Search results matching tag 'Azure'

How Does the Cloud Change a Developer's Job?

BuckWoody — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:26:51 GMT

I've recently posted a blog on how cloud computing would change the Systems Architect’s role in an organization, another on how the cloud changes a Database Administrator's job, and the last post dealt with the Systems Administrator. In this post I'll cover the changes facing the Software Developer when using the cloud.

The software developer role was the earliest adopter of cloud computing. This makes perfect sense, because the software developer has always used computing "as a service" - they (most often) don't buy and configure servers, platforms and the like, they write code that runs on those platforms. And there's probably not a simpler definition of a software developer to be found, but as with all simple statements, you lose fidelity and detail. I'll offer a more complete list in a moment.

Because the software developer's process involves designing, testing and writing code locally and then migrating it to a production environment, all of the paradigms in cloud computing - from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS - come naturally.

The Software Developer's Role

The software developer has evolved since the earliest days of programming.The software developer not only "writes code" - there are far more tasks involved in modern systems development:

Assisting the Business Role(s) in developing software specifications
Planning software system components and modules
Designing system components
Working in teams writing classes, modules, interfaces and software endpoints
Designing data layouts, architectures, access and other data controls
Designing and implementing security, either programmatic, declarative, or referential
Mixing and matching various languages, scripting and other constructs within the system
Designing and implementing user and account security rights and restrictions
Designing various software code tests - unit, functional, fuzz, integration, regression, performance and others
Deploying systems
Managing and maintaining code updates and changes

Like most of the previous roles, those tasks also unpacks into a larger set of tasks, and no single developer has exactly that same list. And like the DBA, the role is often more, or less of that list based on where the developer works. Smaller companies may include the development platform in the duties so that a developer is also a systems administrator. In larger organizations I've seen developers that specialized on User Interfaces, Engine Components, Data Controls or other specific areas.

How the Cloud Changes Things

The software developer role obviously has the same concerns and impacts of "the cloud" as the Systems Architect. They need to educate themselves on the options within this new option (Knowledge), try a few test solutions out (Experience) and of course work with others on various parts of the implementation (Coordination).

The big changes for a developer include three major areas: Hybrid Software Design, Security, and Distributed Computing.

Hybrid Software Design

After the PC revolution, software developers designed systems that ran primarily on a single computer. From there the industry moved to "client/server", where most of the code still lived on the user's workstation, and various levels of state (such as the data layer) moved to a server over fast connected lines. After than followed the Internet phase, which had less to do with HTML coding than it did with state-less architectures. While no architecture is truly stateless, there are ways of allowing the client to be in a different state than the server of the application at any one time - this is the way the Web works.

Even so, the developer often simply moved one the primary layers (such as Model, View or Controller) to the server, using the User Interface merely as the View or Presentation layer. While technically stateless, this doesn't require a great deal of architecture change - there are various software modules that run on a server, and perhaps that connects to a remote data server. In the end, it's still a single paradigm.

We now have the ability to run IaaS (hardware abstraction), PaaS (hardware, operating system and runtime abstraction) and SaaS (everything abstracted, API calls only) in a single environment such as Windows Azure. A single application might have a Web-based Interface Server with federated processes (using a PaaS set of roles), a database service (using a SaaS provider such as Windows Azure SQL Database), a specialized process in Linux (using an IaaS role in Windows Azure) and a translator API (from the Windows Azure Marketplace). This example involves only one vendor - Microsoft. I've seen applications that use multiple vendors in this same way.

Thinking this way opens up a great deal of flexibility - and complexity. Complexity isn't evil; it's how complicated things get done many times. The modern developer needs to understand how to build hybrid software architectures.

Resources: Hybrid Architectures with step-by-step instructions and examples: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh871440.aspx and Windows Azure Hybrid Systems: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh871440.aspx?AnnouncementFeed

Security

Having a single security boundary, such as "everyone who works in my company", is a relatively simple problem to solve. Normally the System Administrators configure and control a security provider, such as Active Directory, and developers can access that security layer programmatically. That allows for good separation of duties and role-based control.

