Architect Council | 2010: A Cloud Odyssey

The forecast for 2010 is looking very cloudy, with every technology company delivering some type of cloud offering, and analysts estimating that almost everyone will try some form of cloud computing. But from a practical stand point, how should organizations leverage cloud computing effectively? Is it to simply host existing and legacy assets somewhere else, or to create next-generation applications that enable differentiated capabilities? In addition, what role does SOA play in the age of cloud computing? And does this impact the way we manage and interact with data?

Facilitated by Microsoft, the premise of this half-day event is to provide an open forum where architects can meet to discuss technologies and insights with peers. This forum will provide first-hand experiences and best practices intended to help the community to collectively discover and generate knowledge. Please join us for this opportunity to learn, share and network with your peers and other thought leaders.

Event Summary

§ Provide a clear and profound understanding of Microsoft’s cloud strategy and roadmap, and latest updates on the Windows Azure Platform

§ Discuss the state of SOA, and its relevance in the age of cloud computing

§ Review case studies and models of cloud usage, and examine approaches to build next-generation capabilities leveraging the cloud

§ Explore trade-offs, best practices, and guidance on today’s myriad of data storage options

§ Explain the differences and patterns of using various data interaction frameworks

Who Should Attend

Technology and business stakeholders, including CTOs, CIOs, VPs, Directors, Program and Product Managers, Architects, Lead Engineers, and IT Managers

Agenda

12:45PM: Introduction and Announcements

01:00PM: Windows Azure Platform – Overview of the Microsoft Cloud

01:30PM: SOA and Cloud Computing

02:00PM: Architecting Solutions Leveraging the Cloud

02:30PM: Making Sense of the Expanding Range of Data Storage Solutions

03:15PM: Best Practices with Data Interaction Frameworks

04:00PM: Groupthink

When & Where

Date: December 01, 2009

Location: Irvine, CA

Event ID: 1032350826

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350826&Culture=en-US

 

Date: December 2, 2009:

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Event ID: 1032350827

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350827&Culture=en-US

Date: December 3, 2009

Location: Phoenix, AZ

Event ID: 1032350828

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350828&Culture=en-US

Date: December 8, 2009

Location: Mountain View, CA

Event ID: 1032350833

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350833&Culture=en-US

Date: December 9, 2009

Location: San Francisco, CA

Event ID: 1032350830

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350830&Culture=en-US

Date: December 10, 2009

Location: Seattle, WA

Event ID: 1032350831

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350831&Culture=en-US

Date: December 15, 2009

Location: Denver, CO

Event ID: 1032350832

Event URL: http://wweventstest.one.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350832&Culture=en-US

Hosts

David Chou

Architect, Microsoft

http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou

David Chou is a technical architect at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, distributed systems, security, etc., and supporting decision makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture. Drawing on experiences from his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems and Accenture, David enjoys helping customers create value from using objective and pragmatic approaches to define IT strategies, roadmaps, and solution architectures.

Joe Shirey

Architect, Microsoft

http://www.joeshirey.com

Joe Shirey is a Senior Architect Evangelist for Microsoft based in the Denver area. In this role, Joe works closely with customers and the community to help them understand where Microsoft technologies fit into the architecture of their solutions. Prior to joining Microsoft, Joe was a Vice President at Interlink group where he was responsible for service and delivery for Interlink’s Denver market. In the past, Joe was a Microsoft Regional Director, a member of the Microsoft Architect Advisory Board, and sat on the .NET Partner Advisory Council. Joe has more than eighteen years of hands-on technical and functional experience in project management, systems analysis, design, development, and implementation. Joe attained his Microsoft Certified Architect award in 2005.

Windows Azure World in Silicon Valley

Earlier this week our team (Developer & Platform Evangeliism team) hosted at our Silicon Valley (Mountain View campus) the last stop of David Chappell’s world-wide tour to talk about the impact of cloud computing, and latest developments on the Windows Azure Platform.

David Chappell’s talked about Windows Azure platform and what it means for enterprises. The topics he covered include:

• An overview of the Windows Azure platform: Technology and business model
• The cloud platform context: Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, and more
• Using the Windows Azure platform: Application scenarios

We also had the CEO of CSRware.com and she showcased their “On-Demand Performance Management solution” for Sustainability and Green IT initiatives. Their current cloud initiative utilized Windows Azure, SQL Azure and hybrid (Software+Services) app dev pattern, for capturing tens of thousands of data points from their customer data center and aggregating them into a single data point to an on-premise SaaS offering.

Also my colleague David Chou also presented some additional views on how to architect applications using the Windows Azure Platform and some customer case studies.

