Cloud – Page 2 – JoelBlogs – Joel Jeffery's Microsoft 365 Blog

Whether we’re talking about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the cloud is really just another place to run your applications.

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).

I’ve just come across another great video from Jason Zander at the UK Tech Days event in Reading. This time it’s about mobile applications and the Azure platform.

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.