Amazon announced the beta availability of Elastic MapReduce, which is essentially an automated Hadoop deployment.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

While I am sure there are folks who will find this very useful, I am hoping it is just the start.

There are some really good applications/frameworks available today that have been written to be scalable services such as CouchDb and Solr. While it is possible for individuals and businesses to host these kinds of applications on the EC2 (and other places) on their own, there is a significant opportunity for others to automate the process.

While there is more to it, in a nutshell, what I would be looking for:

• Click button deployment (maybe with an optional IP address/domain name)
• Reporting (how much data and resources am I consuming)
• Very easy growth (more click buttons and maybe even automation)
• All backups (if necessary/) and other related maintenance to just work.

An early example of this is FathomDB. FathomDB is essentially an automated/managed MySQL in the cloud. Just tell it (via a slider) your data needs and it does the rest.

We really are getting closer to building applications by simply composing a set of (already hosted) third party services.

Azure Team just announced that they released an update to the Windows® Azure™ SDK and Visual Studio Tools. These latest releases are available here:

• Windows Azure SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130232
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752

• Bug and performance fixes
• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role

Keep them Coming Guys!

Mickey Williams of Neudesic talks about cloud computing and what it takes to get off the ground as small start up with Techzulu’s Geoffrey Emery. Azure Microsoft's cloud computing platform is on the horizon for bringing a huge leap forward for startups in instant scalability at a fraction of the cost that you incur if you were to build your own datacenter. One of the things that Mickey brought up was Microsoft .NET services in the sky which hasn't been talked about as much. BizTalk another Microsoft product that Mickey brought up is a technology for connecting multiple interfaces that don’t have a inherent communication protocol. There are now offering this in form in cloud and calling a service bus. The Microsoft .NET services (or the BizTalk Services as it was previously called) allows enterprises to expose their services to the internet from within a firewall without having to setup a DMZ or allow explicit inbound access to the machines. It used the concept of Relay Binding (extension over the existing WCF) to allow access to the services. Allowing disparate systems to be interconnected through the internet, the .NET services sets up an internet service bus in the Microsoft cloud.  See image Below

Getting interfaces to talk to each other through firewalls using the internet and secure socket layer alone is really powerful.

Azure Resource Video

Links in Video

Mickey’s Blog - http://blogs.neudesic.com/blogs/mickey_williams/default.aspx

Azure - http://www.microsoft.com/azure/

BizTalk - http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/default.aspx

WCF  - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa663324.aspx

I have been getting into cloud computing in a really big way/ I just read a great post from Oakleaf System that put a test harness on all the different cloud computing systems out there, With the exception of       s(s)ds (soon to come) and Google. It is a great through down and worth a read.  Here is a link to the article

http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/test-harnesses-compare-amazon-ec2-with.html

Here is a spoiler if you don’t have time to read the whole thing

Following is a comparison of EC2 execution times with those of the original OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project that’s described at Azure Storage Services Test Harness: Table Services 1 – Introduction and Overview, et seq.

Action:	Page	Count	Insert	Delete	Create	Update
EC2 with SQL Express	0.005	0.002	0.019	0.380	0.112	0.374
EC2 with SimpleDB	0.048	0.094	0.048	10.094	22.142	10.855
Azure Table Services	0.215	0.188	0.155	5.820	5.310	6.561

I was surprised to find Azure Table Services’ execution to be substantially slower than EC2 with SimpleDB for single-page SELECTS, iterative counts, and single INSERT operations.

With the exception of the Insert operation, you can verify the Azure Table Services timing data because the harness is available whenever Azure Data Services is up. EC2 services will be made available on request for brief periods (contact roger_jennings[at]compuserve[dot]com).

Make sure you read the comments there worth a gander.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11646261&postID=1093778038105568110&page=1

What do you get when you cross a Language Geek with BI (Business intelligence) guru and put them in front of a surface? Lynn Langit talks with Geoffrey Emery at The PDC Underground about this and more. The talk of the town at PDC has to be the launch of the azure platform and all the Live Services. Lynn dives into what this all means to to the developer community and how it can help you with the horizontal scale and doing data analysis through BI. One thing that cloud computing brings to the table is that you can bring up as many servers that you need for data analysis. What most people don't realize yet is that it takes a ton of servers to do long term financial projections. These projections model can take hours and hours to run over a server farm. By putting this kind computational intensive applications in the cloud you can save your self huge amounts of money as these servers usually sit idle during the day and only come on at night to crunch new numbers. This can all be pushed to the cloud so that you can concentrate on the analysis and let the infrastructure cost and worry be hosted.

We then dive into some of the really cool ways to do design of these new modeling paradigms using Microsoft OSLO and how you can all these pieces and put them together on a surface!

Check out this and more on this great video.

To Learn more about surface check out this video below

Links In Interview

Lynn’s Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/socaldevgal/

Microsoft Surface - http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

PDC - http://microsoftpdc.com

PDC Underground – http://underground.socalcodecamp.com

SQL Server BI - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/business-intelligence.aspx

Oslo - http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx\

What happens when you all your slides fail your mike doesn’t work and then the projector turns off right before you do your presentation? This is just the start of a great conversation that Geoffrey Emery has with David Robinson at the PDC Underground. Dave just lets it all out and more when he talks about cloud computing and what a exciting time it is to be in the windows family. He is currently working on a new technology at Microsoft called SDS SQL Data Services a program at Microsoft that will eventually put SQL server in the cloud. David also brings up how to do bring the cloud computing to your boss in a way that would be easy for everyone to understand.