If you missed attending the session no worries you can get all of the presentation that is posted at Strategy & Architecture Council site:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sac/archive/2009/10/31/windows-azure-world-tour-with-david-chappell.aspx

Thanks to everyone who attended the event, and if you have any further question please feel free to send me a note.

Azure Commercial Availability Confirmed, Business Model Announced and More..

Yesterday at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform including service level agreements and support programs.

Here are few highlights from the announcement.

· Commercial availability at Professional Developers Conference 2009 in November’09.

· SQL Azure will be available later this summer as a cloud-based relational database platform built on SQL Server.

· Free until the release in November. Now is the time to go check out the free CTP.

You can sign-up for the free CTP account for Windows Azure & .NET Services at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx.

The Windows Azure platform, which includes a cloud services operating system – Windows Azure, a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), as well as connectivity and interoperability services with .NET Services.

The pricing model will be a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.

Here is a summary of the pricing:

Additionally the service-level agreement will cover service uptime, connectivity, and data availability and will be backed by a enterprise-class guarantee as outlined in the Windows Azure blog:

“For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action. For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.”

Roadmap for Major Technology announced at TechEd

Thanks to Network World for their article, Microsoft’s software pipeline set to burst. The product roadmaps for the coming year were announced at TechEd this past week.

• Windows 7 offers key features for developers: Windows Touch, Taskbar, Scenic Ribbon, Scenic Animation, Sensor and Location Platform, Windows Installer 5.0, Internet Explorer 8, PowerShell 2.0. The release candidate is currently available publicly.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 offers new group policy features that will help with power management and cost cutting, Hyper-V improvements, File Classification Infrastructure, Server Core, APIs and tools to help your tune your parallel applications using NUMA, PowerShell 2.0, Windows Web Services, background services and tasks, Background Intelligence Transfer. The release candidate is currently available publicly..
• Exchange 2010 designed and developed to work on-premises and as an online service, and introduces a new integrated e-mail archive and features to reduce costs and improve the user experience. The public beta is currently available publicly.
• Microsoft Code-named ‘Geneva’ is an identity federation platform that simplifies user access and secure collaboration across organizational boundaries. The beta 2 version is currently available publicly.
• Microsoft Code-named ‘Dublin’ will be an Application extend Internet Information Services (IIS) to provide a standard host for applications that use workflow or communications. For more information, see Overview of WF 4.0, WCF 4.0, and Windows Server “Dublin”.
• Microsoft Code-named ‘Stirling’ is an integrated security suite that coordinates protection and visibility across desktops, servers, applications and the network edge a client console for Forefront security software. The beta 2 version is publicly available.
• Microsoft Project Code Named “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory application cache platform for developing scalable, high-performance applications. Community technology preview 3 (CTP3) is currently available publicly.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 is being designed inside and out to give developers and development teams every advantage in getting groundbreaking applications to market—faster and easier than ever. The beta 1 release will be available soon.
• Windows Mobile 6.5 with Windows Mobile Marketplace, Windows Phone
• Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers. Commercial availability for Windows Azure will likely be at the end of calendar year 2009. Currently available as community preview publicly.
• Microsoft Hyper-V™ Server 2008 R2 is addition of new features such as live migration and expanded processor and memory support for host systems, it allows organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server. Publicly available as a release candidate.Will continue to be free.

• Office 2010 — including Office Web applications, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 — will enter a technical preview in July 2009 and will release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010. Nominate yourself for the preview at Office The Movie.

• SQL Server 2008 R2 will empower end users to make better decisions through self services analysis (‘Gemini’) and self-service business intelligence code-named “Kilimanjaro.” It will help IT drive greater efficiency and reduce costs through new capabilities such as multi-server management and Master Data Services. The community preview is due by the end of 2009.
• Microsoft Code-Name ‘Madison’ is an appliance version of the database for massively parallel processing. It will be able to handle the most demanding data warehousing workloads spanning hundreds of terabytes of data and thousands of concurrent users at the low total cost of ownership (TCO) businesses have come to expect from SQL Server.

• Silverlight 3. introducing more than 50 new features, including support for running Silverlight applications out of the browser, dramatic video performance and quality improvements, and features that radically improve developer productivity. Currently in publicly available beta. Also includes Microsoft Expression Blend 3 Preview, Silverlight Toolkit, and .NET RIA Services.

