The PK blog

Earlier this week the Windows Azure platform was named Best Cloud Service at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London. Now in its third year, the Cloud Computing World Series Awards celebrate outstanding achievements in the IT market.  This year’s winners were selected by an independent panel of industry experts.

“It’s fantastic for us to see this type of recognition for the Windows Azure platform. We’re seeing companies creating business solutions in record times, reinforcing the new possibilities created by the cloud,” said Michael Newberry, Windows Azure lead, Microsoft UK.

Click here to read the press release about this award.

Source: Windows Azure Blog

April's Update (v2.9) of Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is available now and you can get it here.

"The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Windows Azure platform, including: Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric.   

The April 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit has been updated for Windows Azure SDK 1.4, Visual Studio 2010 SP1, includes three new HOLs, and updated HOLs and demos for the new Windows Azure AppFabric portal.   

Some of the specific changes with the April update of the training kit includes:

• [New] Authenticating Users in a Windows Phone 7 App via ACS, OData Services and Windows Azure lab
• [New] Windows Azure Traffic Manager lab
• [New] Introduction to SQL Azure Reporting Services lab
• [Updated] Connecting Apps with Windows Azure Connect lab updated for Connect refresh
• [Updated] Windows Azure CDN lab updated for CDN refresh
• [Updated] Introduction to the AppFabric ACS 2.0 lab updated to the production release of ACS 2.0
• [Updated] Use ACS to Federate with Multiple Business Identity Providers lab updated to the production release of ACS 2.0
• [Updated] Introduction to Service Bus lab updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Eventing on the Service Bus lab updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Service Remoting lab updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Rafiki demo updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Service Bus demos updated to latest AppFabric portal "

Enjoy!

PK

Amazon announced the AWS Free Usage Tier (http://aws.amazon.com/free/) last week, which will start from November the 1st. I know some people are excited about this announcement and so am I because I believe that competition between cloud providers always brings better service for the customer, but in Amazon's case, it's more like a marketing trick than a real benefit and I'll explain why during this post. Let me remind you at this point that this is strictly a personal opinion. Let me also say that I have experience on AWS too.

Certainly, having something free to start with is always nice, but what exactly is free and how does it compare to Windows Azure platform? First of all, Windows Azure has a similar free startup offer, called Introductory special which gives you free compute hours, storage space and transactions, a SQL Azure web instance, AppFabric connections and ACL transactions, free traffic (inbound and outbound), all at some limit of course. Then there is the BizSpark program, which gives you also a very generous package of Windows Azure Platform benefits to start developing on and of course let's not forget the MSDN Subscription Windows Azure offer which is even more buffed up than the others.

Ok, I promised the Amazon part, so here it is. AWS billing model is different from Windows Azure. It's very detailed, a lot of things are broken into smaller pieces, each one of them being billed in a different way. Some facts:

• Load balancing in EC2 instances, it's not free. Not only you pay compute hours but you're also charged for traffic (GB) that went through your balancer. Windows Azure load balancing is just there and it just works and of course you don't pay compute hours and traffic just for that.
• On EBS you're charged for every read and write you do (I/O), charged for the amount of space you use, snapshot size counts not in the total but on its own and you're also charged per snapshot operation (Get or Put). On Windows Azure Storage you have 2 things. Transactions and amount of space you consume. Also on snapshots only your DELTA (differences) is counted against your total, not the whole snapshot.
• SimpleDB is charged per machine hour* consumed and GBs of storage. Windows Azure Tables you only pay your storage and transactions. You might say that I have to compare this to S3, but I don't agree. S3 is not close to Windows Azure Tables as SimpleDB is. What is even more disturbing on S3 is the fact that there is a durability guarantee of 99.99% which actually means you can lose (!!) data of 0.01%.
• There is no RDS instance (based on MySQL) included in the free tier. With introductory special you get a SQL Azure Web database (1GB) for 3 months or for as long as you have a valid subscription when you're using the MSDN Windows Azure Offer where you actually get 3 databases.

