What's ahead

• What is Windows Azure?
• Fabric
• Storage
• Developer experience
• Roadmap
• My impressions
• Takeaways for everyone else

Disclaimers

• I work on Google App Engine
• Religion
• Strategy, or IANAPM
• Should already know the cloud computing landscape

What is Windows Azure?

• Cloud computing platform
• "Operating system for the datacenter"
• Fabric hosts your cloud services
• Storage: tables, queues, blobs
• SDK
• Developer portal
• ...and friends

Fabric

• ~= RightScale, but better
• Define your cloud service in XML
• Fabric manages service lifecycle:
• Resource allocation
• Provisioning
• Deployment
• Monitoring
• Maintenance

Fabric: Services

• Service definitions include:

roles	== processes (e.g. web frontends)
channels	== network connections between roles
interfaces	== external network endpoints
load balancers

• Instances
• Update domains, fault domains
• APIs

Example service definition

<ServiceDefinition name="MyService" xmlns="...">
  <WebRole name="WebRole">
    <ConfigurationSettings>
      <Setting name="GreetingString" />
    </ConfigurationSettings>
    <InputEndpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn"
                     protocol="http"
                     port="80" />
    </InputEndpoints>
  </WebRole>
</ServiceDefinition>

Example service configuration

<ServiceConfiguration name="MyService" xmlns="...">
  <Role name="WebRole">
    <Instances min="3" max="10" />
    <UpdateDomains count="3" />
    <FaultDomains count="3" />
    <ConfigurationSettings>
      <Setting name="GreetingString"
               value="Hello world!" />
    </ConfigurationSettings>
  </Role>
</ServiceConfiguration>

(Warning: includes minor speculation, since full service definition and configuration isn't available in CTP.)

Fabric: Implementation

• Fabric Controller manages cluster
• Roles run in VMs
• Hypervisor, one host, multiple guests
• Agents inside VMs report state, health to FC
• Deployment based on virtual hard disk images
• FC itself runs on mini Azure cluster (!)
• 5-7 machines, Paxos-based master election

Fabric: Virtualization

From the PDC talk Under the Hood: Inside the Cloud Computing Hosting Environment

What's ahead

• What is Windows Azure?
• Fabric
• Storage
• Developer experience
• Roadmap
• My impressions
• Takeaways for everyone else

Storage

Tables	== App Engine datastore ~= Amazon SimpleDB
Queues	== Amazon SQS
Blobs	~= Amazon S3
Locks	== Chubby
Caches	== memcached

Storage

• All scalable
• Programmatic and REST APIs
• Run on fabric!
• *.{table,queue,blob}.core.windows.net

Tables

• == App Engine datastore, ~= Amazon SimpleDB
• Schemaless, structured storage
• Strongly consistent
• Single-entity txes via per-entity optimistic concurrency
• Manual partitioning
• Partitions ~= Bigtable tablets, ie scaling granularity
• Possibly also locking at partition level; not exposed
• Secondary indices still in progress (!)

Queues

• == Amazon SQS
• Asynchronous processing
• Create, delete queues
• Enqueue, dequeue, delete messages
• Lease-based
• Roughly FIFO
• ie no help with fairness or preventing starvation

Blobs

• ~= Amazon S3
• Create and retrieve programmatically
• Simple, up to 64MB
• Block-based, up to 50GB
• Blobs are mutable!
• URL-based, hierarchical namespace
• enumerable

What's ahead

• What is Windows Azure?
• Fabric
• Storage
• Developer experience
• Roadmap
• My impressions
• Takeaways for everyone else

Developer Experience

• Local SDK == App Engine SDK, others
• "cloud on your desktop"
• command-line tools
• Visual Studio integration
• Developer Portal == App Engine Admin Console
• view, manage, monitor deployed service
• *.cloudapp.net == *.appspot.com

...and friends

...and friends

From azure.com

Roadmap

• Now: Invite-only CTP (beta)
• Calendar 2009: commercial release
  • billing
  • full service model
  • monitoring, alerts
  • native code, raw VMs
  • TLDs
  • secondary indices for tables
  • locks, caches, ...

What's ahead

• What is Windows Azure?
• Fabric
• Storage
• Developer experience
• Roadmap
• My impressions
• Takeaways for everyone else

My impressions

• Big bet for MS

My impressions

• Big bet for MS
• Similar to existing offerings (except for fabric!)

My impressions

• Big bet for MS
• Similar to existing offerings (except for fabric!)
• Aimed at enterprise

My impressions

• Big bet for MS
• Similar to existing offerings (except for fabric!)
• Aimed at enterprise
• "Use your existing skills and tools"

My impressions

• Big bet for MS
• Similar to existing offerings (except for fabric!)
• Aimed at enterprise
• "Use your existing tools and skill set"
• Lots of information about internals

My impressions

• Big bet for MS
• Similar to existing offerings (except for fabric!)
• Aimed at enterprise
• "Use your existing tools and skill set"
• Lots of information about internals
• Standard cloud computing questions
• Code and data portability, regulatory compliance, SLAs...

What's ahead

• What is Windows Azure?
• Fabric
• Storage
• Developer experience
• Roadmap
• My impressions
• Takeaways for everyone else

Takeaways for everyone else

• Keep executing!

Takeaways for everyone else

• Keep executing!
• Give more information

Takeaways for everyone else

• Keep executing!
• Give more information
• Pitch to enterprise better

Takeaways for everyone else

• Keep executing!
• Give more information
• Pitch to enterprise better
• Make SDK and production behave the same

More

• My writeups: snarfed.org/azure
• PDC talk videos: channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008
• Try it: azure.com