Windows Azure jumpstart

Editor's Notes

1. Slide Objectives:Explain how Microsoft thinks of the cloudSpeaking Points:There are numerous terms and definitions floating around in the industry for “the cloud”, “cloud computing”, “cloud services”, etc.Microsoft thinks of the cloud as simply an approach to computing that enables applications to be delivered at scale for a variety of workloads and client devices.The cloud can help deliver IT as a standardized service…freeing you up to focus on your business
2. Speaking Points:There is a lot of talk in the industry about different terms like Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Software as a Service.Since PDC08 when we first announced the Windows Azure our focus has been on delivering a platform as a service offering where you can build applications. Where the platform abstracts you from the complexities of building and running applications. We fundamentally believe that the future path forward for development is by providing a platform. In fact, as you’ll see in a few minutes, we believe that there are a number of new capabilities that should be delivered as services to the platform.Notes:There is a lot of confusion in the industry when it comes to the cloud. It’s important that you understand both what is happening in the industry and how we think about the cloud. This is the most commonly used taxonomy for differentiating between types of cloud services.The industry has defined three categories of services:IaaS – a set of infrastructure level capabilities such as an operating system, network connectivity, etc. that are delivered as pay for use services and can be used to host applications. PaaS – higher level sets of functionality that are delivered as consumable services for developers who are building applications. PaaS is about abstracting developers from the underlying infrastructure to enable applications to quickly be composed. SaaS – applications that are delivered using a service delivery model where organizations can simply consume and use the application. Typically an organization would pay for the use of the application or the application could be monetized through ad revenue. It is important to note that these 3 types of services may exist independently of one another or combined with one another. SaaS offerings needn’t be developed upon PaaS offerings although solutions built on PaaS offerings are often delivered as SaaS. PaaS offerings also needn’t expose IaaS and there’s more to PaaS than just running platforms on IaaS. ----Slide Objectives:Explain the three established terms in the industry for cloud servicesSpeaking Points:With this in mind, it’s important to understand how to talk about our Cloud Services offerings.There is a lot of confusion in the industry when it comes to the cloud. It’s important that you understand both what is happening in the industry and how we think about the cloud. This is the most commonly used taxonomy for differentiating between types of cloud services.The industry has defined three categories of services:IaaS – a set of infrastructure level capabilities such as an operating system, network connectivity, etc. that are delivered as pay for use services and can be used to host applications. PaaS – higher level sets of functionality that are delivered as consumable services for developers who are building applications. PaaS is about abstracting developers from the underlying infrastructure to enable applications to quickly be composed. SaaS – applications that are delivered using a service delivery model where organizations can simply consume and use the application. Typically an organization would pay for the use of the application or the application could be monetized through ad revenue. It is important to note that these 3 types of services may exist independently of one another or combined with one another. SaaS offerings needn’t be developed upon PaaS offerings although solutions built on PaaS offerings are often delivered as SaaS. PaaS offerings also needn’t expose IaaS and there’s more to PaaS than just running platforms on IaaS.
3. Slide Objectives:Explain the differences and relationship between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in more detail.Speaking Points:Here’s another way to look at the cloud services taxonomy and how this taxonomy maps to the components in an IT infrastructure. Packaged SoftwareWith packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications. IaaSWith Infrastructure as a Service, the lower levels of the stack are managed by a vendor. Some of these components can be provided by traditional hosters – in fact most of them have moved to having a virtualized offering. Very few actually provide an OSThe customer is still responsible for managing the OS through the Applications. For the developer, an obvious benefit with IaaS is that it frees the developer from many concerns when provisioning physical or virtual machines. This was one of the earliest and primary use cases for Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Developers were able to readily provision virtual machines (AMIs) on EC2, develop and test solutions and, often, run the results ‘in production’. The only requirement was a credit card to pay for the services.PaaSWith Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor. The Windows Azure best fits in this category today. In fact because we don’t provide access to the underlying virtualization or operating system today, we’re often referred to as not providing IaaS.PaaS offerings further reduce the developer burden by additionally supporting the platform runtime and related application services. With PaaS, the developer can, almost immediately, begin creating the business logic for an application. Potentially, the increases in productivity are considerable and, because the hardware and operational aspects of the cloud platform are also managed by the cloud platform provider, applications can quickly be taken from an idea to reality very quickly.SaaSFinally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
4. First introduced the platform 3 years ago at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference.Three key principles…
5. Special offer for MSDN Subscribers:If you are an existing Visual Studio Professional, Premium or Ultimate with MSDN subscriber, you get free access to Windows Azure each month, and up to $3,700.00 in annual Windows Azure benefits at no charge.This offer provides a base level of Compute, Storage, SQL Azure database, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching each month at no charge.