In modern applications, clients, managers, and users both internal and external need various levels of access to the same objects, code and data. A client should be able to enter an order, a store should be able to accept the order, the credit-card company should be able to check the order and authorize payment, and the managers should be able to report on the order or change it if needed. Using role-based security across multiple domains would be impossible to maintain.

Enter "claims-based" authentication. In this paradigm, the user logs in with whatever security they use - corporate or other Active Directory, Facebook, Google, whatever. The application (using Windows Identity Foundation or WIF) can accept a "claim" from that provider, and the developer can match whatever parts of that claim they wish to the objects, code and data. And example might be useful.

Buck logs in to his corporate Active Directory (AD), and attempts to use a program based in Windows Azure. Windows Azure rejects the login silently, and is configured to check with Buck's AD. Buck's AD says "yes, I know Buck, and he has been granted the following claims: "partner", "manager", "approver". The developer does not need to know about Buck's AD, Buck, his login, or anything else. She simply codes the proper data access to allow "approver" to approve a sale.

This allows a lot of control, at a very fine level, without having to get into the details of each security provider. .

Resources: Overview of using claims-based Azure Security: http://adnanboz.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/claims-based-access-and-windows-azure/

Distributed Computing

Is there a difference between stateless computing, or even the hybrid programming I mentioned earlier, and "Distributed Computing"? Yes - the primary difference is latency. Even stateless code can have too small a tolerance for latency.

Dealing with slow connectivity, or breaks in connections has many impacts. One method of dealing with this is to locate data and computing of that data as closely as possible, even if this means relaxing consistency or duplicating data. Another method is to go back to a great paradigm from the past that is possible underused today is a Service Oriented Architecture. The Windows Azure Service Bus is possibly one of the fastest and easiest way to adopt cloud computing without completely rearchitecting your application.

References: Great breakdown of the thought process around a distributed architecture: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj553517.aspx and using a Windows Azure Relay Service: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/service-bus-relay/

How Does the Cloud Change a Systems Administrator's Job?

BuckWoody — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:46:02 GMT

I recently posted a blog entry on how cloud computing would change the Systems Architect’s role in an organization, and another on how the cloud changes a database administrator's job. This time I'll cover a few of the changes the cloud brings for the Systems Administrator.

The systems administrator shares some similarity with the database administrator, in that it's rare to find a single job description that fits all people in that role. There are some basic similarities among various organizations, so I'll use those as a starting point.

The Systems Administrator Role

The systems administrator role is perhaps one of the earliest in technology, at least as far as the implementation of a system goes. In the earliest days of computing, electronic technical professionals built prototype computers, and newly minted "programmers" wrote logical instructions for these systems. In time, the systems administration role owned the installation, configuration, operation and tuning of these systems once they went into production and use on a larger scale. A few of the tasks associated with the role are:

Planning, installing and configuring systems
Planning, designing and creating storage, networking and other system components
Planning, designing and implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery for each system
Maintaining and monitoring systems
Implementing performance tuning systems based on monitoring
Re-balancing workloads across servers based on monitoring
Securing systems, networks and individual computers based on requirements and implementation
Planning, implementing and controlling user and account security rights and restrictions

Like the DBA, that’s just a short list, and each of those tasks also unpacks into a larger set of tasks. And like the DBA, the role is often more, or less of that list based on where the system administrator works. In smaller companies I've been a "systems administrator" that also ran the database and mail servers, web systems, front-line end-user support and made the coffee. In larger organization I was only able to spend the day on one or two parts of that list, since there were so many systems and they interacted with so many other systems.

Systems administrators often deal with multiple operating systems. In one company where I was a system administrator, I worked with no less than six operating systems from mainframes to PC servers, two of them highly specialized to the hardware.

How the Cloud Changes Things

The systems administrator has the same concerns and impacts of "the cloud" as the DBA and the Systems Architect. They need to educate themselves on the options within this new option (Knowledge), try a few test solutions out (Experience) and of course work with others on various parts of the implementation (Coordination).

