Microsoft Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Editor's Notes

• #2: Expanding Windows Azure capabilities to provide infrastructure as a service Provides us with a full continuum of offerings Brings us relative parity with Amazon, who focuses on IaaS IaaS Details Durable virtual machines with Windows Server or Linux Commercial and community Linux distributions Select from a library of images or bring your own E.g. Select an image with SQL Server Licensing approach Support SharePoint, SQL Server & Active Directory within IaaS images Enable deployments containing both PaaS and IaaS services Create virtual private networks (VPNs) between on-premise servers and Windows Azure Single Instance SLA (99.9%) Planned Upgrade Notification Support Integration between on-premises and public cloud Easily create a hybrid virtual private network (VPN) between on-premise servers and Windows Azure Public / Private cloud symmetry Write apps to common APIs and services that are available within both Windows Azure and on-premise Windows Server
• #3: 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 Software With packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications. IaaS With 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 OS The 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. PaaS With Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor. The Windows Azure 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. SaaS Finally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
• #4: Microsoft provides a continuous solution from private cloud to the public cloud. No matter where you are on your technology roadmap we have a solution to fit your needs. We are a trusted advisor and platform in the traditional enterprise and ISV space and with the new IaaS offering we are making it easier to bring this same level of trust and ease of use to the public cloud.
• #5: Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks support adds the capability to run key server applications and workloads such as Active Directory, SharePoint, SQL Server and most applications that run on a Virtual Machine today. Adding storage capacity is simple. Either through the portal or PowerShell add up to 16 TBs of storage on an X-Large VM. Virtual machines allows you to the option of splitting virtual machine loads across multiple racks in the data center using availability sets. Virtual Networks provide the capability of connecting two cloud services for direct communication. This enables scenarios such as web and worker roles communicating directory with SQL Server. Application migration is much simpler. In most cases the app will just run without changes on a virtual machine.
• #8: The OS and Data Disks are stored in Windows Azure storage. So in addition to the data being persistent you also get the benefits of storage which means your VHD is replicated 3X’s locally and also 3X’s in a separate data center in the same region (geo-replication)
• #9: This slide simply highlights that if the physical hardware backing your VM goes down a new server will start and pick up the same VHD.
• #11: Microsoft think about the stack to provide connectivity between on-premise and cloud. Specifically this deck focuses on the last two layers Servicebus vs connect – SB requires app code change, Connect/Virtual Networks do not. Virtual Networks are the net new here. They provide site to site connectivity where Connect provided server to server connectivity. Virtual Networks are the more flexible and powerful option.
• #12: Windows Azure Virtual Networks is our solution to providing hybrid solutions and solutions that require advanced connectivity in the cloud. Hybrid on-premises to cloud is enabled by using the VPN solution that allows site<->site connectivity allowing machines on premise and machines in the cloud to appear on the same network. Advanced connectivity solutions are enabled because Windows Azure applications that are deployed in to a virtual network will have persistent IP addresses. This is a requirement for solutions like Active Directory. Other solutions enabled by virtual networks in the cloud are mixing VMs and web/worker role solutions in the same Windows Azure network. This allows for scenarios like web/worker roles to communicate back to VMs running applications like SQL server.
• #15: Building new PaaS applications is a no-brainer when looking at some of the benefits: Simplified Deployment and Configuration Health Model Easy High Availability Instance Scalability OS Patching Automatic Firewall Configuration Simple Certificate Deployment However, building new applications sometimes comes with a dependency on other systems or legacy code. This has sometimes blocked the development of PaaS applications. The IaaS offering will unblock these types of applications and allow for the two development models to co-exist and directly communicate.
• #23: Slide should