6. Build a quick HelloAzure app using project templates and show compute and storage emulators.
7. Speaking Points:3 core services: Compute, Storage, DatabaseLet’s take a look at the platform starting with the core services.Compute:Scalable environment for running codeEnables .NET, C++, PHP, Ruby, Python, …Automated service managementStorage:Scalable and highly available cloud storageBlobs, Tables, Queues, DrivesREST APIs and several client librariesDatabase:SQL Relational DatabaseFamiliar programming model & tools--Speaking Points:I suspect most if not all of you in this room are familiar with the Windows Azure today.Today the platform consists of a set of foundational services SQL Azure relational databaseAppFabric provides services that can be used by any apps – hosted in Windows Azure, on-premises, or hosted in another environment. Questions:How many of you are building applications for Windows Azure?How many are using SQL Azure?How many are using the Access Control service today? The Service Bus?Notes:Windows Azure StoryWe are building an open platform to run your applications in the cloud. Your apps are .NET, Java, PHP, etc. We love everyone.We are going to help you migrate your existing apps to the cloud. The cloud platform is the future. Enables scale, self-service, lowers friction, etc. We provide the best cloud platform for building new apps. (aka n-tier, web services, etc.)
8. Build a quick HelloAzure app using project templates and show compute and storage emulators.
9. Slide objectives: Summarize what the audience just saw with the Hello Windows Azure demo.Speaking Points: What you sawSo we just saw a number of things within this simple demo.First you saw a simple ASP.NET web application, like many of you have built before.We created the application using Visual Studio 2010, tools many of you are familiar with.We were able to model the roles and instances for our Windows Azure application in a simple config file.You saw how the Windows Azure development fabric provides a local environment for developing, debugging, and testing our applications – which is integrated directly with Visual Studio. Finally, you saw how we could deploy our applications to Windows Azure and in a matter of minutes have the application running in the cloud and switch from staging to production.What Windows Azure ProvidedWhat is more exciting then this simple application is what you didn’t see, but what Windows Azure provided.First, Windows Azure provided an environment to run code – to run our ASP.NET application.It provided all of the infrastructure such as machines, rack space, connectivity, and switches.It also automated and simplified the deployment and configuration. At no point did we have to remote into machines or FTP files or synchronize our application across machines. This automated service management was provided by Windows Azure.Windows Azure also provided isolation for us – where our application is isolated from other apps that either we would develop or other organizations would develop. We also saw how by simply specifying the number of instances in the service model, Windows Azure delivered key capabilities such as redundancy and load balancing for our application.Ultimately, what this results in is abstraction and flexibility.
10. Slide objectives: Summarize what the audience just saw with the Hello Windows Azure demo.Speaking Points: What you sawSo we just saw a number of things within this simple demo.First you saw a simple ASP.NET web application, like many of you have built before.We created the application using Visual Studio 2010, tools many of you are familiar with.We were able to model the roles and instances for our Windows Azure application in a simple config file.You saw how the Windows Azure development fabric provides a local environment for developing, debugging, and testing our applications – which is integrated directly with Visual Studio. Finally, you saw how we could deploy our applications to Windows Azure and in a matter of minutes have the application running in the cloud and switch from staging to production.What Windows Azure ProvidedWhat is more exciting then this simple application is what you didn’t see, but what Windows Azure provided.First, Windows Azure provided an environment to run code – to run our ASP.NET application.It provided all of the infrastructure such as machines, rack space, connectivity, and switches.It also automated and simplified the deployment and configuration. At no point did we have to remote into machines or FTP files or synchronize our application across machines. This automated service management was provided by Windows Azure.Windows Azure also provided isolation for us – where our application is isolated from other apps that either we would develop or other organizations would develop. We also saw how by simply specifying the number of instances in the service model, Windows Azure delivered key capabilities such as redundancy and load balancing for our application.Ultimately, what this results in is abstraction and flexibility.