I've mentioned the three big buckets of cloud computing, dealing with Virtual Machines (IaaS) writing code (PaaS) and using software that’s already written and being delivered via an Application Programming Interface (API). In my experience, the systems administrator role normally tackles the first "bucket" most often - IaaS, which has at its base the technology of virtualization.

Virtualization

One of the first areas the systems administrator is involved with "the cloud" is in the area of virtualization. This technology isn't new - in fact, I worked on Virtual Machines (VM's) way back in my mainframe days. It's the process of using software to emulate hardware - which has implications far beyond that simple sentence.

Virtualization is normally a standard on-premises process. When you take Virtual Machines and host them in another location, this is called Co-Location, or CoLo. Personally, I don't define either of these activities as "Cloud" computing - it's simply virtualization. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) normally involves several more components, at the very least being able to set up the systems (provision) and deploy them in a standard, automated way. It also involves (at a minimum) the ability to monitor, move and alter the systems using a prescribed methodology. There are other parts of IaaS to be sure, but this level above simply scripting installations or virtualizing a machine is where the system administrator becomes involved in this new "cloud computing" paradigm.

There are multiple VM technologies available, from the hypervisor that is built-in to the Windows operating system (Hyper-V) to third-party alternatives such as VMWare. The choice of cloud provider often dictates the selection of hypervisor. Windows Azure uses Hyper-V, and allows you to move systems from the cloud to the desktop and back again. Other providers use VMWare, or a proprietary format. Some allow you to push or pull images from the cloud service, others do not. The systems administrator must educate themselves on the business need and then select the cloud provider that best fits the requirements for a workload. It's also common to use several cloud providers within a single company.

Resources: Windows Azure Virtual Machines: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/tutorials/virtual-machine-from-gallery/ and System Center: http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2011/12/01/managing-and-monitoring-windows-azure-applications-with-system-center-2012.aspx

Cloud Computing Architecture - Private, Public and Hybrid

It's important to note that IaaS can be on-premises, at another facility, or both. The first is called "private cloud", the second "public cloud", and the third "hybrid cloud". Yes, these are marketing terms, but they are useful in describing where the decisions are for deploying a system. If data security is paramount, then private cloud may be the right choice for a given workload. If agility or cost is an issue, public cloud may be the right answer for another workload. And in many cases - perhaps most - using both architectures is the right way to split the workload.

The key is to understand the workload well. In the past the system administrator needed to know the component requirements, such as how much memory, CPU, network and storage a workload needed. In cloud computing, these are also concerns, but you need to add in the questions of cost, business use, location of users, security and other vectors. These concerns bring the systems administrator closer to the business and its goals.

Resources: Windows Azure Hybrid Systems: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh871440.aspx?AnnouncementFeed

DevOps

One new term introduced into cloud computing is "DevOps" - short for Developer Operations. Not everyone agrees that this is even a real "thing" - that it's a made-up term by cloud vendors. Regardless, there is a new set of tasks that the cloud brings that may sit within the purview of the system administrator.

Basically it involves the administration needed at the PaaS or SaaS level. The IaaS function of cloud computing holds most of the same characteristics as an on-premises system, defined the in the first list I mentioned above. But when the organization uses Platform as a Service, the operating system, much of the security, scale and other components of infrastructure are abstracted into the platform, and are often even controlled by the developer.

But once the application "goes live", there are a host of billing, controlling, scaling and other security questions that developers aren't equipped to handle. Who takes care of those? As companies are finding out, they need to appoint someone to cover these overlapped areas between developers and administrators.

References: How DevOps brings order: http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/feature/How-DevOps-brings-order-to-a-cloud-oriented-world and Managing Windows Azure: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/overview/

How Does the Cloud Change a Database Administrator’s Job?

BuckWoody — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:08:32 GMT

I recently posted a blog entry on how cloud computing would change the Systems Architect’s role in an organization. In a way, the Systems Architect has the easiest transition to a new way of using computing technologies. In fact, that’s actually part of the job description. I mentioned that a Systems Architect has three primary vectors to think about for cloud computing, as it applies to what they should do:

Knowledge - Which options are available to solve problems, and what are their strengths and weaknesses.
Experience - What has the System Architect seen and worked with in the past.
Coordination - A system design is based on multiple factors, and one person can't make all the choices. There will need to be others involved at every level of the solution, and the Systems Architect will need to know who those people are and how to work with them.

