Windows Azure introduction Dr. Neil Roodyn Ráðstefnan 2009

2. Introducing Windows Azure
Dr. Neil Roodyn

3. This talk is for developers.

4. The islands in our digital lives
Data
People Devices Apps
Synchronization
Bringing this all together

5. What are we seeing?
• People share with other people
• People have multiple devices
• Software+services (both cloud and
client)
• Building this stuff today is hard or
impossible

6. Microsoft Azure Services Platform
Microsoft Microsoft
Live Services .NET Services SQL Services Dynamics CRM SharePoint
Services Services

7. What Is The Cloud?
• A set of connected servers
• On which developers can:
–Install and run services
–Store and retrieve data

8. What Is Windows Azure?
• It is an operating system for the cloud
• It is designed for utility computing
• It has four primary features:
– Service management
– Compute
– Storage
– Developer experience

9. Imagine Building A Desktop
Application In This Way:
• Select your hardware, wire it all together
• Find some device drivers
• Write a file system
• Write a job scheduler
• Write an application installer
• …
• This would be a complete waste of time!

10. But This Is What Every Cloud
Service Developer Has To Do Today!
Business logic
…
Expand to new locale
Perform live upgrade for new feature
Apply OS patches Service “glue”
Diagnose service failures
and operations
Add storage capacity
Handle increase in traffic
Respond to hardware failures
Datacenter

11. What's The Answer On The
Desktop?
• An application execution environment
that abstracts away the hardware
• A shared file system with access control
• Resource allocation from a shared pool
• Support for powerful
programming environments
• Inter-operability with other systems

12. What's Missing In The Cloud?
An operating system for the cloud:
…. ……
Service 1 Service 2 Service 3 Service N

13. What Should The Cloud OS Provide?
• The same facilities that a desktop OS
provides, but on a set of connected
servers:
– Abstract execution environment
– Shared file system
– Resource allocation
– Programming environments
• And more: Utility computing
– 24/7 operation
– Pay for what you use
– Simpler, transparent administration

14. How Is The Cloud OS Manifested?
• Automated service management
– You define the rules and provide your code
– The platform follows the rules: deploys,
monitors, and manages your service
• A powerful service hosting environment
– All of the hardware: servers; load balancers;
…
– Virtualized and direct execution
• Scalable, available cloud storage
– Blobs, tables, queues, …
• A rich, familiar developer experience

15. Demo
Hello Cloud World

16. Automated Service Management
Develop and Deploy and Maintain
Model Run Service Health
• What’s in the model?
– Service topology and size
– Health constraints
– Configuration settings

17. Automated Service Management
Maintaining service health
• Abstraction is the key
– All resources are logical, and must be
declared in the service model
– Service code calls platform APIs to map
logical resources to physical entities
– Service code then uses standard APIs
• The OS can replace resources
transparently
– In the face of failures
– When performing upgrades

18. Automated Service Management
The bottom line
• A balance between power and
ease of use
– Write well behaved services, reduce
your TCO
– Designed for a full range of scenarios,
from the hobbyist to the enterprise
developer

19. Scalable, Available Cloud Storage
• Simple, essential storage abstractions:
– Large items of user data: Blobs, file streams,
…
– Service state: Simple tables, caches, …
– Service communication: Queues, locks, …
• With an emphasis on:
– Massive scale, availability and durability
– Geo-distribution and geo-replication
• This is not a database service in the cloud

20. Rich, Familiar Developer Experience
• A cloud environment on the desktop
• Support for a variety
of programming languages
– ASP.NET, .NET languages, native code, PHP
• An ecosystem of tools and support
– Integration with Visual Studio, Eclipse
– Logging, alerts, tracing, …
– Samples, documentation, MSDN, forums, …

21. Putting It All Together
Simple architectures for scalability
Example:
n m
LB
Web Role Worker Role
Cloud Storage (blob, table, queue)

22. Windows Azure Is
• Designed to encourage best practices
– Stateless compute + durable storage
– Co-location of computation and data
– Queues for asynchronous processing
• An open platform
– Connect outbound to any server
– Open protocols and APIs on all
components

23. Technical Preview
Started at PDC 2008
• Open release of the desktop SDK
• Limited preview of the cloud
infrastructure
– Free usage, with quotas
• Key features:
– VMs with dedicated resources
– Automated service management
– Simple service architectures
– ASP.net websites, managed code workers
– Storage: Blobs, tables, queues
– Single, large datacenter on U.S. west coast

24. Making things concrete.

25. • Developing an service
• Testing and debugging locally
• Deploying to the cloud
• Maintaining a running service

26. No Surprises

27. Consistent, Familiar Development
• Visual Studio
– Templates
– Debugging
• .NET platform
– .NET, IIS7, WCF
• “The cloud on your desktop”
– Complete offline cloud simulation
– Like Cassini (web development server)

28. So What?
Default.aspx

29. We Got Scalability For Free!
LB
Default.aspx
• Scalability
• Availability
• Zero-downtime upgrades
• All with existing tools and skills

30. Horizontal Scaling
What about state?
(e.g., shopping cart)

31. Separating State
Durable Store

32. Durable Storage
• Durable, scalable, available store
• Simple abstractions
Blobs Tables Queues
…
• Simple interface
– REST
– ADO.NET Data Services

33. DEMO
Windows Azure Storage

34. Simple Storage
LB
Default.aspx
Storage
(Blobs, Tables, Queues)

35. Not Just Websites
• Cloud services aren’t just websites
• Many other types of work for the cloud
– Bulk file conversion
– Heavy analytics
– Finding extraterrestrials
• Even websites can offload async work
• We need a more complex architecture

36. Service Architectures
Web role
LB
Default.aspx Worker.cs
Storage

37. Service Architectures
Worker role
LB
Default.aspx Worker.cs
Storage

38. Service Architectures
Web and worker roles
LB
Default.aspx Worker.cs
Storage

39. LB
Web And Worker Roles
Default.aspx Worker.cs
Simple queue interface
Storage
(Blobs, Tables, Queues)

40. Debugging
• Remember, no surprises
• Offline, just what you would expect
– Set breakpoints
– Step into code
– Inspect variables
• What about in the cloud?

41. Logging
• Debugging the cloud really means logging
• Simple logging API today
• More functionality over time

42. Publishing Your Service To The Cloud
1. Write code on your laptop
2. Upload your package to the web portal
3. Push “deploy”
4. Monitor, upgrade, scale…

43. Summary
• Familiar development
• Local debugging
• Simple deployment
• Automated management

44. What Next?
• Go to http://azure.com
• Download the SDK, write some code

45. Questions?