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 ...

One of the use-cases for a cloud solution is to serve as a Disaster Recovery option for your on-premises servers. I’ll explain one particular use-case in this entry, specifically using Windows Azure “IaaS” or Virtual Machines as a Recovery Solution for SQL Server (more detail here: ...

There are multiple ways to learn, and one of the most effective is with examples. You have multiple options with Windows Azure, including the Software Development Kit, the Windows Azure Training Kit and now another one…. the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework,, a free, centralized code sample library driven by developers' real-world pains ...

Microsoft has many tools for “Big Data”. In fact, you need many tools – there’s no product called “Big Data Solution” in a shrink-wrapped box – if you find one, you probably shouldn’t buy it. It’s tempting to want a single tool that handles everything in a problem domain, but with large, ...

To create a Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service Virtual Machine you have several options. You can simply select an image from a “Gallery” which includes Windows or Linux operating systems, or even a Windows Server with pre-installed software like SQL Server. One of the advantages to Windows Azure Virtual Machines is that it is ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I deal with computing architectures by first laying out requirements, and then laying in any constraints for it's success. Only then do I bring in computing elements to apply to the system. As an example, a requirement might be ''world-side availability'' and a constraint might be ''with less than 80ms response time and full HA'' or something ...

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 ...