11. This slide explains web and worker role architecture within a cloud service.Things to call out: Each role can have multiple identical instances You can currently have up to 25 roles per cloud service.
12. Slide ObjectiveUnderstand at a high level how the Windows Azure Platform maps into the high scale archetype Speaker NotesKey points here are that all external connections come through a load balancer THIS INCLUDES STORAGE.If you are familiar with the previous model, you will notice that two new features are diagrammed here as well, namely inter-role communication (notice there is no load balancer) and TCP ports directly to Worker Roles (or Web Roles). We will still use the storage to communicate async and reliably via queues for a lot of options. However, inter-role communication fills in when you need direct synchronous comm.A worker role can expose an endpoint to the loadbalancer (an input endpoint). That is not shown here.The load balancers are a key to Windows Azure.
13. Slide Objectives:Introduce Windows Azure Storage and some of the key features/capabilities of the storage serviceSpeaking Points:The design point is for the cloud is availability of storage, there are 3 replicas of data, and we implement guaranteed consistency. In the future there will be some transaction support and this is why we use guaranteed consistency.There are 4 types of storageTables = Key value storeQueues = a simple queuing mechanismBlobs = Binary file storage in the cloudDrives = A mechanism that allows a VHD in a blob to be mounted as an NTFS drive into a Compute roleBlobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center Access is via a storage account – you can have multiple storage accounts per live id.Although the native API is REST web service, there is a .NET storage client in the SDK that. This makes working with storage much easier from .NET
14. Slide Objectives:Understand the key differentiators of SQL AzureUnderstand where a user has control and where the cloud runs thingsSpeaking Points:SQL Azure provides highly available SQL Server.Appears to be a SQL Server to the client.In reality is 3 transitionally consistent copies of the database that are fronted by a Gateway that appears to be a SQL serverSimple to provision- create a logical server in the Portal, execute a create DB Command to create a new databaseCan add and remove DBs easily from application to scale up and downCustomers look after logical optimizations like indexesSQL Azure manages the physical databaseNo need to install or patch software or other physical administrationAutomatic high availability and fault toleranceSimple provisioning and deployment of multiple databasesScale databases up or down based on business needsMulti-tenantIntegration with SQL Server and tooling including Visual StudioSupport for T-SQL based familiar relational database modelNoteshttp://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sqlazure/http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/sqlazure/default.aspx
15. Slide Objectives:Understand the key differentiators of SQL AzureUnderstand where a user has control and where the cloud runs thingsSpeaking Points:SQL Azure provides highly available SQL Server.Appears to be a SQL Server to the client.In reality is 3 transitionally consistent copies of the database that are fronted by a Gateway that appears to be a SQL serverSimple to provision- create a logical server in the Portal, execute a create DB Command to create a new databaseCan add and remove DBs easily from application to scale up and downCustomers look after logical optimizations like indexesSQL Azure manages the physical databaseNo need to install or patch software or other physical administrationAutomatic high availability and fault toleranceSimple provisioning and deployment of multiple databasesScale databases up or down based on business needsMulti-tenantIntegration with SQL Server and tooling including Visual StudioSupport for T-SQL based familiar relational database modelNoteshttp://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sqlazure/http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/sqlazure/default.aspx
16. Cloud First Provisioning means exactly what is says. Building a VM in the cloud first. You have three methods of starting this process: Build a VM from the portal, from the command line OR programmatically calling the REST API. Once your choice of provisioning is made you will need to select the image and instance size to start from. The newly created disk will be stored in blob storage and your machine will boot.
