About two or three weeks ago, I went to a conference of “Microsoft Cloud Application Development using Visual Studio 2010” presented by Mr. Chalermvong Vijitpiyakul who is a Developer Technical Specialist and MVP of Microsoft. This event was held at MUICT Building, Mahidol University. From this event, I think I got a lot of knowledge about a cloud computing service given by Microsoft, Windows Azure Platform. So, I would love to spend my time to write this article and share the knowledge from what I got from this event. Anyway, I might write the wrong one, so I’m sorry for that and any suggestion is acceptable for me
Why Cloud Computing?
Let’s talk about the importance of a cloud computing. A cloud computing provider will provide a full set of storage, network, maintenance and availability, etc. over internet and let users deploy applications over there. So the users no need to invest a lot of money to buy the stuff about hardware, software and network without knowing whether they will really use them or not when the applications have been deployed. In addition, if the users don’t want to use it, they can close the service immediately. The cost of using the cloud service may be cheaper than we buy a lot of things including maintenance. Pay per use of the cloud service is used to keep service charge from customers.
Cloud Service’s Patterns
First of all, in order to give a cloud service to requesters, it’s necessary for those requesters to understand the “patterns” of the cloud service as follows:
- On and Off
It’s analogous to a light switching in which if you want to use a cloud service at a point of time, you’re able to open the service. But if you don’t want to use it, just close it. - Growing fast
The amount of using a cloud service is gradually increased. - Unpredictable Bursting
There is one triggered event without recognizing beforehand that causes the amount of using a cloud service is a lot. For instance, at that time, there is nobody going outside his/her residence because of an influenza event or something. So E-commerce will be used a lot for the people who don’t want to go out for ordering things and send them directly to home. - Predictable Bursting
When any predictable event is coming such as Christmas period or etc., a cloud service is able to handle a peak period of using the cloud service. The way to know this kind of event is to use a statistic.
Cloud Service Type
Next, to indroduce a cloud service type, there are 3 types as follows:
- IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service)
This service is to give you ability of providing a servers, networking, storage (hardware layer) over the Internet whose advantage is that we can use a lot of hardware resources such as RAM,CPU, etc. from different hosts to process specific problems with one another so that the problems can be operated very fast. It’s called virtualization. Moreover, it will let user choose which OS should be installed in servers and which DBMS should be use in order to match with our readily installed softwares in order to process or operate works/problems , etc. - PaaS (Platform-as-a-service)
This service is to hide the complexity of IaaS has about how many servers that I should deploy or how much storage should be used for our applications (Software layer) and let people easily deploy the applications without thinking about the whole structure as IaaS. Anyway, OS and application server stack such as PHP, JAVA, etc must be configured by yourself as well as Database software. One of this service provider that I’m going to focus on is “Window Azure Platform”. - SaaS (Software-as-a-service)
This service is to give you a web-based software over the Internet. Hence, this software can be accessed from anywhere from your PC or even mobile phone. It’s as if we use an Microsoft Word in a web browser so the Microsoft Word’s file no need to maintain by ourselves. In contrast, if we use Microsoft Word in PC or notebook, the file must be kept by users and it’s risky to be disappered due to harddisk broken, etc.
- Windows Azure – A powerful computing service for applications.
It can be seperated into 3 main components- Compute (Machine) – Provides application scalability. It’s replicated as needed to scale the applications and computational processing power.
- Storage – Allow users to store data any length and format of time and the users must pay for them
- Fabric – control works happened between Compute and Storage and it works with “Fabric controller” who control the accessing of resources and communicating with all data centers.
- SQL Azure – It’s a DBMS of SQL server but it’s run on the cloud.
- Windows Azure platform AppFabric – It’s used for communication between applications and cloud, and
importantly, control access for applications.
Window Azure Platform
There are 3 service components that we must understand before going to use Window Azure Platform.
Reference: http://www.qrimp.com/blog/blog.The-Difference-between-IaaS-and-PaaS.html
http://www.qrimp.com/blog/blog.The-Difference-between-IaaS-and-PaaS.html
http://ezinearticles.com/?IaaS-Vs-SaaS-Vs-PaaS:-The-Differences-in-Cloud-Computing&id=5519584
Window Azure Marketplace
Next thing, how we are going to make money from this cloud service. One thing that you can do is to publicly sell inportant data that is usable for some specific applications. For instance, you have all English word data in our database on the cloud and then there is one company wanting to do the “Dictionary Application” on the cloud as well. Then, you can sell the data to the company building Dictionary Application as one requested word to our database per .001 cent something like that. In this scenario, it could happen on “Windows Azure Marketplace”
Windows Azure Platform Appliance
However, instead of using Windows Azure Platform in a cloud, we can locally use it at your home as a private cloud computing. This ability is provided by Windows Azure Platform Appliance.
Platform Portal & AppFabric Environment
When we want to configure the cloud component running and operating in the way as we want, “Platform Portal” in Window Azure will allow you to do those jobs. In the Windows Azure Platform, the operating can be run up to 99% availability in the AppFabric environment in which the processing nodes will be reserved 3 nodes at least for server or database nodes as usual.
REST protocol
It’s used to address the resource in the meaningful way. For instance, the URL in the data format as pomzung.wordpress/2010/12/30 so we could implicitly understand if this is activated, it will open the article in December 30, 2010 of pomzung blog. When we compare with the old representation one such as pomzung.wordpress/content?id=”23423″, it’s so hard to understand.
Encode/Decode Base64 (8 bits)
It’s an encoding which convert the binary data into printable characters or texts in order to send it through network (bit by bit).
64 characters to encode and decode
+-[a-z][A-Z][0-9]
Reference:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4070693/why-base64-encryption
Importance of Windows Azure Platform
It’s a protocol used to communicate and exchange information between Windows Azure SDK for a specific language used to develope a deployed application and Windows Azure
Affinity
In a cloud computing, it’s a necessary to set a location between databases and deployed applications closely in order to faster communicate with one another. It calls the databases and deployed application as the same affinity group.
Others
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Copies contents, consisting of media, downloadable objects, etc., and place to near servers of that user in order to reduce bottleneck for communication across the world instead of communicate with only one central server.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
Windows Azure Platform Training Kit
A tool helping beginners easily understand Window Azure Platform
Certificate of Windows Azure
In order not to require to enter username and password all the time when we ‘re logging in Window Azure Platform by using IIS
For more information:
http://www.mrmie.com/Blogs/Default.aspx
All in all, by introducing the overview of cloud computing as well as Windows Azure Platform, I hope you guys being able to get some ideas when to use cloud technology. Especially, the Windows Azure could be one important choice for you to run applications on cloud technology.
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