For me, the biggest difference is the development experience. Windows Azure offers a precise local emulation of the cloud environment on your development machine, called DevFabric which ships with Windows Azure Tools for VS2008/VS2010. All you have to do, is click F5 on your Cloud project and you get the local emulation on your machine, to test, debug and prepare for the deployment. Amazon doesn't offer this kind of development environment. There is integration with Eclipse and other IDEs but every time you hit the Debug button, you're actually hitting real web services with your credentials, consuming from your free tier and as soon as you're done consuming that you start paying to develop and debug. Free tier is more like a "development tier" for me. Windows Azure offers you both, the development experience you expect without any cost on your local machine with DevFabric and a development experience on the real cloud environment where you can deploy and test  your application also without any cost, unless of course you consume your free allowance.

Some may say you can't compare AWS to Windows Azure, because they are not the same. AWS is mostly IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Windows Azure is PaaS (Platform as a Service) and I couldn't agree more. But what I'm comparing here are features that already exist on both services. I'm not comparing EC2 instances sizes to Windows Azure instances sizes but I'm comparing the Load Balancing, SimpleDB etc.

* Machine hour is a different concept to compute hour and it's beyond the scope of this post.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to comment.

PK.

Once again, Microsoft proved that it values its customers, either big enterprise or small startups. We’re a small private-held business and I personally have a major role in it as I’m one of the founders. Recently, I’ve been giving some pretty nice presentations and a bunch of sessions for Microsoft Hellas about Windows Azure and Cloud computing in general.

I was using my CTP account(s) I have since PDC 08 and I had a lot of services running there from times to times all for demo purposes. But with the 2nd commercial launch wave, Greece was included and I had to upgrade my subscription and start paying for it. I was ok with that, because MSDN Premium subscription has 750 hours included/month, SQL Azure databases and other stuff included for free. I went through the upgrade process from CTP to Paid, everything went smoothly and there I was waiting for my CTP account to switch on read-only mode and eventually “fade away”. So, during that process, I did a small mistake. I miscalculated my instances running. I actually missed some. That turned out to be a mistake that will cost me some serious money for show-case/marketing/demoing projects running on Windows Azure.

About two weeks ago, I had an epiphany during the day and I was like “Oh, crap.. Did I turned that project off? How many instance do I have running?”. I logged on the billing portal and, sadly for me, I was charged like 4500 hours because of the forgotten instances and my miscalculation. You see, I’ve did a demo about switch between instance sizes and I had some instances running like big VMs. That’s four (4) times the price per hour.

It was clearly my mistake and I had to pay for it (literally!). But then I tweeted my bad luck to help others avoid the same mistake and the thing I was been warning my clients all this time and some people from Microsoft got interested in my situation, I explained what happened and we ended up in a pretty good deal just 3 days after I tweeted. But, that was an exception and certainly DON’T count on it.

Bottom line is be careful and plan correctly. Mistakes do happen but the more careful we are, the more rare they will be.

* I want to publicly say thank you to anyone who was involved in this and helped me sort things out so quickly.

PK.

Recently at MSDN Forums there were people asking how they can detect if their web application is running on the cloud or locally (Dev Storage). Well besides the obvious part, if you have code inside a Web Role or a Worker Role Start() method, this only exists on a cloud template but what if you want to make that check somewhere else, for example inside a Page_Load method or inside a library (dll)?

If you’re trying to detect it on the “UI” level, let’s say Page_Load, you can simply check your headers. Request.Headers["Host"] will do the trick. If it’s “localhost” or whatever you like it to be to can be used to determine if it’s running local.

But how about a Library? Are there any alternatives?

Well, it’s not the most bullet proof method, but it served me well until now and I don’t think it’s going to stop working as it’s a fundamental architecture element of Windows Azure. There are specific Environment properties that are raising a SecurityException as you’re not allowed to read them. One of them is MachineName. So, if Environment.MachineName is raising an exception then you’re probably running on the cloud. As I said it’s not bullet proof because if an IT administrator applies a CAS that restricts specific properties, it can still raise an exception but you get my point. A combination of tricks can give you the desired result.

PK.