The Database Administrator Role

But a Database Administrator (DBA) is probably one of the harder roles to think about when it comes to cloud computing. First, let’s define what a Database Administrator usually thinks about as part of their job:

Planning, Installing and Configuring a Database Platform
Planning, designing and creating databases
Planning, designing and implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery for each database (HADR) based on requirements for its workload
Maintaining and monitoring the database platform
Implementing performance tuning on the databases based on monitoring
Re-balancing workloads across database servers based on monitoring
Securing databases platforms and individual databases based on requirements and implementation

That’s just a short list, and each of those unpacks into a larger set of tasks.

The issue is that I’ve never actually met a DBA that does all of those things, or just all of those things. Many times they do much more, sometimes the systems are so large they specialize on just a few of them.

And as you can see from the list, some of these areas are shared with other roles. For instance, in some shops, the DBA plans, purchases, sets up and configures the hardware for database servers. In others that’s done
by the Infrastructure Team. In some shops the DBA designs databases from software requirements, and in others the developers do that – or perhaps it’s done as a joint effort. The same holds true for database code – sometimes the
DBA does it, other times the developer, and still others it’s a shared task.

In fact, you could argue that there are few other roles in IT where the roles are so intermixed. Also, the DBA works with software the company develops, and software the company buys. They work with hardware, networking, security and software. There are certain aspects of design and tuning that are outside the purview of some of those things, and inside the others.

With all of these variables, simply telling a DBA that they should “use the cloud” is not the proper approach.

How the Cloud Changes Things

To be sure, the DBA has the same vectors as the Systems Architect. They need to educate themselves on the options within this new option (Knowledge), try a few test solutions out (Experience) and of course work with others on various parts of the implementation (Coordination). But it goes beyond that.

There are three big buckets of cloud computing, dealing with simply using a Virtual Machine (IaaS) to writing code without worrying about the virtualization or even the operating system (PaaS) and using software that’s already written and being delivered via an Application Programming Interface (API). Each of these has so many options and configurations that it’s often better to think about the problem you’re trying to solve rather than all of the technology within a given area - although some of that is certainly necessary anyway.

Database Platform Architecture

I’ll start with when the DBA should even consider cloud computing for a solution. Once again, it’s not an “all or nothing” paradigm, where you either run something on premises or in the cloud – it’s often a matter of selecting the right components to solve a problem. In my design sessions with DBA’s I break these down into three big areas where they might want to consider the cloud –and then we talk about how to implement each one:

Audiences
HADR
Data Services

Audiences

If the users of your database systems all sit in the same facility, you own the servers and networking, and the application servers are separate from the database server, it doesn’t usually make sense to take that database workload and place it on Windows Azure – or any other cloud provider. The latency alone prevents a satisfactory performance profile, and in some cases won’t work at all. It doesn’t matter if the cloud solution is cheaper or easier – if you’re moving a lot of data every second between an on-premises system and the cloud it won’t work well.

However – if your users are in multiple locations, especially globally, or you have a mix of company and external customer users, it might make sense to evaluate a shared data location. You still need to consider the implications of how much data the application server pushes back and forth, but you may be able to locate both the application server and SQL Server in an IaaS role. Assuming the data sent to the final client will work across public Internet channels, there may be a fit. There are security implications, but unless you have point-to-point connections for your current solution you’re faced with the same security questions on both options.

Your audience might also be developers looking for a way to quickly spin up a server and then turn it down when they are done, paying for the time and not the hardware or licenses. This is also a prime case for evaluating IaaS. And there are others that you'll find in your own organization as you work through the requirements you have.

Resources: Windows Azure Virtual Machines: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/tutorials/virtual-machine-from-gallery/ and Windows Azure SQL Server Virtual Machines: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/common-tasks/install-sql-server/

HADR

The next possible place to consider using cloud computing with SQL Server is as a part of your High Availability and Disaster Recovery plans. In fact, this is the most common use I see for cloud computing and the Database Administrator. The key is the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Based on each application’s requirements, you may find that using Windows Azure or even supplementing your current plan is
the right place to evaluate options. I’ve covered this use-case in more detail in another article.

