1. Demystifying the Cloud
                                        
Demystifying the Cloud
What is this “Cloud” you speak of? Where does the Windows Azure Platform fit in?
New Hampshire Code Camp 3 (Concord)
04-June-2011
Boston Azure User Group
@bostonazure
Bill Wilder
@codingoutloud
Copyright (c) 2011, Bill Wilder – Use allowed under Creative Commons license

2. Bill Wilder has been a software professional for over 20 years
Bill Wilder has been a software professional for over 20 years. In he founded the Boston Azure User Group, an in-person cloud community which gets together monthly to learn about the Windows Azure platform through prepared talks and hands-on coding. Bill is a Windows Azure MVP, an active speaker, blogger (blog.codingoutloud.com), and tweeter on technology matters and soft skills for technologists, a member of Boston West Toastmasters, and has a day job as a .NET-focused enterprise architect.
Bill Wilder

3. Agenda What is the Cloud? Azure’s Place in Cloud
Overview of Tables, Blobs, Queues, Drives
Overview of Compute Resources
Overview of Caching, Traffic Manager, ACS
Time permitting…
Scenarios for combining capabilities
Azure Table Storage vs. Relational SQL Azure
Roles & Queues

4. But first…
DEMO

5. The Horse-Drawn Carriage
From
Was shared under
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6. What Makes a Cloud a Cloud?
METERED USAGE
What are some ways a Cloud differs from a co-lo or ISP?
PAY-AS-YOU-GO
The cloud continues trend from differentiated hardware towards smarter software – the software-centric data center
The cloud continues trend from differentiated hardware towards smarter software – the software-centric data center
HOMOGENOUS, Over-PrOVISIONED COMMODITY HARDWARE “∞”
Highly automatED VMs
Generally speaking, a cloud is a pool of resources – like a smart phone, multi-tasking computer, or server farm – Think co-lo or ISP – these are the CHANGES, the next step
Self-Service

7. “Bring Your Own” ____ as a Service
BYO Users
BYO Applications
BYO Virtual Machines
SaaS
PaaS
IaaS

8. ___________________ as a Service
Infrastructure
Platform
Software
___________________ as a Service
Apps, $/user, LDAP, Expertise, SLA
System Software OpEx, Auto Scale Out, Geo LB, Failover, HA, OS Patching, Monitoring, Monitoring, Backup, Expertise, SLA
Hardware OpEx, Networking, DB/OS Licenses, Virtualization, Automation, Geo Distribution, CDN, Geo Replication, Elasticity, Managed Facility, Expertise, SLA
BYO Users 
Public Cloud Rental Models
SaaS
BYO Apps 
PaaS
DDTK = Dynamic Datacenter ToolKit … Dan will go into more detail on this in a few minutes
Iceberg or Pyramid?
BYO VMs 
IaaS

9. “Bring Your Own” ____ as a Service
BYO Users
BYO Applications
BYO Virtual Machines
SaaS
PaaS
IaaS

10. Public  Hybrid  Private
Public Cloud Platform
My Data Center
Public Cloud
Hybrid Cloud
Private Cloud

11. [Azure] Cloud Platform
The rise of focused, specialized services
Several “Scalable” Persistent Storage abstractions
Illusion of infinite scale out
Same performance with x clients as with 10x as with 100x as with 1000x as with …
Billing model: pay only for what you use
Friction-free access to add’l or less storage

12. Cloud-Native Applications
Effort focuses on business functionality
Development is highly productive
Time-to-market is short
Modification is straight-forward
Infrastructure is not a limiting factor
Cost structure is a good fit
Downtime is not necessary
Scale is efficient
Innovation / experimentation is enabled

13. Azure Storage Services
Blobs
Drives
Tables
Queues
SQL Azure

14. Persistent Storage Services – Options
Type of Data
Traditional
Azure Way
Relational
SQL Server
SQL Azure
Blob
File System, or SQL Server
Azure Blobs
File
File System
Azure Drives, or Azure Blobs
Reliable Queue
MSMQ (maybe)
Azure Queues
Non-Relational
Azure Tables

15. Azure Storage Services
Family of specialized, complementary storage services
Abstractions
High level services
Blobs + Queues + Tables + Drives
Many features in common
Plus each with its own differentiating features
SQL Azure

16. Azure Storage – Common Features
RESTful API (http + XML + “resources”)
Operations - REST/http verb support
Create = PUT Read = GET
Update = POST Delete = DELETE
Language agnostic
Client library provided for .NET by Microsoft
Many other client libraries available

