Day 5 - In Which Pooh Understands Azure

Technical content of this issue - 2 out of 5

The conference is officially closed, so instead of being huddled over my sad little hotel room desk late at night trying to get this done so I can go to sleep, I'm sitting by the pool in the late afternoon watching some sessions that I missed and writing up this issue just for you!

More on Azure, What It Is and Who It Isn't

Never content to leave well enough alone, DW from MD expands upon his earlier question. Since it is long and depressingly substantive, we will address here in the body of the newsletter rather than lump it in with the juvenile potty humor and innuendo found in the mailbag segment.

Interesting, this is not what I was expecting when I first heard about Azure. I’m getting the impression it is more like a super ISP than a business oriented, user app cloud. Does this mean that they are counting on third party vendors or the customers themselves to do the heavy lifting of developing the business specific (or generic) functionality, or are they planning to enter that space as well? Certainly most small and mid-sized business that would be prime candidates for cloud capabilities would be looking to avoid the investment in IT programming resources to utilize this at the service level. Maybe I, like you, still don’t have the complete picture.

Part of the problem is that I don't think Microsoft still has the fully complete picture. I spoke to some Azure team members last night about how hotfixes and OS upgrades are applied and how we can be sure they don't break our apps and the strategy for doing that is still up in the air. Comprehending all this stuff is a little like 6 blind men trying to describe an elephant. At it's heart it is definitely a huge hosting service for .Net web applications and services. They run the data centers, scale the databases, distribute geographically, cash big checks, etc. But if it stopped there then they would be nothing more than the highest market valued ISP in the entire world.

Another huge part is the services that they provide on top - SharePoint, SQL Data Services, Dynamics CRM, and .Net Services (that's the service I still understand the least). These provide extra capabilities available not just to your .Net app hosted in the cloud, but to the entire web via REST interfaces. I went through the Hands On lab for SQL Data Services today and created an Authority (biffspdcnewsletter01) with a container. I then added several entities (not records - there's no tables or schema, what the hell kind of database are we talking about here?). All of this was done with URI REST calls, then again with SOAP calls. I stored BLOBs up there as well. It really made clear how an app could be a rich client app in WPF or Silverlight and communicate via REST with the exposed data on the web. Wow - how cool! A new model! Of course, everyone here who ever wrote an int86 call in C sees a startling similarity with Client Server apps.

One service I left of the list is Live Services, which I interpret as the programmatic interface to the Live Framework. This exposes the ability to write consumer apps that will all be based at heart on the cloud even though the code you might write will run on a phone, a PC or a picture frame (wow, go back 15 years and tell some developer he's gonna write code for a picture frame!). All of these are the services in the Cloud that Microsoft is providing based on Azure, the OS for the cloud.

There, all clear now? As for your question about others providing services in the cloud on top of Azure, they have not said anything about that. My first reaction was that they control everything and that "third party Cloud services" is kind of an oxymoron. The more I thought about it, though I realized that someone could write services and host them in the cloud and make them availabe via REST to clients on the web or in the cloud. I don't think someone will be able to provide low level stuff like new data services (I don't believe Oracle would be welcome in this case), but might be able to provide libraries with somewhat generic content - although I can't think of an example off the top of my head.

Correction on Google Products

It didn't take long for two different readers, LM from CA and SH from CA, to point out to Miss Litella that it's not Google Apps that Azure competes with, it's Google App Engine.

oh...never mind.

Now that I've read their emails and gone out and reviewed Google App Engine on the Web, I see why people perceive this as a competitor - it's pretty much a direct competitor. I think the comparison will involve my having to actually create an HTML table. Waitress, I'm gonna need another scotch over here.

Issue	Azure	Google
Dev Environment	Simulated cloud environment on dev box	Simulated cloud environment on dev box
Programming Options/Runtime Environment	.Net managed code, VB.Net, C#, managed C++, F#, etc.; unmanaged code hinted at in the future.	Python; web site talks of non-specific "others" in the future
Data Services	SQL Data Services - no schema only entities	Non-relational object store (sounds similar)
Other features	Sharepoint, CRM, Live Framework, Workflow	GMail integration, Image Manipulation

Wow, guess I shouldn't have blown this topic off so quickly in yesterday's newsletter. Funny that no Microsoft folks corrected me when I asked about Google Apps as a competitor - maybe they aren't familiar with this Google product. My impressions are that Azure starts off as a product like Google, but goes beyond with the Azure services.

This issue has really been more more of a discussion than previous issues, with give and take between you, the readers, and me. I hate discussions - both LM and SH will be dropped from the mailing list for showing up the editor, so if you know who they are they may need you to send them a secondhand copy.

Letters! We Get Letters!

TA from MN reveals - The "cheap plastic/cloth tote bag" (see Day 3) is actually part of Microsoft's environmentally-friendly PDC efforts. They are made primarily of recycled soda bottle containers, and any unused or unwanted bags can be turned back in so that they can be donated to a local charity for reuse. It's true! Now, one would only know this if one read the whole Conference Guidebook, which about 0.5% of attendees did, so 99.5% of the bags will indeed go into the trash. I guess it's Microsoft's thought that counts, sort of...

On Day 2, when I was discussing that you could tell the PDC attendees on the street easily, I was referring only to the contrast with the local LA business people. It's a little harder to tell the PDC attendees from the homeless people, the best way is to see if there is a Microsoft logo on the bag of useless stuff they are carrying around. Apparently when we come back for the next PDC, that will no longer be possible. - Ed.

Last chance to get your letters in before the final issue of the year - editor@biffspdcnewsletter.com.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow - the trip home, editorial page and links to online sessions.

Biff
Pool Boy, Biff's PDC Newsletter