References: SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery options with Windows Azure: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2013/01/08/microsoft-windows-azure-disaster-recovery-options-for-on-premises-sql-server.aspx

Data Services

Windows Azure, along with other cloud providers, offers another way to design, create and consume data. In this use-case, however, the tasks DBA’s normally perform for sizing, ordering and configuring a system don’t apply.

With Windows Azure SQL Databases (the artist formerly known as SQL Azure), you can simply create a database and begin using it. There are places where this fits and others where it doesn’t, and there are differences, limitations and enhancements, so it isn’t meant as replacement for what you could do with “Full-up” SQL Server on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine or an on-premises Instance. If a developer needs an Relational Database Management
(RDBMS) data store for a web-based application, then this might be a perfect fit.

But there is more to data services than Windows Azure SQL Databases. Windows Azure also offers MySQL as a service, RIAK and MongoDB (among others) and even Hadoop for larger distributed data sets. In addition you can use Windows Azure Reporting Services, and also tap into datasets and data functions in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

The key for the DBA with this option is that you will have to do a little investigation this time, and potentially without a specific workload in mind this time. I think that’s acceptable thing to ask – DBA’s constantly keep up with data processing trends, and most will consider different ways to solve a problem.

References:

Windows Azure SQL Databases: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/data-management/

Windows Azure Reporting Services: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/other/sql-reporting/

HDInsight Service (Hadoop on Azure): https://www.hadooponazure.com/

MongoDB Offerings on Windows Azure: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/common-tasks/mongodb-on-a-linux-vm/

Windows Azure Marketplace: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/store/overview/

How Does the Cloud Change a Systems Architect’s Job?

BuckWoody — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 15:43:59 GMT

I know - I said I didn't like the "cloud" term, but my better-phrased "Distributed Systems" moniker just never took off like I had hoped. So I'll stick with the "c" word for now, at least until the search engines catch up with my more accurate term.

I thought I might spend a little time on how the cloud affects the way we work - from Systems Architects to Database Administrators and Developers, and Systems Administrators - a group often referred to as "IT Pro's". But each role within these groups have different aspects when using cloud computing. In this post we'll take a look at the role of the Systems Architect, and in the posts that follow I'll talk more about the other roles in the IT Pro area.

The Systems Architect Role

What does a "Systems Architect" do? Like most IT roles, it depends on the company or organization where they work. In fact, the term isn't even specific to technology, but I'll use it in that context here. In general, a Systems Architect takes the requirements for a given system, and assembles the relevant technology areas that best fulfill those requirements. That's a single-sentence explanation, and needs further unpacking.

As an example, a Systems Architect at a medical firm is presented with a set of requirements for tracking a patient through the entire care cycle. The Systems Architect first looks at all of the requirements for the data that needs to be collected based on business, financial, regulations, and other requirements, and then how that data needs to flow from one system to another. They check the security requirements, performance, location and other aspects of the system. They then check to see which options are available for processing that data, and which parts they should "build or buy".

For instance, the requirements might be so specific that only custom code is the proper solution - but even there, choices still exist, such as which language(s) to use, what type of data persistence (a Relational Database Management System or or other data storage and processing) will be used, what talent within the company is available for the system and a myriad of other decision.

All of this boils down to three primary vectors:

Knowledge - Which options are available to solve problems, and what are their strengths and weaknesses.
Experience - What has the System Architect seen and worked with in the past.
Coordination - A system design is based on multiple factors, and one person can't make all the choices. There will need to be others involved at every level of the solution, and the Systems Architect will need to know who those people are and how to work with them.

How the Cloud Changes Things

From the outset, it doesn't seem that using a distributed system would change anything in the Systems Architect role. Isn't the cloud simply another option that the Systems Architect needs to learn and apply? Yes, that is true - but it goes a bit deeper. Let's return to those vectors a moment to see what a Systems Architect needs to take into account.

