20120614 innovation days - Windows Azure

Editor's Notes

• #5: Slide Objectives:Understand the challenges of irregular load in applicationsUnderstand the challenges of both too much capacity and not enough capacity and the sort of groups they impact within a customerUnderstand that traditionally IT capacity is purchased in a stepwise fashion involving capital expenditure at each pointSpeaking Points:To understand the value and opportunity for cloud computing, I believe it’s important to think about how IT capacity is typically used by applications today in most environments.Today most organizations significantly over estimate or underestimate the amount of resources they need to run their applications.This leads to a higher cost for the infrastructure and the delivery of the overall applications. Build Steps:Forecast load is to grow steadilyPlanned capacity grows in a stepwise fashion. Need to plan in advance due to hardware lead timesActual load is highly variable over timePeriods where we have excess capacity. Capital laying idle, opex wasted powering and cooling serversPeriods where we have insufficient capacity and our customers get a bad experience
• #9: Slide Objectives:Explain the three established terms in the industry for cloud servicesSpeaking Points:With this in mind, it’s important to understand how to talk about our Cloud Services offerings.There is a lot of confusion in the industry when it comes to the cloud. It’s important that you understand both what is happening in the industry and how we think about the cloud. This is the most commonly used taxonomy for differentiating between types of cloud services.The industry has defined three categories of services:IaaS – a set of infrastructure level capabilities such as an operating system, network connectivity, etc. that are delivered as pay for use services and can be used to host applications. PaaS – higher level sets of functionality that are delivered as consumable services for developers who are building applications. PaaS is about abstracting developers from the underlying infrastructure to enable applications to quickly be composed. SaaS – applications that are delivered using a service delivery model where organizations can simply consume and use the application. Typically an organization would pay for the use of the application or the application could be monetized through ad revenue. It is important to note that these 3 types of services may exist independently of one another or combined with one another. SaaS offerings needn’t be developed upon PaaS offerings although solutions built on PaaS offerings are often delivered as SaaS. PaaS offerings also needn’t expose IaaS and there’s more to PaaS than just running platforms on IaaS.
• #10: Slide Objectives:Explain the differences and relationship between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS in more detail.Speaking Points:Here’s another way to look at the cloud services taxonomy and how this taxonomy maps to the components in an IT infrastructure. Packaged SoftwareWith packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications. IaaSWith Infrastructure as a Service, the lower levels of the stack are managed by a vendor. Some of these components can be provided by traditional hosters – in fact most of them have moved to having a virtualized offering. Very few actually provide an OSThe customer is still responsible for managing the OS through the Applications. For the developer, an obvious benefit with IaaS is that it frees the developer from many concerns when provisioning physical or virtual machines. This was one of the earliest and primary use cases for Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Developers were able to readily provision virtual machines (AMIs) on EC2, develop and test solutions and, often, run the results ‘in production’. The only requirement was a credit card to pay for the services.PaaSWith Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor. The Windows Azure Platform best fits in this category today. In fact because we don’t provide access to the underlying virtualization or operating system today, we’re often referred to as not providing IaaS.PaaS offerings further reduce the developer burden by additionally supporting the platform runtime and related application services. With PaaS, the developer can, almost immediately, begin creating the business logic for an application. Potentially, the increases in productivity are considerable and, because the hardware and operational aspects of the cloud platform are also managed by the cloud platform provider, applications can quickly be taken from an idea to reality very quickly.SaaSFinally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
• #12: Speaking Points:At PDC10 in just over a month, we will introduce several new services including: Caching and Reporting. We will also have a new CTP for the Data Sync Service and Project Dallas will be finally available. Let’s drill into these services in a bit more detail.--Speaking Points:I suspect most if not all of you in this room are familiar with the Windows Azure Platform today.Today the platform consists of a set of foundational services SQL Azure relational databaseAppFabric provides services that can be used by any apps – hosted in Windows Azure, on-premises, or hosted in another environment. Questions:How many of you are building applications for Windows Azure?How many are using SQL Azure?How many are using the Access Control service today? The Service Bus?Notes:Windows Azure StoryWe are building an open platform to run your applications in the cloud. Your apps are .NET, Java, PHP, etc. We love everyone.We are going to help you migrate your existing apps to the cloud. The cloud platform is the future. Enables scale, self-service, lowers friction, etc. We provide the best cloud platform for building new apps. (aka n-tier, web services, etc.)