Windows Azure just got sexy
Posted Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 12:03 am by Jason Cartwright
After using Windows Azure since around April this year for the backend of Constructiv, I’ve gotten pretty familiar with the website. Today there’s been a massive overhaul of Windows Azure, probably the largest since launch.
It’s important to not the change is the the Azure website, but the Azure Platform (Managing your servers) remains the same. SQL Azure was updated a couple of days ago, so it is likely just a matter of time before we see the new design across the board.
The new design brings with it the Metro UI we’ve seen across a number of other Microsoft properties including WP7, Windows8 and now the Xbox 360.
Check it out for yourself at https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/
Build // Day 2 – Server, Azure, Visual Studio, Ballmer.
Posted Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:01 am by Jason Cartwright
It’s day 2 of Microsoft’s Build Conference and today the focus turns onto Server, Azure and Visual Studio. The first demo of the day showed how a game ‘Tankster’ could write data back to an Azure backend, so PC and Mobile gamers can play against each other cross platform.
Developers we also treated to a number of announcements regarding Visual Studio 2011, demo’d by Scott Guthrie.
- .Net 4.5
- New MVC4 template
- jquery mobile will be part of Visual Studio 2011
- Web sockets
- TFS on Azure
Windows 8 will use a synchronised password vault for single sign-on. Leveraging the SkyDrive syncing discussed yesterday, signing into a service or website on one machine is then associated with your LiveID. Every subsequent machine you log into using that same LiveID will also bring with it the passwords stored in the secure Password Vault.
Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer made an appearance to discuss Microsoft’s future. Ballmer re-iterated that they are “all-in” with the cloud. Every part of Microsoft is looking at how to leverage Cloud services as a key fundamental of their business model. Ballmer says there has never been a better time to be a developer and that there is no other product that there is nothing that has the install base of Windows.
During his presentation Ballmer said Microsoft are in the process of pivoting the business to move with the evolving needs of users and business. From the slides below, you can see the products and services that Microsoft is focusing on.
With consumers goodies taken care of yesterday, today was very much focused on developers, that now wraps up the keynotes for the Build conference. There is still a couple of days of sessions for Build attendees to sink there teeth into. Yesterday created just as many questions as it answered, so expect more information to be release on Windows 8 as we move closer to its release.
Resonate Solutions helps business improve customer connections
Posted Monday, September 5, 2011 at 12:56 pm by Jason CartwrightAustralian company Resonate Solutions have built a Business Intelligence application running on SQL Server 2008 + Analysis Services, while leveraging Azure burst processing to post-process and transform this data into Deep Zoom images and PivotViewer’s CXML. Customer feedback is digested and made sense of by detecting trends using automated natural language processing.
Joris Dries, from Resonate Solutions discusses why they chose to use Windows Azure and how they are working with large companies like Qantas and Rebel Sports to improve customer experiences. Check out the interview from Tech.Ed Australia below.
More information @ http://resonatesolutions.com.au/
GreenButton revolutionising on-demand compute tasks with Azure
Posted Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 4:36 pm by Jason Cartwright
This year, Tech.Ed broke the keynote into 2 distinct audiences, IT Pro and Developer. One of the most impressive demo’s during the developer keynote was from GreenButton. CTO of Green Button, Dave Fellows showed off how a large 3D rending job can be distributed across Azure to perform incredibly time expensive compute tasks, in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.
During the demo attendees seen a complete 3D rendering drawn block by block in just 20 seconds, a task that would typically take around 30 minutes. This was achieved by distributing the workload across a number of high powered servers, but because the compute hours spent was low, the cost of using this extreme horsepower amounts to very little.
GreenButton has plugins for major modelling applications like Blender, as well as a SDK to allow developers to integrate with their existing applications. With a simple elegant web front end, jobs are not only managed, but also costed. Green Button provides a cost back to the users of just how much that task cost, so there’s no waiting for an end of the month bill.
This kind of immediate horsepower at an affordable rate will fundamentally transform the way design and animation firms work. Wether it be creating the next Pixar movie or working out the fluid dynamics of an F1 car, GreenButton on top of Windows Azure is making a massive impact in the economics of business.
I got a chance to sit down with Fellows and discuss the New Zealand origined company, to discuss GreenButton at Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conference.
More info @ http://www.greenbutton.net/
Microsoft: Australian datacentre not financially viable
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:44 pm by Jason Cartwright
It’s official, Microsoft will not be building an Australian data centre. During a Cloud round table, Microsoft explained that it is not financially viable to build and run datacentres in Australia. A very long internal spread sheet is used to calculate the economics of where and when to build datacentres across the globe.
Temperature, Power Costs, Latency, Stable governments, Geography, Natural disasters are all taken into consideration when selecting the perfect site. Australia is also burdened with the 20 Million problem. Large datacentres only really make sense when used on a large scale. Unfortunately Australia’s volume of use wouldn’t match up to the cost model Microsoft want to charge for cloud services.
Despite being available in 41 countries, Azure deployments can only be published to the US, Europe or Asia. The closest being Southeast Asia, which Microsoft assures use that latency back and forward to, isn’t a problem.
Things are constantly evolving in this space. Take the new datacentre in Dublin, which can now run servers around room temperature meaning the water and cooling requirements are significantly reduced.
Some Enterprise customer needs are serviced in Australia by Microsoft partnering with providers of smaller datacentres like Fujitsu or Telstra for services like Office 365.
Interestingly Amazon have announced they are going to build an Australian datacentre. Clearly their infrastructure scale and cost models are different than that of Microsoft’s, in reality, the end consumer sees Amazon able to make it work, when Microsoft can not.
There is NO law that prevents offshore data storage in the cloud
Posted Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 5:17 pm by Jason Cartwright
Image by karindalziel
There is a trend developing amongst Australian companies. Those who went down the outsourcing route, are now reining back services and looking to cloud solutions to solve common business functions. With this trend, a number of questions arise around the storage of sensitive data outside Australian borders.
Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft Australia, Greg Stone, says there is actually no legislation in place that requires businesses to store private information in Australia. This is a common misconception which is often quickly dissolved when legal advice is sought, rather than just assuming or following hearsay. One exception suggested was highly sensitive government information that may need to be stored locally for national security reasons.
Often concerns about the ability for foreign governments to force the turnover of data adds to the concern of data centres being located off-shore. In reality, the ability for international governments to request data is enabled through existing channels, wether the documents be stored in a filing cabinet, or on a server.