17. Authentication Requirements
PUT, POST, DELETE are always Authenticated
GET is usually Authenticated
Exception possible for Blobs
Blob GET access can be public if Blob Container allows for Unauthenticated GET requests
Sign http header using Access Key from Portal
Don’t need to code this (use Microsoft-provided .NET client library)
Key lives in an Azure xml config file

18. SQL Azure
SQL Server in the cloud

19. SQL Azure is SQL Server Except…
only
SQL Azure
only
Full Text Search
Size not limited
Old school licensing model
Encrypt, compress
Many more…
“Mirroring”
Limitations
Tables require a clustered index
50 GB size limit
New Capabilities
HA; Rental
Coming: Backups & point-in-time recovery
Other new Awesomeness…
Common
“Just change the connection string…”
“Another feature in development is the ability to take control of your backups. Currently, backups are performed in the data centers to protect your data against disk or system problems. However, there is no way currently to control your own backups to provide protection against logical errors and use a RESTORE operation to return to an earlier point in time when a backup was made. The new feature involves the ability to make your own backups of your SQL Azure databases to your own on-premises storage, and the ability to restore those backups either to an on-premises database or to a SQL Azure database. Eventually Microsoft plans to provide the ability to perform SQL Azure backups across data centers and also make log backups so that point-in-time recovery can be implemented.”
Additional information on Differences:

20. SQL Azure Automagically handles…
Provisioning on demand
Install, configure, optimize (azurized™ versions of) “Windows Server 2008 R2” and “SQL Server 2008”
Health monitoring
Patching
High Availability (HA)
Load Balancing (LB)
Billing

21. Not Only SQL

22. NoSQL Databases Faster, Cheaper Scales Out “Simpler”
, CouchDB: JSON Document Stores
Amazon Dynamo, Azure Tables: Key Value Stores
Many others!
Faster, Cheaper
Scales Out
“Simpler”
(And often eventually consistent)

23. Relational Data vs. [NoSQL] Azure Tables
Approach
SQL Azure
Azure Tables
Normalization
Normalized
Denormalized
(Duplication)
(No duplication)
(Lots of duplication)
Structure
Schema
Flexible
Transactions
Distributed
Limited scope
Responsibility
DBA/Database
Developer/Code
Knobs
Many
Few
Scale
Up (or Sharding)
Out
Consistency
ACID semantics
Strongly consistent

24. Azure Table Storage – NoSQL in Azure
Best place for granular, semi-structured data
No rigid database schema
No complex joins or complex transaction
Fast and easy to instantiate
Strongly Consistent
No performance lag
Programming model is WCF Data Services
All data access and data updates
LINQ
Not SQL, not managed with SQL Server tooling

25. Azure Table Storage  DB Instance  Table  Row  Column
Storage Account
 DB Instance
Table [*]
 Table
Entity [*, 1 MB data]
PartitionKey + RowKey
 Row
Property [255x]
Name/Value/Type
Up to 64k
 Column

26. Azure Table Storage Partition Key Row Key
A “logical grouping” (a shard with less baggage)
PartitionKey value of up to 64 KB
Row Key
Identify specific row within a partition
RowKey value is String of up to 64 KB
Table access requires Partition Key + Row Key
Not to mention (cryptographic) Access Key (for the digital signing of the http header)

27. The File System for the Cloud Blob Container  Directory Blob  File
Azure Blob Storage
The File System for the Cloud
Blob Container  Directory
Blob  File
– Windows Azure CDN
– 20 CDN nodes available across the world

28. Azure Blob Storage The place to put ANY LARGE OBJECT Private or Public
Public blobs can be anonymously accessed
Images, videos, CSS files
Need not be binary
Public blobs can be cached in Azure CDN
20 locations around the world
Different locations than data centers
Time-limited signed-access available
“You have until tomorrow to download this video”
– Windows Azure CDN
– 20 CDN nodes available across the world

29. Azure Blob Storage Two types of Azure Blobs “Block Blob” “Page Blob”
Parallel upload scenarios
Resume download scenarios
Up to 200 GB
“Page Blob”
Random access scenarios
Azure Drives
Up to 1000 GB
– Windows Azure CDN
– 20 CDN nodes available across the world

30. Azure Drive Storage Disk Drive simulation in cloud
Façade over an Azure Blob
Specifically, Page Blob type
Legacy-focused, not “cloud native”
Limits same as Page Blob limits
1000 GB = 1 TB

31. Azure Queue Storage Service for RELIABLE message delivery
7 days = default TTL for item to stay in queue
30 seconds = default “invisibility window”
8 KB = max size of a queued item
500 = approx number of transactions a queue can handle per second
Beware of “spinning” – may get throttled, disabled
N = number of queues you can have (N >> 1)

