Sunday, December 12, 2010

Notes: My first look at Azure

ME: Today I am working on Sunday because I want to get ahead of the game.

NOW: listening to a pre-recorded web cast on about Azure, the MS cloud database. notes as I listen.Talking about challenges.

AZURE: How to make applications that are useful and scalable? need disks, memory, hardware - managing a data center is hard. How to get app to the market quickly? Helps to have a simplified deployment path (?). Optimize.  Sample: NFL website - very active during games but not all the time. --> data center optimization --> benefits from pay-as-you-go service platform. Azure enables developers to deploy apps. If it can be hosted in IIS, it can be put into Azure. Blob storage:file system. SQL Azure: database. App fabric: queuing/messaging.  Codename Dallas: analysis and BI. 

AZURE: familiar SQL Server relational model. Uses existing APIs and tools. Friction free provisioning and reduced management (?). Built for cloud with availability and scale.

ME: marketing is annoying.

AZURE: true relational database as a service.

ME: This contrasts to, say, SalesForce (maybe more about this later).

AZURE: Data always available and (automatically?) replicated. self heal because (todo. learn more). Scale. 1GB to 50GB.  Control over load balancing.  business ready SLAs.  data centers are all around the world.

AZURE: Relational. Developers use existing knowledge with building SQL server based relational apps. Azure looks just like SQL server to the app. Requests go through the load balancer.

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Architecture.  Provision with ActiveDirectory (?).  App topologies. – Azure compute/Code Near – use the azure deployed web site – LOW latency.  Code Far – traditional app model (!!!) – Hybrid. Synch up.

ME: OK!  This is a good thing that I was listening.  “Code Far” is the model I am using with my project right now.  It would be a disaster to try and deploy this knowing the latency would be an issue and the product is not really aimed at this (my interpretation).

HOWEVER! We also need a solution for maintaining highly available PHP based sites, so it’s worth learning a little more.  That said I really need to know if the pricing is something I can sell to management.

Interesting the next topic in the web cast addresses this concern.  Maybe they do focus groups or something and people out there like me reacted just like me.

Provisioning.  Account>Server>Database.

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EOF for now.

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