people big enough that I won’t worry they might not be around next year, are giving it away. Space, email, hosting. I’ve decided, rather unsurprisingly, to go with the Windows Live offerings from Microsoft.

Somebody Else’s Problem

My domain names still live with my registrar, and I continue to pay a couple of quid per year per domain name. My DNS records are now with a free DNS hosting provider. There are quite a few now – FreeDNS, ZoneEdit and EveryDNS to name but three.

Microsoft now offers a service called Windows Live Domains, that allows you to point your own domain name at as many Hotmail accounts (and Live Spaces) as you can consume. If you were so inclined you could even set up your domain for “public email sign up” – configure some co-branding to get your logo up next to Microsoft’s and allow your web site users to have free hosted email @yourdomain.com.

The offering? 5GB of file storage at Windows Live SkyDrive, 5GB Email (per mailbox, and up to 500 mailboxes per domain) at Windows Live Hotmail, an as far as I can tell another 5GB storage per blog/website at Windows Live Spaces. The cost? Zip. Squat. Diddly. Nada.

The Next Step

OK, so that solves my personal host and email problems. But it doesn’t really give me a robust platform for e-commerce. There are offerings from Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook to get you there. Some of these are free.

Databases

The three main contenders for database storage in the cloud are Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. There are differences between what we know and love as Relational Databases and these cloud-based offerings. All three listed below are primarily object databases with a SQL-esque wrapper to them.

For instance, you can only access your records if you know their unique key or ID field to start with; there are no indices other than on the object key fields; you relate data by creating “associations” (effectively many-to-many lookup tables) between them. In this way, the database software is able to provide excellent guarantees of scalability without any further action on the part of the developer or customer.

• Amazon SimpleDB – pay per GB, per compute-second, per month
• Microsoft SQL Server Data Services – currently free beta
• Facebook Data Store – currently free beta

Hosting and Utility Computing in the Cloud

There are also some pretty cool ways of spreading the load the and cost for incremental business models, and those where the volumes of concurrent users fluctuate hour by hour, if your audience is spread across time zones.

• Joyent – one year free; Linux only.
• Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) – pay per GB, per compute-hour, per month; Linux only.
• Flexiscale – pay per GB, per compute-hour, per month; Linux and Windows.

File Storage

The most common use of cloud-based services today is file storage. You can get some pretty good offerings for free, or you can pay if you want an SLA.

• Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Server) – pay per GB stored, per GB transferred, per month/
• Microsoft SkyDrive – 5GB free storage/
• Microsoft Windows Live Application Based Storage API – experimental, free beta, for storing small quantities of config data.

Feed My Guests

If you’d like an example of what you can do with these services, check out:

apps.facebook.com/feedmyguests

I’ll follow this up with a case study around Feed My Guests, how we did it, and why.

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Facebook, SaaS, Web 2.0

http://www.codeplex.com/facebookdatastoreapi/

Feel free to leave feedback, feature requests and issues/bugs.

Cheers,

joel

Technorati Tags: C#, Codeplex, Facebook, Facebook API