32. Replication

33. All Azure Storage is Replicated
Resilient in case of failure
“All data replicated multiple times” – Sriram Krishnan, Programming Windows Azure, p130+
Supports scale-out
Replicate specific data if it gets too hot to keep up
Geographic distribution of replication
Currently up to you

35. Pay As You Go – Data Transfer
North America and Europe regions
$0.10 per GB in
$0.15 per GB out
Asia Pacific Region
$0.30 per GB in
$0.45 per GB out
No charge for transfer within a data center

36. Pay As You Go Storage Windows Azure Storage SQL Azure
$0.15 per GB stored per month
$0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions
“transactions”
Queues, Tables, Blobs, Drives
SQL Azure
$10/GB/month

37. Cost: SQL Azure=67x Table Storage
$10/GB/m - SQL Azure
$0.15/GB/m – Tables
10/0.15=66.66
No transaction costs
Same data xfer
100x?
Nominally, by SQL Azure max size
SQL Azure not completely full
Table Storage may denormalize

38. Pay As You Go – CDN Content Delivery Network (CDN)
$0.15 per GB for data transfers from European and North American locations
$0.20 per GB for data transfers from other locations
$0.01 per 10,000 transactions
More or less expensive than straight-to-blob costs
Do the math! But also consider UX

39. Azure Does Compute Compute Services Web Roles Worker Roles
VM Role (coming?)
Your Code Runs Here
Image:

40. Web Roles vs. Worker Roles
Runs in IIS 7 (always listening)
Built using ASP.NET, MVC
Good to handle interactive users
Addressable over Internet
Good for hosting Web API (WCF)
Runs Continuously
Smarx “The only difference between a web role and a worker role is that in the web role, IIS (actually Hosted Web Core) gets started and pointed at your app data directory. You can still put code in WebRole.cs that does exactly the same thing as you would do in your worker role, so the decision should really be "Do you want IIS?" If so, use a web role. If not, use a worker role.”
One is always running, one is always listening

41. “Out” is the New “Up” Scaling Out has hard limits at CPU, Memory
Architecturally more limiting

42. Azure Storage Services in Concert

43. AppFabric Services Not to be confused with the Fabric Controller
Not to be confused with AppFabric for Windows Server
Traffic Manager
Caching (“Velocity”)
Service Bus
Connect
Access Control Service (ACS)

44. Key Pattern: Roles + Queues
Web
Role
(IIS)
Worker
Role
Queues
AJAX – orthogonal concern
Worker Role not related to HTML 5 concept of Web Worker
Blobs
Tables

45. Canonical Example: Thumbnails
Web
Role
(IIS)
Worker
Role
Queues
AJAX – orthogonal concern
Worker Role not related to HTML 5 concept of Web Worker
Blobs
Tables

46. Roles + Queues: API queue.AddMessage( new CloudQueueMessage(
statusUpdateMessage));
Web
Role
(IIS)
Worker
Role
Queues
AJAX – orthogonal concern
Worker Role not related to HTML 5 concept of Web Worker
CloudQueueMessage statusUpdateMessage =
queue.GetMessage(
TimeSpan.FromSeconds(10));
… queue.DeleteMessage(statusUpdateMessage);

47. Adding to Queue - Conceptual
Queue Name: “thumbnailer-7”

48. Adding to Queue - Actual
314159
265358
979323
Azure Blob Storage
314159
265358
979323

49. Geography
From NASA: Apollo 17

50. Geography Matters Select Data Center near customers
Keep data resources near compute resources
Currently 6 data centers from which to choose
Additional 24 sites for CDN

51. Geography Matters Azure data centers
Data Center choices
Azure data centers
North Central US
South Central US
West Europe
North Europe
East Asia
Southeast Asia
Anywhere options for: US, Europe, Asia

52. Slides available from Bill’s blog
hmbl.me is URL shortener running on Windows Azure:

53. Questions? Comments? More information?

54. Visit http://bit.ly/BillOnAzure Use this promo code: BillOnAzure
Free 30-Day Windows Azure & SQL Azure Pass (in countries where Azure is offered)
Visit
Use this promo code: BillOnAzure
You will be provisioned an Azure account valid for 30 days that includes for FREE:
Three small compute instances
Two 1 GB SQL Azure Databases
3 GB of Windows Azure Storage
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55. Azure Pass Screen Shot

56. BostonAzure.org Boston Azure cloud user group
Focused on Microsoft’s cloud platform
Last Thursday, monthly, 6:00-8:30 PM at NERD
Food; wifi; free; great topics; growing community
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More info or to join our list:

57. I may be able to speak at your technology event
Contact Me
I may be able to speak at your technology event
Just Ask!
Bill Wilder
@codingoutloud