Missed some yesterday afternoon, but back with a vengeance! I don't know if Windows Azure is the way we would go, but I do want to find out a bit more about cloud computing in general. A lot of this is stuff I think many already know very well and I just want to keep up.
Morning Session 1: Windows Azure - A New Era of Cloud Computing
Aaron Skonnard
Pluralsight
Plans to focus on the business and financial benefits. Says developers won't like it.
Amazon (S3) still the leaders, MS catching up quickly.
Low total cost, "provision" servers quickly (in minutes!)
No necessity to over-provision to handle spikes
At Google, 1 admin may manage >1000 servers.
Azure is generally have to develop differently since platform is abstracted from the infrastructure (so can't do things like access file system in the same way) [Note: Really curious about the impacts here for us...]
Economies of Scale:
Medium data center: $95/Mbps/month, Storage $2.20/GB/month
Large data center: $13/Mbps/month, Storage $0.40/GB/month
Choosing Amazon, Google, MS....argues MS is well positioned since they are in the business of selling OS while Google sells ads and Amazon sells books [Note: not a fair comment at all...]
Amazon/Google - how do you connect back to your internal servers? According to him, Azure is the only one that provides a solid solution for this.
Amazon provides a solution for transferring enormous amounts of data - ship it to em on a USB stick. Cheaper and potentially faster.
Azure today supports web role (web sites), worker role (windows service) and communicate between the two using Azure Storage (tables, blobs, queues)
Cloud computing in general -- definitely interesting and useful in our environment. Azure -- not so sure. It seems like there are a lot of new things we would have to do to switch our applications to Azure apps (using their API for accessing config or something), whereas certainly for Amazon, we can get going much sooner.
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Hey Tim, To me, Azure stands out in a few ways... the single biggest way: manage App Instances not Machine Instances. SQL Azure and .NET Services are interesting, too - and absolutely unique in the industry.
ReplyDeleteHere's a 1-slide view on what I like about Azure: http://bit.ly/31G7oE .
Full Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, but my opinions are my own -- I'm genuinely excited about Azure!]
I was at this VSLive session as well instructed by Aaron Skonnard, and I thought he did a great job. The one thing I will add it that if you are strictly a .NET Shop, then Windows Azure will probably be the best bet going forward for cloud computing, especially if you are using SQL Server. The Azure SQL Services and .NET Services will make that model be closest to what .NET developers are used to as opposed to what is offered from Google and Amazon. Good summary post, thank you.
ReplyDelete@John M.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the 1-slide view. I agree in theory that managing app instances over machine instances is a good thing. But a lot of what I see out of Azure simply ensures that, instead of being tied to a particular platform like Windows, you're tied to Azure. I think it would be a lot easier to architect a traditional .NET application (even running in something like Amazon's cloud solution) that could still easily be moved to, say, a physical machine at some point in the future since you access things the same way. I have not seen enough out of Azure to say the same, though.
Cloud computing I think is going to grow going forward, though, and Microsoft has a good start here it seems.