Frank Michael Kraft's Blog

I wanted to continue the discussion about my goals management that I started in salesforce.com. The problem was that the data structure did not fit my needs so well and that I wanted to implement business functionality – i.e. aggregation of remaining effort, but I did not want to invest too much into learning APEX, the salesforce.com proprietary programming language. I could, but I thought why live with the limitations of the platform, if I could try to build my own cloud platform? Maybe later I come back to salesforce.com, but for now I want to try Microsoft Windows Azure.

To quickly wrap it up: It was a good decision. I have built 9 Business Objects in the meanwhile of which the first one was the most difficult obviously. The others quite naturally follow. These are as of now: Workitem, Sprint, Book, Attachment, Note, Payment, Regular Payment, Statement, Transaction. Furthermore I have added Analytical Objects for the purpose of analyzing the Business Objects. I will explain by and by what they do. I will not explain the programming model and architecture of Microsoft Windows Azure in detail. You can inform yourself in public sources, if you want. The UI is HTML – so it’s not worse than salesforce.com. Plus I have added some diagrams in Microsoft Silverlight.

I was able to quickly implement the business logic, that I wanted to have. The programming language I use is C#, which I like. After implementation you press a button (ok, three, four) and then the application is running live in the cloud. It’s just so easy, lean and clean.

So the first Business Object I implemented is the Workitem. In salesforce.com I called it Goal – I am still a little bit indecisive how to call it. I can say so far that it is different from all other Workitems or Tasks that I happen to know. I asked myself what I need for my daily work. My work is that of a Knowledge Worker. It is in good part unpredictable, but not unrelated. Also it is not unplanned. And it has clear goals and a clear purpose. So for this requirement I tailored this Business Object Workitem and I worked with it for many weeks now. I have worked now with at least 3000 instances of it and I am more happy with it than with any other task or project tool that I used so far. I have my work under control now, notwithstanding the fact that many unpredicted events occurred and adaptations of the plan were either necessary or chosen by me.

And: It is served in the cloud. Obviously this means that I can access it from every computer with a browser, which I regularly do. Recently I was in a shop and wanted to buy a memory extension. I did not remember the model. So I asked, if I could quickly use the computer, logged into my Platform and looked it up. Just as easy. In other instances I just pulled out my iPhone, logged into my Platform – using the standard browser, and edited some workitems. I did not even have to write an iPhone App for this. Although I might in the future.

What did I do with the old workitems/goal instances that I had already created in salesforce.com including attachments and notes? Within two days I migrated them completely into my Azure Workstream Platform. How? Salesforce.com offers web services to read the content. So I pulled out the Web Service Description (WSDL) from my salesforce application – which as we remember were custom objects – into Microsoft Visual Studio, generated WebService Proxies for that, mapped them into my Business Object Structure and then pulled the content over. That’s it. From that point on I as productive in my own Azure Workstream Platform. And I am until today.

I will explain more about the functionality of the Business Objects, that I created, soon.

This is the afternoon report from the Windows Azure Platform Launch Day, Stuttgart Germany.

We see a demo of creating a development project and deploying it to the cloud.

It does not make sense to repeat all the steps here. There are good tutorial videos on the Windows Azure Platform.

Interesting from my standpoint is, that one has to choose a datacenter for their application to run (why?) and their data to store (why?). I would have preferred just “in the cloud”. However I was told by a Microsoft professional that it might have legal implications where the data ist. ok.

An interesting part of the demo is what I never saw before, the usage of the SQL Data Service. First, an ADO.NET Object ist created, then in the local SQL server the schema is created. Then the implementation with ASP.NET MVC (business as usual) is done. The program can be tested against the local SQL server instance. Later you get the cloud SQL Data Service connection ID via the Azure Portal and you connect to the cloud SQL data service. That sounds to be quite easy. Interesting from my standpoint was, that the Database Size for the SQL Data Service is limited to 10 GB. If you need more, then you need to create more instances or you need to utilize Azure Tables, which have a very different programming models. Azure Tables is not a relational database, but an entitiy data model. There are also no Transactions across entity instances. It is much more scalable. The programming model is different.

