Leveraging Non-Microsoft Technologies into Azure

Josh Holmes – UX Evangelist @ Microsoft

Twitter: @JoshHolmes

In-House or Hosted Servers

  • In House
    • Barrier for Innovation
      • Requires a large amount of IT that needs to be bought and needs a lot of money and also takes a lot of time
    • “Waste” of capacity
      • Our businesses have spikes but that’s not the normal usage, but in order to permit that usage we need to have that IT capacity and so we waste a lot of that capacity
  • Cloud Computing
    • No Initial costs, and this the investment needed
    • Cloud Computing is not competing with Shared Hosting, this is for real enterprise applications

Types of Cloud

  • Private Cloud (On-Premise)
    • We manage everything
  • Infrastructure (IaaS)
    • We manage only a small amount of the Infrastructure and not all the network
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS)
    • We don’t manage any infrastructure but only take advantage of the platform services that are being released
    • Windows Azure seats here

Windows Azure Data Centers (~100 Globally Distributed Data Centers)

  • US
    • Quincy, WA
    • Chicago, IL
    • San Antonio, TX
    • …
  • Europe
    • Dublin
    • Amsterdam
  • Asia

Microsoft CDN – Content Delivery Network . Currently in CTP

The Microsoft Cloud

  • Application Services
    • Bing
    • Windows Live
    • Office Live
    • Health Vault
    • Microsoft Advertising
  • Software Services
    • Office Online
    • Dynamics CRM Online
    • Exchange Online
    • …
  • Platform Services
    • Windows Azure
    • SQL Azure
    • AppFabric
    • Live Mesh
    • …

Not everything has to or can live in the cloud.

Only need the things that benefits on being in the cloud.

The core Strategy is ‘Hybrid’, we call that Software + Services

Where is the cloud most compelling

  • Massive scales: Outback promo on Facebook
  • High reliability: eCommerce Apps
  • Variable load

Reasons to use the cloud

  • Improve Bottom Line Business
  • Improve Strategy

Windows Azure VMs

  • Small
    • 1 x 1.8GHz
    • 1.76 GB memory
  • Medium
    • 2 x 1.8 GHz
    • 3.5 GB memory
  • Large
    • 4 x 1.8 GHz
    • 8 GB memory
  • X-Largeb
    • 8 x 1.8 GHz
    • 16 GB memory

Determine an ROI

  • AzureROI.CloudApp.net

Windows Azure Roles

  • Web Role
    • External Facing
    • Http/Https endpoints
    • Short lived calls
    • “Think Web Server”
  • Worker Role
    • Internal Facing
    • TCP/HTTP endpoint
    • Long running processes
    • “Think Service or Deamon”

Running PHP and Ruby on Azure

  • We can place the all the php files inside the package and have several versions of PHP running in different WebRoles
  • How to do it
    • Host in WebRole (like in .NET)
    • Package the PHP runtime
    • Point to FastCGI

Windows Azure for Eclipse

  • Does a lot of the heavy lifting for you
  • Creates the Web.config, Web.roleConfig, PHP implementation and debugs in the dev fabric
  • http://windowsazure4e.org

Running EXEs in Worker Role

  • Start with Worker Role Process to
    • Copy the exes to the worker role’s app directory
    • Execute the process
    • Monitor the health of the process
    • Other auxiliary tasks
  • Examples:
    • Deploying Tomcat on Windows Azure
    • Deploying MySQL
    • …

Storage Options

  • Windows Azure Storage
    • Types Available:
      • Queues
        • Buffered delivery data storage
      • Blobs
        • Unstructured data Storage
        • Partitioned by Containers
      • Tables
        • Semi-structured or tabular a storage (not the same as SQL Tables)
        • Tables contain entities
        • Entities contain properties
        • Tables are contained in partitions
        • Partitions are the units of replication
        • Support ACID transitions
        • Loosely typed
        • Non Relational DB
        • Massive scalable
      • Drives
    • SDKs
  • SQL Azure
    • Relational Data storage
    • Fully structured
    • Strongly typed
    • RDMS
    • Highly Scalable
    • guaranteed 99.999 % uptime
    • 3 replicas are guaranteed
    • Not Supported
      • Physical Server Access
      • Catalog DDL
      • CLR
      • Service Broker
      • Reporting Services
      • Analysis Services
      • Distributed Transactions and Queries
    • Supported
      • Tables, Indexes, Views
      • Stored procedures
      • Triggers
      • constraints
      • table variables
      • temp tables
    • Database Migration

Admin Windows Azure Data Storage

  • http://windows.azure.com and make some Storage type project
    • This gives you access to a storage account and also the AccountName and ApplicationId that you’ll need to develop against it

MySQL in a Windows Azure Application

  • Running MySQL in a Worker Role

Zend Framework has now support for Windows Azure for Azure Storage, and will have support for Azure AppFabric (Service Bus, Access Control)

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