Knowledge

The first and probably most obvious impact is learning about cloud technologies. But the important part of that knowledge is to learn when and where to use each service. It's a common misconception that the cloud should be an "all or nothing" approach. That's just not true - every Windows Azure project I work on has some element of on-premises interaction, and in some cases only one small part of a solution is placed on the Windows Azure architecture. Since Windows Azure contains IaaS (VM's) PaaS (you write code, we run it) and even SaaS (Such as Hadoop or Media Services), a given architecture can use multiple components even within just one provider. And I've worked on several projects where the customer used not only Windows Azure and On-Premises environments, but also components from other providers. That's not only acceptable, but often the best way to solve a given problem.

As part of the learning experience, it's vital to keep in mind what you need to pick as key decision points. In your organization, cost could be ranked higher than performance, or perhaps security is the highest decision point.

To stay educated, there are various journals, websites and conferences that Systems Architects use to keep current. Almost all of those are talking about "cloud" - but there is no substitute for learning from the vendor about their solution. I'm speaking here of the technical information, not the marketing information. The marketing information is also useful, at least from a familiarity standpoint, but the technical information is what you need.

Resource: For Windows Azure, the Systems Architect can start here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2012/06/13/windows-azure-write-run-or-use-software.aspx

Experience

Cloud computing is relatively new - it's only been out a few years, and the main competitors are only now settling in to their respective areas. It might not be common for a Systems Architect to have a lot of hands-on experience with cloud projects.

Even so, there are ways to leverage the experience of others, such as direct contact or even attending conferences where customers present findings from their experiences.

You can also gain hands-on experience by setting up pilots and proof-of-concept projects yourself. Most all vendors - Microsoft included - have free time available on their systems. The key to an experiment like this is choosing some problem you are familiar with that exercises as many features in the platform as possible. There is no substitute for working with a platform when you want to design a solution.

Coordination

Probably one of the largest changes in the Systems Architect role that the cloud brings is in the area of coordination. When a Systems Architect deals with the business and other technical professionals, there is a 20+ year history of technology that we are all familiar with. When you mention "the cloud", those audiences may not have spent the time you have in understanding what that means - and often they think it means the "all or nothing" approach I mentioned earlier.

I've found that a series of "lunch and learns" for the technical staff is useful to explain to each role-group how the cloud is used in their area is useful. In the posts that follow this one, I'll give you some material for those. For managers and business professionals, you'll want to go a different route. I've found that an "Executive Briefing" e-mail, consisting of about a page, with headings that are applicable to your audience.

Resource: Writing Executive Summaries: http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=76

[New England] Mark Souza on Big Data and Cloud at NESQL

Adam Machanic — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 18:33:00 GMT

This Thursday, January 17, at New England SQL Server we'll be featuring Mark Souza, General Manager of the Data Platform Group at Microsoft. Most of you are probably familiar with that name; he's the guy who founded the CAT team, and he's been in a number of key roles in the SQL Server organization for the past several years.

Mark's topic for Thursday is Big Data and Cloud at Microsoft. The talk should be an interesting look into how the company is approaching these key areas.

If you're in New England and aren't already a member of New England SQL Server, you can sign up here. RSVP is required to attend our meetings, and we will send out the invitation e-mail on Tuesday morning.

Hope to see many of you there!

Reading the tea leaves from Windows Azure support

jamiet — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 22:13:00 GMT

A few idle thoughts…

Three months ago I had an issue regarding Windows Azure where I was unable to login to the management portal. At the time I contacted Azure support, the issue was soon resolved and I thought no more about it. Until today that is when I received an email from Azure support providing a detailed analysis of the root cause, the fix and moreover precise details about when and where things occurred.

