Microsoft: The Web Story

"Microsoft the Web Story" Seminar in Singapore
Singapore; Microsoft explains about its "Window Azure Platform"in 19th October 2009 in Singapore.

The seminar was to help Microsoft developers to develop and run rich, engaging and robust applications on the web and the cloud.

There were two main speakers.

Jonathan Wong,

Web Platform Evangelist,

Microsoft Singapore



And

David Chappelle,

Principal,

Chappelle & Associates.



This article is based on http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ .You might want to surf to it for more information and download.







What is Azure Service Platform?

The Windows Azure platform is comprised of

1. Windows Azure: an operating system as a service

2. SQL Azure: a fully relational database in the cloud and

3. .NET Services (please do not confuse with .net framework): consumable web-based services that provide both secure connectivity and federated access control for applications.

4. The services are free to evaluate now and will be commercially available in November 2009.





What is Window Azure?

1. Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform.

2. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manages web applications on the internet through Microsoft® data centers.

3. Windows Azure is an open platform that supports Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments.

4. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® expertise.

5. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP.





What is SQL Azure?

1. Microsoft® SQL Azure™ Database is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies.

2. It provides a highly available, scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud.

3. SQL Azure Database helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases.

4. Developers do not have to install, setup, and patch or manage any software.

5. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required.

6. SQL Azure Database supports Transact-SQL (T-SQL). Customers can use existing knowledge in T-SQL development and a familiar relational data model for symmetry with existing on-premises databases.

7. SQL Azure Database can help reduce costs by integrating with existing tool-sets and providing symmetry with on-premises and cloud databases.



What Microsoft is doing right now?

Choosing the correct platform?

PHP support?

PHP on Window server 2008 with IIS 7?

web platform installer?

Premise Platform and Azure Service Platform

What are suitable for Azure?

1. Online ticket selling system. Where ticket selling machines are very busy at some time but ideal most of the time.

2. Applications with unpredictable life time. Like presidential campaigns where votes are unpredictable. Marketing campaigns where data or sales are unpredictable.

3. For starter applications and websites (most of them like 90% fails).Easy to success and easy to fail. Very economical.

4. Cooperation with confidential data and information. Where the boss do not want to inform the IT department. For example, sales and budget record.

5. A firm with no specific data centre, co-operation of two or more companies or business partners and so on.





Drawbacks of Azure

1. Limited access or control to the cloud and database structure.

2. Resources are very expensive.

3. Become highly dependent on Microsoft!The day you stop paying is the day they might delete your valuable data.

4. Less job opportunity for IT-administrators. Database controls and Resources control will be very few.

5. During the seminar a lot of developers also complain that debugging for the cloud is very annoying.



VI. Advantages of Azure.

1. Administration cost will be lower.

2. Growing and shrinking of resources will be quicker.

3. High reliability (almost do not crash with parallel processing).

4. Design to process in high scales.



Costs for using Azure Services

Please refer to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing



Window Azure

(Computing is performed by Virtual Machines inside the main frames located at Microsoft -Currently there are three places for super computers two in United States and one in Europe)

1.Compute = $0.12 / hour(the usage of VMs are defined by traffic and data size, the more traffic and the more heavy jobs; mean you have to use more VMs)

2.Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month

3.Storage Transactions = $0.01 / 10K

4.Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB



SQL Azure

Web Edition: Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month

* Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database

* Self-managed DB, auto high availability

* Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.

Business Edition: Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month

* Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database

* Self-managed DB, auto high availability

* Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fan-outs etc.

* Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps

* Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

.Net Services

• Messages = $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

• Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB







(P.S special thanks goes to Ko Alex Ko Aung for making this article possible, thanks bro!)