Save your job with Windows Azure!
More and more technologies are born each year as software developers have less and less time to learn and play with the new tools. It becomes important to invest your precious learning time wisely. In my article I would like to talk about a technology which is worth learning, the technology which will be around for decades. That technology is Microsoft Windows Azure. Windows Azure is a cloud computing technology announced by Microsoft. The Community Technical Preview (CTP) phase of Windows Azure was announced by the software giant in October 2008 on Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. The concept of cloud computing has been around since 2001. It has been largely contributed by Amazon, which had plenty of excessive hardware sitting at their facilities underutilized after the dot com boom was over. In this article I will take a look at Windows Azure and show that it is worth of your learning efforts.
What is Windows Azure?
Windows Azure is a platform which allows to upload your applications to geographically distributed data centers and run them remotely. The client has control over the physical location of the deployment through specifying the geographical region. At the time of CTP there were three options available: "USA - Northwest", "USA - Southwest", and "USA - Anywhere". Microsoft Windows Azure comes with a set of tools including deployment tools(Developer Portal, MS Visual Studio 2008), diagnostics tools (Logging, Event Log, Performance Counters), the number of third party tools is already large and growing. From software aspect, Windows Azure consists of three major components: Fabric, Compute, and Storage.
Fabric represents the Runtime of Windows Azure. Fabric is responsible for instantiating your applications, once they are uploaded into the cloud.
Compute component represents your application in Windows Azure. To be able to run in the cloud your application has to be either a Web Role or a Worker Role. A Web Role is your Web application in Windows Azure and a Worker Role is your service application in Windows Azure. While the Web Role application can be accessed via HTTP directly, the Worker Role can only be consumed by the Web Role application.
Storage component represents your durable store in the cloud. Windows Azure allows storing SQL table data, BLOBS, and Message Queues. The storage is implemented as a RESTful service and can be accessed through HTTP. Although Windows Azue SDK provides a client library for accessing the Storage, you can also develop your own client.
Typical Design of Windows Azure Web Application
Why Windows Azure?
Many industry practitioners believe that the transition to Cloud computing will take at least a decade. What makes businesses spend the precious funds for developing their Cloud applications?
Reduces the cost With traditional hosting model the pricing has a fixed cost component. No matter how much your hardware is utilized you always pay the full rent for it. Now imagine how much saving your company can make if you pay only for the actual hardware usage? To calculate your monthly hosting fees, Windows Azure offers a pricing model which uses computer hours, traffic your application creates.
Instant scale-up, instant scale-down Another very interesting aspect of the Cloud Computing is its ability to instantly increase or decrease number of application instances. That is as easy as changing the number of instances in your service configuration file and takes less then a minute.
How would you benefit from adopting Windows Azure?
Certainly I would recommend to expand your knowledge and learn this technology. Armed with knowledge you can find opportunities to introduce Windows Azure to your company and take advantage of the tremendous savings this technology offers. This is the unique time when you can learn a great technology, help your company, and elevate your professional career. Save your job with Windows Azure!
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