The email itself is interesting and I have included the entirety of it below. A couple of things that leapt out at me:

The level of detail and the diligence in investigating and subsequently reporting the issue back to me I found really rather impressive. They even outline the number of users that were affected (127 in case you can’t be bothered reading). Compare this to the quite pathetic support that another division within Microsoft, Skype, provided to Greg Low recently: Skype support and dead parrot sketches

This line:

“Windows Azure performed a planned change from using the Microsoft account service (formerly Windows Live ID) to the Azure Active Directory (AAD) as its primary authentication mechanism on August 24th. This change was made to enable future innovation in the area of authentication – particularly for organizationally owned identities, identity federation, stronger authentication methods and compliance certification. ”

I also found to be particularly interesting. I have long thought that one of the reasons Microsoft has proved to be such a money-making machine in the enterprise is because they provide the infrastructure and then upsell from that – and nothing is more infrastructural than Active Directory. It has struck me of late that they are trying to make the same play in the cloud by tying all their services into Azure Active Directory and here we see a clear indication of that by making AAD the authentication mechanism for anyone using Windows Azure. I get the feeling that we’re going to hear much much more about AAD in the future; isn’t it about time we could log on to ~~SQL Azure~~ Windows Azure SQL Database without resorting to SQL authentication, for example? And why do Microsoft have two identity providers – Microsoft Account (aka Windows Live ID) and AAD – isn’t it about time those things were combined?

As I said, just some idle thoughts. Below is the transcript of the email if you are interested.

@Jamiet

This is regarding the support request <redacted> where in you were not able to login into the windows azure management portal with live id.

We are providing you with the summary, root cause analysis and information about permanent fix:

Incident Title: You were unable to access Windows Azure Portal after Microsoft Account to Azure Active Directory account Migration.

Service Impacted: Management Portal

Incident Start Date and Time: 8/24/2012 4:30:00 PM

Date and Time Service was Restored: 10/17/2012 12:00:00 AM

Summary:

Windows Azure performed a planned change from using the Microsoft account service (formerly Windows Live ID) to the Azure Active Directory (AAD) as its primary authentication mechanism on August 24th. This change was made to enable future innovation in the area of authentication – particularly for organizationally owned identities, identity federation, stronger authentication methods and compliance certification. While this migration was largely transparent to Windows Azure users, a small number of users whose sign-in names were part of a Windows Live Custom Domain were unable to login. This incompatibility was not discovered during the Quality Assurance testing phase prior to the migration.

Customer Impact:

Customers whose sign-in names were part of a Windows Live Custom Domain were unable to sign-in the Management Portal after ~4:00 p.m. PST on August 24th, 2012. We determined that the issue did impact at least 127 users in 98 of these Windows Live Custom Domains and had a maximum potential impact of 1,110 users in total.

Root Cause:

The root cause of the issue was an incompatibility in the AAD authentication service to handle logins from Microsoft accounts whose sign-in names were part of a Windows Live Custom Domains. This issue was not discovered during the Quality Assurance testing phase prior to the migration from Microsoft Account (MSA) to AAD.

Mitigations:

The issue was mitigated for the majority of affected users by 8:20 a.m. PST on August 25th, 2012 by running some internal scripts to correct many known Windows Live Custom Domains. The remaining affected domains fell into two categories:

Windows Live Custom Domains that were not corrected by 8/25/2012.

An additional 48 Windows Live Custom Domains were fixed in the weeks following the incident within 2 business days after the AAD team received an escalation from product support regarding those accounts.

Windows Live Custom domains that were also provisioned in Office365.

Some of the affected Windows Live Custom Domains had already been provisioned in AAD because their owners signed up for Office365 which is a service that also uses AAD. In these cases the Azure customers had to work around the issue by renaming their Microsoft Account or using a different Microsoft Account to administer their Azure subscription.

Permanent Fix: The Azure Active Directory team permanently fixed the issue for all customers on 10/17/2012 in an upgraded release of the AAD service.

High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

BuckWoody — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:15:28 GMT

Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that.

Planning for HA in IaaS

IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective.

As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching.

In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients.

You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this.

This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial.

You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution.

Planning for HA in PaaS

Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer.

Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR.

Planning for HA in SaaS

In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).

All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA.

References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

Cloud Computing - just get started already!

