I watched the PDC day 1 keynote today with my fellow coworkers. Below are my (unrefined) notes from the session.

Ray Ozzie

Why Cloud?

  • Current solutions focused on internal apps
  • Future solutions will assume more external facing solutions
  • Users expect more social networking features embedded in solutions (ranking, reviews, etc)
  • Operations teams and Dev teams are finding that they must work more closely together
  • Some companies have spike / valley traffic patterns
  • Companies need redundancy as apps move to the Internet
  • Going global can require data centers around the world to reduce the latency of remote customers

Cloud offers:

  • Excess, dynamic capacity
  • IT, security, operations expertise
  • Dependencies between services
  • Keeping systems up to date
  • Planning for spikes

Tiers

  1. User experience
  2. Enterprise tier - backend systems
  3. Web tier

Azure started by:

  • Dave Cutler
  • Amitabh Srivastava

Amazon - started the EC2 platform

Microsoft Platform: Windows Azure

  • For consumers and business
  • Virtualized computation
  • Automated service management, provisioning, etc

Goals

  1. Use existing skills, code and tools
  2. Open environment for 3rd party tools, etc

Today's apps are based on "Scale Up" applications

Tomorrows apps need to be horizontally scalable

Modeling

Storage

Azure is a service that runs in MS data centers.

Initially in US. Then worldwide.

Platform meant to be iterated for continuous improvement

Azure is most economical, eco friendly, scalable

Services:

  • SQL Services
    • Soon: reporting and OLAP
  • .NET Services
    • Workflow
    • Authorization
    • Identity Federation
  • Live Services
    • Extends Azure to end users (MESH)
  • Dynamics CRM
  • SharePoint

Commercial Release sometime in 09

Costs based on two things:

  1. Resource usage
  2. SLA

  

Amitab

Scalable hosting

  • Uses virtualization and hypervisors

Security

  • Code access
  • IP filters
  • VLANs
  • Virtualization based isolation

OS For the clouds

  • Automated Service Management
    • Separates the app from the OS to enable seamless upgrades and deployments
  • Fabric Controller manages the environment and applications
    • Works based on service models
      • Roles, channels, interfaces, config settings, etc.
      • Stored as XML files, enabling modeling support in tools
    • High availability
    • Platform built on fault tolerant hardware.
    • Data spread across multiple machines

Supports desktop development environment

  • Can write, run and test on a local machine. No need to deploy to the cloud during dev.
  • Uses current toolset

Works with both managed and native code

Open platform

  • Will support Eclipse, PHP, etc.

 

Steve Marxs - Building Hello World

Templates create two projects - One with metadata, one standard web app

  • Can hit F5 and run locally

Deploy by selecting publish

  • Takes me to the Azure portal
  • Can create a new project and upload the project from there.
  • Upload package file
  • Upload config file

 

Jonathan Greensted

Bluehoo (http://www.bluehoo.com) - runs via Bluetooth on phones. Connects to the cloud to help people meet each other.

Written with C# and VS, hosted on Windows Azure

 

Bob Muglia - VP Servers and Tools

Service Requirements

  • Interop, business process
  • Identity and federation
  • Management and compliance

Faster time to market

  • Scale out from the start
  • Reduced up-front cost
  • Reduced / optimized ongoing costs

.NET Services

  • Service Bus
    • Connect the on-premise systems to the cloud and traverse firewalls
  • Identity Systems
    • Integrates multiple providers
    • Users control their identity
    • Single federated identity platform
    • Open and interoperable
    • "Geneva"? (Code name)
    • Integrates AD into the cloud using the AD Connector.
    • Claims based system
  • Workflow
    • Run WF workflows in the cloud
  • Additional services to come

Databases - SQL Server

  • Database
  • Sync
  • On premise or mobile data
  • Reporting
  • Data Mining
  • ETL
  • Reference Data
    • Cloud may have some data available already so that it doesn't need to be duplicated

Case Studies

  • Atlanta - Use Azure services to connect data in System Center into the cloud

Modeling

  • Oslo
  • Brings the dev and operations teams closer together and more easily.
  • Includes a modeling language called "M"

 

Demo - Red Prairie

Product Recall Application

Previously, required many VPN or leased line connections to connect partners

Uses Azure to simply and easily connect multiple partners

 

Dave Thompson - VP of MS Online

Some companies are capable of running IT well and staying up to date. Other companies found that IT was a large, disproportionate burden. Therefore for some customers, it makes sense for some companies to use hosted services…

Microsoft Online Services

  • Exchange, CRM, and all other servers will be available as hosted solutions
  • Easier to stay up to date
  • Faster deployment
  • Highly redundant
  • Secure

Power of Choice

  • On Premise - Control
  • Online - Easy

Hybrid = Software plus Services

  • Challenge: Federated Identity
    • Users in AD
    • MS Services Connector links identities into the cloud
    • MS Federation Gateway can round trip back to the on premise identity to determine who they are
  • Challenge: Extensibility in the cloud for hosted solutions
    • Exchange
      • Exchange web services
      • Notifications and sync
    • SharePoint
      • SharePoint Designer can customize the site
      • Custom workflows (custom code in the future)
      • Data view web part can access other services
      • On-premise code can push/pull from SharePoint
    • CRM
      • Supports flexible data modeling
      • Access data via web services
      • Custom workflows

Demo - MS Online Services

  • App on CRM hosted custom timecards, etc
  • Connected Word to CRM for a status report
  • Pushed the repot to SharePoint
  • Client accessed the data via the SharePoint portal

  

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