Buzz in the Cloud November 18, 2008
Today's buzz is a little shorter than the rest. I guess people are busy playing with Azure instead of writing about it. However, there are some very interesting posts/articles out there today. So let's get on with today's news so you can get back to feeling blue.
Go Ahead I Dare You
After given an excellent overview of Azure (sans marketing hype), Dare Obasanjo does it again with the Live Framework. He does admit to having difficulty seeing the benefit of the client side Live Operating Environment, so I will attempt to clarify. Leveraging the client side LOE (formerly Mesh Operating Environment) allows your code to fire and forget in an occasionally connected scenario. The sync framework takes over from there. I'll be talking about this more soon.
I've Got All This Stuff, Where Do I Put It
On the Oak Leaf Blog, they have started a series on Azure Storage Services centered around a test harness they are building for the platform. The first post gives an overview of the platform architecture (under the guise of introducing the test harness), and the second post discusses the REST API. Fortunately there is a .NET wrapper around all of this so you don't have to build REST calls by hand, although it's a good idea to understand what's going on so you can debug when things go south.
So How Does This Stuff REALLY Work
In one of the PDC sessions, Microsoft pulled back the curtains and revealed some of the magic behind the cloud. This is an extremely technical presentation and goes into details that the average Azure developer will not need to know. It does an extremely good job at showing just what Microsoft means when they call Azure a Cloud OS (i.e. this is stuff you'd have to deal with if you attempted to roll your own).
We Get the Hand Me Downs
On the vinternals blog, the author talks about how Microsoft deploys the host machines for Azure. Unfortunately, the post quickly turns into VMWare fanboyism. Hmm, you're critiquing Microsoft for "making us wait" until 2010 to get a feature that...VMWare doesn't even have yet. He even has the gall to say that "of course [VMWare ESXi] has a *massive* advantage over Windows in this scenario..." (that is if you ignore the fact that VMWare doesn't support this scenario btw, you do realize that HTML supports things like bold text and underlining don't you?). It's interesting to note that the ability of Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 to natively boot VHD's is another feature driven by Azure (as is Live Migration).
For You Command Line Zealots Out there
The Powershell Guy points out that there are Powershell samples (albeit rudimentary) in the Azure Training Kit. I think the Azure Services Management Tools is what he's looking for. It includes an MMC snap-in for managing Azure as well as Powershell cmdlets.
Well it looks like I lied, there was a bit more content here than I anticipated. Don't forget to keep your head in the Cloud.