BuckWoody — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 14:43:27 GMT

OK - you've been hearing about "cloud" (I really dislike that term, but whatever) for over two years. You've equated it with just throwing some VM's in some vendor's datacenter - which is certainly part of it, but not the whole story. There's a whole world of - wait for it - *coding* out there that you should be working on. If you're a developer, this is just a set of servers with operating systems and the runtime layer (like.NET, Java, PHP, etc.) that you can deploy code to and have it run. It can expand in a horizontal way, allowing massive - and I really, honestly mean massive, not just marketing talk kind of scale. We see this every day.

If you're not a developer, well, now's the time to learn. Explore a little. Try it.

We'll help you. There's a free conference you can attend in November, and you can sign up for it now. It's all on-line, and the tools you need to code are free.

Put down Facebook and Twitter for a minute - go sign up. Learn. Do. :)

See you there. http://www.windowsazureconf.net/

Keeping your options open in a cloud solution

BuckWoody — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:20:00 GMT

In on-premises solutions we have the full range of options open for a given computing solution – but we don’t always take advantage of them, for multiple reasons. Data goes in a Relational Database Management System, files go on a share, and e-mail goes to the Exchange server.

Over time, vendors (including ourselves) add in functionality to one product that allow non-standard use of the platform. For example, SQL Server (and Oracle, and others) allow large binary storage in or through the system – something not originally intended for an RDBMS to handle. There are certainly times when this makes sense, of course, but often these platform hammers turn every problem into a nail. It can make us “lazy” in our design – we sometimes don’t take the time to learn another architecture because the one we’ve spent so much time with can handle what we want to do.

But there’s a distinct danger here. In nature, when a population shares too many of the same traits, it can cause a complete collapse if a situation exploits a weakness shared by that population. The same is true with not using the right
tool for the job in a computing environment. Your company or organization depends on your knowledge as a professional to select the best mix of supportable, flexible, cost-effective technologies to solve their problems, whether you’re in an architect role or not.

So take some time today to learn something new. The way I do this is to select a given problem, and try to solve it with a technology I’m not familiar with. For instance – create a Purchase Order system in Excel, then in Hadoop or MongoDB, or even in flat-files using PowerShell as an interface. No, I’m not suggesting any of these architectures are the proper way to solve the PO problem, but taking something concrete that you know well and applying that meta-knowledge to another platform will assist you in exercising the “little grey cells” and help you and your organization understand what is open to you.

And of course you can do all of this on-premises – but my recommendation is to check out a cloud platform (my suggestion would of course be Windows Azure :) ) and try it there. Most providers (including Microsoft) provide free time to do that.

The Windows Azure Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Windows Azure Training Kit (WATK)

BuckWoody — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:40:40 GMT

Windows Azure is a platform that allows you to write software, run software, or use software that we've already written. We provide lots of resources to help you do that - many can be found right here in this blog series. There are two primary resources you can use, and it's important to understand what they are and what they do.

The Windows Azure Software Development Kit (SDK)

Actually, this isn't one resource. We have SDK's for multiple development environments, such as Visual Studio and also Eclipse, along with SDK's for iOS, Android and other environments. Windows Azure is a "back end", so almost any technology or front end system can use it to solve a problem.

The SDK's are primarily for development. In the case of Visual Studio, you'll get a runtime environment for Windows Azure which allows you to develop, test and even run code all locally - you do not have to be connected to Windows Azure at all, until you're ready to deploy.

You'll also get a few samples and codeblocks, along with all of the libraries you need to code with Windows Azure in .NET, PHP, Ruby, Java and more.

The SDK is updated frequently, so check this location to find the latest for your environment and language - just click the bar that corresponds to what you want:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/downloads/

The Windows Azure Training Kit (WATK)

Whether you're writing code, using Windows Azure Virtual Machines (VM's) or working with Hadoop, you can use the WATK to get examples, code, PowerShell scripts, PowerPoint decks, training videos and much more. This should be your second download after the SDK. This is all of the training you need to get started, and even beyond. The WATK is updated frequently - and you can find the latest one here:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/other-resources/training-kit/

There are many other resources - again, check the http://windowsazure.com site, the community newsletter (which introduces the latest features), and my blog for more.