Therefore if there is the question, how much effort is it to migrate my existing application to Windows Azure, then the answer is: it depends. If you have a Web application with SQL Server, it should be quite easy if the limitation fits. If you want to use Azure Tables, this – in my opinion – is a different programming model. Even if you can make use of ADO.NET, you have to think about consistency of the data storage in a different way. However in my personal opinion database consistency is overestimated anyway (if we are not speaking about FIN posts for example). There are a lot of applications that do not need a very high database consistency and if they use Azure Tables, they can save a lot of overhead, that is not necessary for the use case at all.

The next presentation is titled RIA apps. However the applications were about connecting a smartphone via the service bus to a desktop application. This is interesting in itself, but with RIA I expect something like silverlight. An interesting emphasis was, that it is possible to request the service bus my mere http – which should be clear in itself – but the usage is, that it can be used to connect any kind of devices to it – and not necessarily only by the .net library. This is in general the open architecture of Microsoft Azure, also for data store for example.

A complaint that I have is the missing of a search infrastructure for Azure Tables. There is nothing and it is not known inasmuch something will be offered, althouh – naturally – many customers are requesting it. However it will be built or offered sooner or later – just because people need it.

Closing this remarks I must say, that the market is moving. My personal observation is, that even today much more is already technically possible, than that which is planned to be exploited. There are exciting opportunities ahead and nobody can afford to just ignore it.

This is a report from the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Launch Day in Stuttgart, Germany.

Microsoft is offering not only inhouse Server operating system and database software, but goes into the area of cloud computing with Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the operating system, that takes care of MS datacenter memory and computing management. On top of this is the App fabric, that offers .NET services in the cloud and SQL Data services that offers an SQL Server to be used in the cloud. This is claimed to be fail-safe with regards to servers and drives.

Interesting to me is, that MS positions Azure for custom software mainly. I didn’t see why standard software can not be built on MS Azure, other than this has not yet been done. I agree, that it is not the same to just port existing software to Azure – even if there are many similarities. But there are also subtle differences in the programming model that can lead to a different architecture of the software than existing software. For example it is not imparative to use SQL Data Services, but one can use Windows Azure Tables. In this cast the SQL transaction is not available – still there are interesting programming models to be applied to this environment.

The value add that MS claims with “PaaS” – Platform as a Service – is more than virtual servers and monitoring: Managed Database SQL Azure, automatic OS Updates and integration with Inhouse Systems (via Service Bus). Furthermore services like federated identity services.
Personally I thing PaaS should be used differently. For me PaaS is what MS claims as PaaS plus a Business Object and Business Process Platform that makes it possible for the customer to define own business objects and processes by means of modeling. This is not, what MS understands by PaaS. But it is a new term and probably still under discussion. Of course this can be built, if you know how. At least I am wondering how Azure might be integrated with Microsoft Oslo.

Günther Igl presents the Microsoft Online Services. Office Web Applications for example shall be able to offer online collaboration and offline work. Furthermore integration with local sharepoint installations. Is this the microsoft wave? Not yet. But it plays in the collaboration area. They complete the offering of Exchange Online, Sharepoint and LiveServices. However I still have to understand what this has to do with Windows Azure, or is it a mere sales slot. I know at least, that it is possible to use LiveServices with Azure.
He sais, that Sharepoint allows with Sharepoint Designer to build Workflows and Silverlight Applications (?!). However this is not Azure. Probably they could be integrated with Azure. But why should you do that? If you did not want to build your own workflow – yes. However first, Azure has its own workflow services that can be used and I do not believe, that it is possible to build applications with SharePoint.

In the next presentation the architecture of MS Azure is explained. It makes no sense to explain all here. However some types of applications are presented, that could be realized with MS Azure.

1. Cloud only application – basically implementing a web site.
2. Extend existing application with cloud part. For example a local point of sales application, that stores sales data in the cloud, but can also operate offline and synchronize later.
3. Web Shop type – Have a web site with backend integration (e.g. SAP). This is done via the Azure Service Bus, that provides a public URL directory for private inhouse systems (of course with authentication).
4. Massive scalable Website. You have Terabytes of data (Youtube). This makes use of Azure Tables (massively scalable), Azure Blobs, Azure Queues with Work Roles for asynchronous work.

Not mentioned was the Multi-Enterprise Business Application (MEBA) approach that I find most interesting. I will elaborate on this in a different post.

The service guarantee of Windows Azure is

• Role Monitoring and restart
• Compute Connectivity
• Storage AvailabilitDatabase Avaliabiligy
• Service Availability

All of this > 99.9% , they say.

This was the morning, now we will have lunch.