17. This use case is when you already have a “golden image(s)” your company uses for server provisioning or you have a VM running on premises that you would just like to run in our data center. You take the vhd – use CSUpload to upload as a page blob to a storage account. From there use the portal to add as an image (sysprepped) or disk (configured VM) and there you can create a VM based off of the vhd.
18. This use case is all about using the capture feature of IaaS to create OS images. The first part you start with a base vhd that you then custom with software binaries, registry settings etc.. You run sysprep.exe and generalize/shutdown the OS. You can then upload it if coming from on-premises or just click the capture button if you created the VM in the cloud. Capture allows you to take a generalized VM and save the underlying VHD as a new image in your image library.
19. One of the key benefits of IaaS is flexibility and control. The Windows Azure solution provides the capability of not only moving VHDs TO the cloud but also allows you to copy the VHD back down and run it locally or on another cloud provider. Great for testing out production issues or any other need where you require a copy of the production server.
20. When there are multiple VMs in the same cloud service they can communicate directly as they are on the same network.
21. Speaking Points:Building Block Services for developing connected applicationsYou could write code and build any of these services yourself…but you wouldn’t want to…Slide Objectives: Define and enumerate the Windows Azure AppfabricSpeaking Points: Much in the same way that SQL Services is about extending SQL Server to the cloud, we are also extending key .NET capabilities to the cloud as services.We call this the Windows Azure AppFabric. These services are really key components you would need for building distributed, connected applications. When we talk about connecting to your existing on-premises applications and enabling the composition of hybrid (Cloud + on-premises) applications – that is where the AppFabric really comes in.There are currently two AppFabric Services: the Service Bus & the Access Control ServiceService Bus:The Service Bus is designed to provide a general purpose application bus, available on the internet at internet scale. You can really thin of the Service Bus as being similar to an Enterprise Service Bus that many enterprise organizations have today. However, we believe that when providing a Service Bus as a programmable service on the internet, there are a wider range of scenarios for many more types of organizations.Fundamentally, the .NET Service Bus is about connecting applications across network and application boundaries and making key message exchange patterns such as publish and subscribe messaging very simple.Access Control:The Access Control service is designed to provide rules-driven, claims-based access control for applications. Essentially, this allows you to define authorization rules for your applications using the claims-based approach that we are adopting within many Microsoft products and technologies and that is becoming adopted in the industry.Notes: Windows Azure has the .NET Framework built into it so thatyou can use those services within your application.But just like your application must be designed to scale out, the services that we have built into Windows over time in .NET also need to be designed and built in a way that can scale out naturally. We want to create services for you, and that's the purpose of the AppFabric, creating a pool of resources available to you to take advantage of and do things within your application very simply. So we're including a built-in, scale-out implementation of a service bus. The service bus lets you connect your on-premises systems securely into the cloud, into the Azure environment, while allowing your data and your information to traverse firewalls, solving a problem that is a bane of many application developments.
22. Speaking Points:Building Block Services for developing connected applicationsYou could write code and build any of these services yourself…but you wouldn’t want to…Slide Objectives: Define and enumerate the Windows Azure AppfabricSpeaking Points: Much in the same way that SQL Services is about extending SQL Server to the cloud, we are also extending key .NET capabilities to the cloud as services.We call this the Windows Azure AppFabric. These services are really key components you would need for building distributed, connected applications. When we talk about connecting to your existing on-premises applications and enabling the composition of hybrid (Cloud + on-premises) applications – that is where the AppFabric really comes in.There are currently two AppFabric Services: the Service Bus & the Access Control ServiceService Bus:The Service Bus is designed to provide a general purpose application bus, available on the internet at internet scale. You can really thin of the Service Bus as being similar to an Enterprise Service Bus that many enterprise organizations have today. However, we believe that when providing a Service Bus as a programmable service on the internet, there are a wider range of scenarios for many more types of organizations.Fundamentally, the .NET Service Bus is about connecting applications across network and application boundaries and making key message exchange patterns such as publish and subscribe messaging very simple.Access Control:The Access Control service is designed to provide rules-driven, claims-based access control for applications. Essentially, this allows you to define authorization rules for your applications using the claims-based approach that we are adopting within many Microsoft products and technologies and that is becoming adopted in the industry.Notes: Windows Azure has the .NET Framework built into it so thatyou can use those services within your application.But just like your application must be designed to scale out, the services that we have built into Windows over time in .NET also need to be designed and built in a way that can scale out naturally. We want to create services for you, and that's the purpose of the AppFabric, creating a pool of resources available to you to take advantage of and do things within your application very simply. So we're including a built-in, scale-out implementation of a service bus. The service bus lets you connect your on-premises systems securely into the cloud, into the Azure environment, while allowing your data and your information to traverse firewalls, solving a problem that is a bane of many application developments.
