Private Cloud R2: Scaling From Server To Cloud Services

Editor's Notes

• #12: In some instances, like the PaaS web sites service, we’ve actually provided essentially the same code you would find in the Windows Azure experience. In other cases, such as the IaaS service, the experience mimics that of Windows Azure Here’s a closer look at each of the components of the Windows Azure Pack.Administrator Portal & Tenent PortalThe first components we’ll talk about here are the portal experiences. The first is the administrative portal which allows you to design the plans that tenants will subscribe to. These plans include the various services with fine grain metering control to allow various experiences. There is also the Tenant Portal which will allow your customers to interface with the services they’ve subscribed to. This experience, done in the modern style of the Windows Azure portal, allows for a very high level of self-service interface. It is also highly customizable to meet you needs. However, if you opt to not leverage the portal directly, you can simply write to the Service Management API to get all the functionality through your existing portal.Service Management APIUnderlying the portals is an Odata Rest API known as the Service Management API. This provides access to the underlying services and enables automation and replacement of the supplied management portal, opening up the possibility of integrating with existing portals or technology from partners such as Parallels. The API also enables integration of additional services modules and other solutions such as customer billing. The service management API is an extensible REST-based API that will enable enterprises and service providers to integrate their existing systems and tools (e.g. customer portals at service provider) with these new services. Key to enabling enterprise adoption is portal/ API integration with Active Directory.. Web Sites ServiceThe Web sites service provides a high-density multi-tenant web hosting service, one of the most fundamental services any service provider needs to provide and at the lowest cost possible. A broad range of programming languages and template web applications is also supported as well as integration with developer tools and popular source control repositories. Web Sites enables a high density, secure web hosting offerings for service providers and enterprise IT.Virtual Machines ServiceThe Virtual Machines Service enables self-service provisioning of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (also known as IaaS) capabilities enabling a high quality self-service experience to provision and manage VMs. This is equivalent to renting a virtual server on which the tenant can install their own operating system and administer the server themselves. This includes a standardized VM gallery for consistent workload deployment and hosting – We will be delivering a consistent gallery of VM templates - single VM and multi-VM tiers - for Windows Server and Windows Azure environments. The goal here is to enable uniform IaaS services across these contexts, including consistent VM lifecycle management from a provisioning and operations standpoint. Database ServiceAn extension of the VM service is the ability to offer databases as well. These can either be a dedicated VM Role (OS + Database) or can be configured as Database as a Service (DBaaS) leveraging clustered SQL Servers. Either way, you are able to offer an automated, high margin offering that is one of the most requested from customers.Virtual Network ServiceLeverage the power of software defined networking in your service offerings and allow your customers to take advantage of it as well. With this service, customers can defined dedicated virtual networks on which to assign their infrastructure. They can also leverage it to connect back to their enterprise datacenter to extend their corporate capacity.Service Bus ServiceThe Service Bus service is a technology to enable messages to be passed between applications where a synchronous hand-off is not possible but the sender needs assurance that the message will reach the recipient eventually. Applications may be within the same cloud, across clouds, clouds and devices or many other supported scenarios.