10 Great Questions to ask about the Windows Azure PlatformEric Nelson http://www.ericnelson.co.uk David Gristwood http://blogs.msdn.com/david_gristwood Application ArchitectsMicrosoft UK

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Where is Windows Azure?

1

North Central

USA

South Central

USA

Northern Europe

Western Europe

Eastern Asia

Southeast Asia

24 x Node CDN

Dublin Datacentre First Mega Datacentre built outside the US, on-line on July 2009

Cost $500 million EU Datacenter Best Practice

Award Winner Stand-alone Server Pods

Environmentally Sustainable

Free Air-Cooling via Air-Side Economization

1 % water use vs. traditional facilities

50ms50ms

100ms

Windows Azure Traffic Manager

*Performance – traffic sent to closest service in terms of network latency*Round Robin – traffic distributed equally across all services*Failover – traffic sent to primary service, if offline, to next service in a list

Traffic ManagerMonitorin

gPolicies*

foo.cloudapp.net foo-us.cloudapp.net

foo-europe.cloudapp.net

foo-asia.cloudapp.net

1.2.3.4DNS response

Will My Code Just Work?

Short answer - “It depends”Long Answer – “It really does depend”Azure specific code

Role Programming Model defines OnStart(), Run() and OnStop() methodsBlob, Table and Queue storage APIAzure services such as AppFabric Cache

Architectural designExploiting power and economics of the cloudSurviving failure of any one part of the systemLatency, security, scalability, resiliance

2

A Common Windows Azure Pattern

Web Role* Worker Role

SQL Azure / Windows Azure Storage**

QueueStorage**

* 2 x Instances for SLA ** Triple replicated for durability

Will it run Foo/Bar/?

Things it can do….NET, Native code (C/C++), PhP, Ruby, JavaCMS and Blogging Engines – Umbraco, DotnetNuke, BlogEngine, etcOpen Source Frameworks - Lucene, etc…

Things it can not do (today)…SharePointActive DirectoryThings needing “full SQL Server”

2b

How big a solution can it handle?

Big Limits

SoftHard

3Question: How do you sell 150,000 Tickets in 10 Seconds?

Answer: 750 Compute Instances and 550 databases

Running on Windows Azure

Facebook and Twitter

Near Real-Time Search

Microsoft Zune Media Storage and

Delivery

Telemetry for Kinect

Game Saves in Cloud

Facebook/Twitter data stored into blobsIngestion engine process blobs

Annotate with auth/spam/adult scores, content classification , expands links, etcUses Tables heavily for indexing

Queues to manage work flowResults stored back into blobsBing takes resulting blobs and folds into search index

BING REALTIME FACEBOOK/TWITTER SEARCH INGESTION ENGINE

Running on Windows Azure Storage

Windows Azure Blobs

User postingsStatus updates

…………

Bing Ingestion Engine (Azure Service)

Windows Azure Tables

Windows Azure Queues

peak 40,000 Requests/sec2~3 billion Requests per day

Took 1 dev 2 months to design, build, release to production

Index Facebook/Twitter data within 15 seconds of update

VM

VM

VM

VM

Soft Limits

5 Storage Accounts 6 Hosted Services (Projects)20 Cores across all your hosted services150 SQL Azure Database Web 15 SQL Azure Database Business 10TB Data Transfer per month, 100 million ACS tx per month etc

Hard LimitsCompute

1000s of instances (VMs)Maximum Instance Size – 8 Cores, 14GB Memory25 roles per Hosted Service

Windows Azure Storage 100TB1 Table 100TB, each Entity 1MB1 Queue 100TB, each Message 64KB1 Blob 1TB

SQL Azure database 50GBSQL Server LimitsFederation

How small a solution can it handle?

Very smallSingle role instance

running multiple web siteseach web site multi tenanted

A single instance of a role can be Extra Small

Test/Debug/Demo – not liveP.S. Your MSDN Premium includes 2 role instances

3b

Can you deploy on-premise ORin the cloud?

The goodIt is WindowsIt is .NET It is Visual StudioIt is SQL Server

4

The badIt has new constraintsIt has new bitsIt is not SQL Server

Typically < 5% is Windows Azure specific code

API differences e.g. AppFabric Caching is a subsetExtra bits e.g Windows Azure StorageDealing with “the cloud”

Timeouts, Latency, Retries

“Almost symmetrical”

What are the differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server?

Largely the same Macro

Missing Analysis Services/Reporting Services/SQL Agent/CLRBut also get Data Sync, ODATA (CTPs)

MicroTSQL differencesOperations – no backup/restoreRuntime – Throttling

5

How fast is it?

Comparative hardwareSQL Azure

Database 32 GB RAM, 8 CPU cores and 12 hard drives

Compute Nodes aka VM sizes

Test it yourselfhttp://azurescope.cloudapp.net/

Blob/Table/Queue

Design Targets

6Building Blocks vs Architecture

Will it AutoScale?

Storage – yes

Compute – not reallyExpensive resource, so more complex

Diagnostic MonitorCollect Event Logs, Trace Logs, Performance Counters

Programmatic Service Management REST API

Script with PowerShell CmdLets

OptionsRoll your own policyEnterprise Library Autoscaling BlockThird party tools

7

AzureWatch from Paraleap Technologies offers elasticity-as-a-service for Windows Azure

How Secure Is It?

We take security very seriously How secure are you?Examples

Global Foundation Service ISO 27001:2005 Accreditation - Security ManagementSAS 70 Type I and II Attestations - Audit standard for our internal controls systemwww.globalfoundationservices.com

Auto patching of the platform

8

How Much Will It Cost?

Azure drives cost based architecture model

Azure exposes costs more explicitlyControlling resources is key for highly scalable systems

Platform chargesData center egress Windows Azure VMs, storage, storage transactionsSQL Azure database sizeAppFabric

9

The Demand Curve

TIME

IT C

AP

AC

ITY

Actual Load

Allocated IT-capacities

Too Much Power

Not Enough Power

Load Forecast

The Demand Curve

Actual Load

Capacity on Demand

Lower Capex

No capital laying idle

No screaming customers

Resources go up...

And...down

TIME

IT C

AP

AC

ITY

Load Forecast

Compute Price

Extra small instance $0.05 per hour

Small instance (default) $0.12 per hour

Medium instance $0.24 per hour

Large instance $0.48 per hour

Extra Large instance $0.96 per hour

All pay as you go pricing

SQL Azure

$99.99 per database up to 10GB per month

$199.98 per database up to 20GB per month

$299.97 per database up to 30GB per month

$399.96 per database up to 40GB per month

$499.95 per database up to 50GB per month

Windows Azure storage

$0.15 per GB stored per month based on the daily average

$0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions

Data transfers

North America and Europe regions: $0.15 per GB out

Asia Pacific Region: $0.20 per GB out

But for BizSpark Members….

Free

Azure Pricing Calculator

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/

<Insert Your Question Here>

10

?

Summary

1. Where is Windows Azure? You decide (Dublin)2. Will my code just work? It depends (but yes)3. How big/small a solution can it handle?

Enormous/tiny4. Can you deploy on-premise OR cloud? Yes5. Differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server?

Many/Few – it depends6. How fast is it? Pretty fast7. Will it Autoscale? Storage - Yes, Compute - No8. How secure is it? Very9. How much will it cost? Less than you think 10. ?

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