23. Slide ObjectiveUnderstand that Microsoft has a long history in running data centres and online applications. Bing, Live, Hotmail etc….Understand the huge amount of innovation going on at the data center levelSpeaking Points:Microsoft is one of the largest operators of datacenters in the worldYears of ExperienceLarge scale trustworthy environmentsDriving for cost and environmental efficientlyWindows Azure runs in 3 regions and 6 datacenters todayData center innovation is driving improved reliability and efficiencyPUE = Power Usage Effectiveness = Total Facility power/IT Systems Power = Indication of efficiency of DCUnder 1.8 is very good, modern cloud DCs approaching 1.2Multi-billion dollar datacenter investment700,000+ square foot Chicago and the 300,000+ square foot Dublin, Ireland data centersMicrosoft cloud services provide the reliability and security you expect for your business: 99.9% uptime SLA, 24/7 support. Microsoft understands the needs of businesses with respect to security, data privacy, compliance and risk management, and identity and access control. Microsoft datacenters are ISO 27001:2005 accredited, with SAS 70 Type I and Type II attestations.Notes:http://www.globalfoundationservices.com/http://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/06/20/microsoft-s-pue-experience-years-of-experience-reams-of-data.aspxhttp://blogs.msdn.com/the_power_of_software/archive/2008/06/27/part-2-why-is-energy-efficiency-important.aspx
24. Speaking Points:PerformanceDirects the user to the “best”/”closest” deploymentExample: Direct the user to the “best” deployment between US South and West EuropeFailoverOne deployment is primaryTraffic is redirected to another deployment if the primary goes downExample: All traffic is directed to US North; if it goes down, send all traffic to US SouthNotes:Traffic Manager monitors hosted services by executing periodic HTTP GET requests to an endpoint that you specify when creating a policy. In the simplest case, this endpoint can be the URL to a file served by the application. Traffic Manager considers the service to be available if its monitoring endpoint responds with an HTTP status code of 200 OK within 5 seconds.The Health Monitor Timeout provides an estimate of how long it takes Traffic Manager to become aware of the change.When a hosted service is disabled, its monitoring endpoint stops sending responses to simulate a failure. Traffic Manager performs a check of this endpoint at 30-second intervals and if it fails to receive a response to three consecutive polls, it considers the service as unavailable. Thus, it could take as much as 120 seconds for the service to failover.After you disable a service, a timer on the page starts showing the elapsed time since the status of the service changed, providing an estimate of how long it takes the Traffic Manager to become aware of the failure.Disabling a hosted service in a Traffic Manager policy can be useful for temporarily removing a malfunctioning service or during maintenance tasks.Example: all users from US -> US North, all users from Asia -> US North, all users from Europe ‑> West EuropeRatioSends traffic to different deployments based on fixed ratio (N/M)Example: Direct 20% of user traffic to US South and 80% to US North.
