There’s no abstract online, but the session is about Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy. The speaker is “Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. He is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources.”
Cloud computing ideal: efficient, available, infinite, on-demand, ubiquitous
Microsoft’s vision is to extend Windows to the Cloud. Will preserve investment and knowledge (customer, partners and of course, Microsoft). Leveraging Microsoft’s data center investment.
Window’s Azure Pillars:
1. Scalable hosting
2. Automated Service Management
3. Scalable, available, durable storage service
4. Rich developer experience
scalable hosting
- hypervisor based virtualized computation
- virtualized network
– scale out, not scale up. uniform systems.
- [two more]
Automated Service Management [manage services, not just servers]
- automate entire lifecycle of your service
- assigns from shared pool of hardware resources
- maintains the health of your service
- declarative service model guides [x]
Storage Services – optional, can use other cloud storage services
- tables, blobs, queues and streams
- low cost commodity hardware
- adaptive replication, caching and load balancing
- high availability without user intervention
Rich Developer Experience – preserve investment in tools, programming model, skills
- Cloud in a box desktop development environment
- supports both native and managed code
- visual studio technologies
- monitoring and diagnostic support
Platform is designed for interoperability (between clouds, cloud services)
- command line interfaces
- REST protocols
- XML file formats
- support for all languages
List of optional services: Liveservices, .netServices, SQLServices, SharePoint Services, Microsoft Dynamics CRM services, all available on top of Windows Azure
.NetService examples: Service Bus, Access Control, and Workflow
Access Control you can use corporate directory to set policies and permissions on Cloud applications
Part of basic vision is to move services from on-premise to the cloud. But, on-premise does not go away. Picture up now of Public and Private Clouds with big arrows showing “secure cloud federation and cloud bursting”. Cloud bursting you ask? Shared loads.
Tells us to go try this right now. Community preview at http://www.azure.com Yousef asks for feedback after you try it.
They handed out an Introducing Windows Azure paper by David Chappell. If you are interested in Azure, you should grab this paper. David always does a nice job on this stuff.
Audience Q&A
Q. Timeframe on release of private cloud?
A. Can’t comment on timing.
Q. Licensing?
A. Pay as you go. But, stay tuned. Still to be announced.
Q. Support models for private clouds?
A. Wide spectrum. Goal is to maintain benefit of cloud as much as possible. This includes not worrying about the hardware. However, can’t provide detail, not yet announced.
Q. Languages? Ruby, Java?
A. Yes.
Q. Load balancing?
A. Load balancing is built in. Part of deployment, Azure will figure out what to do. If you application needs more resources, and you know, you (developer) can trigger changes via exposed APIs.
Q. Security & DoS attacks?
A. Leveraging experience in running online services, such as Messenger. Won’t give out the secrets. (shocking!)
Q. Follow-on, how do you know if it’s really a DoS attack?
A. Good point, might need to expose some API’s for developers, wants to talk offline.
Q. Interoperability? Provide interoperability use case?
A. Customers want option to switch, to run workloads on different cloud platforms, have access to data etc. Customers want freedom, not lock-in.
So far, this session has generated the most Q&A. Folks really want to know the details of what’s inside, the cost, the integrations and the timeline.
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