For more details on the roadmaps, see

• Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 Anticipated for Holiday Release
• Simplify User Access, Secure Collaboration Across Organizational Boundaries with ‘Geneva’ Beta 2
• How to Get Started Leveraging Windows Server 2008 R2 Features
• ‘Velocity’ Preview Updates In-Memory Caching Platform
• Top 10 Scenarios; ISVs Add Customer Value with Windows 7 Features
• First Look of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0 Available On Demand During May, June
• Walkthrough to Get Your Applications Ready for Windows 7
• Opportunities for ISVs to Step-up, Subscribe, Upgrade, Switch to Visual Studio, MSDN
• Exchange 2010 Beta Highlights S+S
• Alpha Version of Windows Logo Testing Kit Ready April 14

Students can get current Microsoft technologies at Dreamspark.

Startup businesses can get current Microsoft technologies at BizSpark.

Eduify Innovates to the Edge – BizSpark, Azure..

Eduify, is a provider of web-bases solution for students and its mission is to give every student the tools and services they so critically need to become better writers and more importantly deliver to President Obama’s impetus to re-invigorate education in America.

So before we talk about Eduify capabilities here is a real life scenario of a high school kid going through a very scattered process writing a paper.

T1 – Starting to thinking about the paper while at home

T2 – Next starting then start writing on a word processor at school.

T3 – Next at a friends house searching for sources and copy the quotes down by hand

T4 – Next writing the bibliography at home

T5 – Next proofreading the paper while on the bus

T6 – Finally turn it in the paper

With Eduify, a student can start writing in their web browser, find guidance from the available paper templates available, do research within the editor, have those sources automatically formatted, run the paper through a proofreader and plagiarism checker, and ask for help from family or friends when necessary.

Eduify’s web service demonstrates how a startup can take advantage of Microsoft technologies to create an innovative solution and in this case work to improve education. Through the BizSpark program, Microsoft is helping startups like Eduify by providing them with a wide range of end-to-end software and Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform, a set of cloud platform technologies, to help them build a scalable and sustainable business.

Currently Eduify is in beta and here are some articles covering Eduify:

• TechFlash: New online student writing app, Eduify, based on Windows Azure
• PRWeb: Eduify Answers Obama’s Call to Help Students With New Service
• Eduify Blog: Launch :: We’re Answering President Obama’s Call to Help Students 
• http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/docs/eduify.doc (Press Release)
• http://visitmix.com/News/Eduify-MIX09 (MIX09 interview with Dan Meritt VP of Marketing)
• http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/Blogs/anand%5fiyer/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=57 (AI’s blog he is a Sr.Developer Evangelist on my team)
• www.microsoft.com/casestudies (coming soon)

The Azure Developer Challenge

new CloudApp(), a US based developer challenge, was launched today.  Its focus is to promote applications running on the Azure Services Platform.  This contest will have three categories of winners for applications running on the Azure Services Platform:

• best .NET application,
• top PHP application, and,
• community winner

Contest Dates:

• Monday, May 4: Contest Open
• Thursday, June 18: Submission deadline
• Friday, June 19: Community voting starts
• Thursday, June 25: .NET & PHP category winners announced at Structure 09
• Monday, June 29: Community voting ends
• Tuesday, June 30: Community winner announced

Here is what the winner gets ?

• Be featured on www.azure.com as well as at major Microsoft events
• Be featured in a video interview on Channel 9 with the application author
• Winners will be announced at Structure 09
• Receive cash ($):
  • .NET Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
  • PHP Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
  • Community winner: $2,500 Visa gift card

How do I get Started ?:

1. Join BizSpark if you’re a startup or an entrepreneur, to get access to tools for development and test
2. Register to join the contest
3. Sign up for the Azure Services
4. Download the SDKs and Tools

For more information see newCloudApp().com.

Azure Service Plaform Videos

As some of you had left comment in my blog post on “Azure” wanting additional  tutorial and here’s the first of a comprehensive set of HDI’s (“How Do I …?”) on the entire Azure Services Platform.

Here are some of the HDI’s you will find there:

• How Do I: Get Started Developing on Windows Azure?
• How Do I: deploy a Windows Azure Application?
• How Do I: Store Blobs in Windows Azure Storage?
• How Do I: Leverage Queues in Windows Azure?
• How Do I: Get Started with .NET Services?
• How Do I: Get Started with the Live Framework?

Additional here is a a great series (ongoing) on cloud computing and related concepts, and the Microsoft platform and strategies by David Chou, an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft (friend and colleague)::

• Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Platform (2009.01.13)
• Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBA) as Cloud-Based Next-Generation B2B Business Processes (2008.12.01)
• Cloud Computing and User Authentication (2008.08.19)
• Cloud Computing and Microsoft (2008.07.31)
• Cloud Computing and Software Clients (2008.07.31)
• Describing Cloud Computing (2008.07.25)