25. Slide Objectives:Understand basic concept of a CDNUnderstand at a high level how Windows Azure CDN worksSpeaking Points:The Windows Azure CDN provides edge nodes around the worldData stored in CDN enabled storage accounts is retrieved from the origin storage container and cached at each edge node in a lazy load fashionWindows Azure Customers have control over how long data is cached for.Windows Azure CDN has 20 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expandThe benefit of using a CDN is better performance and user experience for users who are farther from the source of the content stored in the Windows Azure Blob service. Windows Azure CDN provides worldwide high-bandwidth access to serve content for popular events.Noteshttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network.aspx
26. Slide Objectives:Provide overview and detail on pricingDiscuss localization of pricingSpeaking Points:Windows Azure is charged per compute hour.Pricing is localized for global marketsDifferent VM sizes have a different number of CPUs and therefore are a multiple the single CPU rateCompute time, measured in service hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed.remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Partial compute hours are billed as full hours.Storage, measured in GB: Storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. Data transfers measured in GB (transmissions to and from the Windows Azure datacenter).Data transfers within a sub region are free. Transactions, measured as application requests to the REST serviceSQL Azure is priced on a per database per month basisAppFabric Service Bus is based on a per connection modelAppFabric Access control is based on a per transaction modelAppFabric Service Bus connections can be provisioned individually on a “pay-as-you-go” basis or in a pack of 5, 25, 100 or 500 connections. For individually provisioned connections, you will be charged based on the maximum number of connections you use for each day. For connection packs, you will be charged daily for a pro rata amount of the connections in that pack (i.e., the number of connections in the pack divided by the number of days in the month). You can only update the connections you provision as a pack once every seven days. You can modify the number of connections you provision individually at any time.For AppFabric Access Control transactions, customers will be charged the actual number of transactions utilized for the billing period (i.e., not in discrete blocks of 100,000 transactions), plus data transfers in or out.Notes:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/netservices/archive/2010/01/04/announcing-windows-azure-platform-commercial-offer-availability-and-updated-appfabric-pricing.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/
27. Slide Objectives:Explain that there are different VM instance sizes available within Windows AzureSpeaking Points:---Speaking Points:One of the key areas of feedback has been to reduce the cost and size of Windows Azure instances. At PDC we will announce..Notes:(*) 20GB with a limitation on VHD size if they are deploying VMRole on XSmall: the VHD can only be up to 15GB.each tenant can support 20 instances just like regular subscriptions with Small VM. We do not scale based on core counts.There is no SLA on the network bandwidth for each VM size as this resource is shared among all the VM. That said, we need to provide guidance for customer so they could design their applications correctly. From the engineering side, this is what we mean by Low, Moderate and High. • Low currently means 0-15Mbps with short burst up to 25-50Mbps (Megabit/s). These are sufficient for some web sites with low traffic. • Moderate means 0-100Mbps with short burst up to 200Mbps (100Mbps is the norm). This is what we currently reserve for the Small VM.• High means 200-800 Mbps. If you divide this into 3 spectrums for Medium, Large and XL. Then Medium is in the low end, Large hovers around the middle zone and of course XL takes the high-end spot.These rates should be used as guidance. Nothing can beat a test run to see what the application requires but using these bandwidth ranges, hopefully it reduces the guess work for the customers
28. Slide Objectives:Explain the SLAs for the Windows Azure PlatformSpeaking Points:
29. Speaking Points:At WPC two weeks ago we announced the new Windows Azure marketplace for applicationsApp Qualifications:Windows Azure SaaS applicationApp must pass Windows Azure Usage CheckApp is commercially available (not sample code etc.)Documentation & Support for the app is provided by ISVISV has Signed Windows Azure Marketplace Publisher Agreement Pricing & PayoutCreate offer variantsDefine offerings based on number of users, feature set, etc.Set the price of the applicationApplication TrialsOne month free, Automatic ConversionBilling handled by the Marketplace80/20 revenue splitPayment every quarter, 45 days after quarter endsMicrosoft will contact you for accounting detailsPublishers choose where to accept payments fromCurrently 8 markets: US, Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom Marketplace sends a purchase messageIncludes clientID, ClientSecret, OfferID- Client ID: is a name or code that will identify your application within the marketplace, be sure to remember or take note of this value since you will use it in a future step of this lab.- Name: is the friendly name of the application.- Client Secret: provided by default, is the secret that will be used, together with the Client ID, to integrate your application with the Marketplace, be sure to take note of this value as well.- Redirect URI: is the URI where the marketplace will post the Purchase message, you will get further information on this in a future step.