Putting the pieces together Microsoft is coming out with some really interesting technologies for cloud computing that is not just a database in the cloud but also hosting of your web site either by spinning up a new server instance and launching it in the cloud or by actually deploying your code into the cloud automatically by using Visual Studio development platform and eliminating the need for the developer to know the ins and outs of IIS for those who don't need it.

Links in the video

David's Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/drobinson/

Windows Azure – http://azure.com

SQL Server Data Services (SDS) - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dataservices/default.aspx

Visual Studio - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx

Microsoft Could Computing – http://azure.com

IIS - http://www.iis.net/

  Here is my interview of  Microsoft Architecture Evangelist David Chow at the PDC Underground.  What is a Architect Evangelist? ITs a person who specializes in a  Microsoft Technology and helps other Architects in the business world find the right answers and right people for the job at hand. David’s current Technology Platform is Microsoft Cloud Computing project known as Azure.  David describes to us how the could will help us extend out our current architecture from the internal data center out onto the cloud giving the enterprise environment more flexibility and a robust disaster recover model. He also explains that by taking our datacenters to the cloud we are given the ability to scale horizontally instantaneously with only minor costs increases. Microsoft has brought this idea into reality when it hosted its NBC Olympics on this platform using its Silver light player.  David firmly believes that this form of computing will democratize the way the internet works allowing everyone to host and scale as if they were a Amazon or EBay site during Christmas. It is truly a exciting time for the internet community as cloud computing is bringing in a age of cheaper hosting and easing designing for a architecture of scale. Look for this and more in this very exciting interview.

Topic Links

Microsoft Azure – http://azure.com

Microsoft Silver light – http://silverligght.com

Microsoft PDC – http://microsoftpdc.com

Davids blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou/

PDC Undergound - http://underground.socalcodecamp.com/

Today at microsoft PDC the lunched their cloud computing platform Azure. Think of it as software and services, but it seem like many more exciting things to come on this. Think of this as a operating system on the cloud.

I jut received this email this morning

Dear AWS Developers,

We are excited to release the public beta of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) running Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. AWS is also announcing that Amazon EC2 is now Generally Available and includes a Service Level Agreement (SLA). In addition, we're giving you a sneak peek at some upcoming features that will make Amazon EC2 even easier to operate. Please see details below on these announcements.

You requested to be notified when Windows was available on EC2, and starting now you can employ Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server with all of the performance, reliability, and scalability benefits of Amazon EC2. AWS customers have commonly requested Amazon EC2 running Windows Server since the service launched, and this announcement means that Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour. Please go to aws.amazon.com/windows for more information.

Also, Amazon EC2 has entered General Availability (GA), after just over two years of operation in beta and the addition of many highly-requested features. We are also providing an SLA for Amazon EC2, with a service level commitment of 99.95% availability within a Region. If availability falls below this level, customers are eligible to receive service credits. The new Amazon EC2 SLA is designed to give customers additional confidence that even the most demanding applications will run dependably in the AWS cloud. For further details on the SLA for EC2, see aws.amazon.com/ec2-sla.

Lastly, to help its customers better plan their future hardware and software investments, AWS is providing visibility into plans to release several new features in 2009 that will make managing cloud-based applications even easier. These features will help provide even more cost-efficient consumption of Amazon EC2 and greater visibility into the operational health of applications running in the AWS cloud. These features include:

• Load balancing - Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto-scaling - Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
• Cloud monitoring - Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
• Management Console - Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

To learn more about these new services or to sign-up for notification when they are released, please visit: aws.amazon.com/contact-us/new-features-for-amazon-ec2.

We are excited to share these exciting new announcements with you, and invite you to visit aws.amazon.com/ec2 for full details.

I can't tell how exciting this is. More to come on this!

I was just talking about windows/SQL server in the cloud with my buddy James and after reading my blog he was still a little confused about what was going on. So I found a much more interesting link that I think will be more relevant to the average .net hoster here is the relevant information that I think that you will need to get started.

Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services. Customers will only pay for as much or little as they actually use; of course the actual price will be higher than Linux-based instances, due to the cost of Windows licenses. We’ll announce specific pricing when we make the service broadly available later this Fall.

Our goal is to support any and all of the programming models, operating systems and database servers that you need for building applications on our cloud computing platform. The ability to run a Windows environment within Amazon EC2 has been one of our most requested features, and we are excited to be able to provide this capability. We are currently operating a private beta of Amazon EC2 running Windows Server and SQL Server

 

You can sign up for more information about this from here

After doing some basic analysis about what it cost to relocate some common domains that were more brochure site we figured we could incur a common savings of over 50%. The question still is how is the SQL server instance going to work and replicate across the data centers.

I think the biggest question here is what is microsoft going to do with its cloud and what announcements are going to come out at PDC?