Windows Azure announcements from MIX 2011

Microsoft announced several updates to the Windows Azure platform today at MIX11 in Las Vegas. These new capabilities will help developers deploy applications faster, accelerate their application performance and enable access to applications through popular identity providers including Microsoft, Facebook and Google. Details follow.

New Services and Functionality

A myriad of new Windows Azure services and functionality were unveiled today. These include:

• An update to the Windows Azure SDK that includes a Web Deployment Tool to simplify the migration, management and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications and Web sites. This new tool integrates with Visual Studio 2010 and the Web Platform Installer. This update will ship later today.
• Updates to the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control service, which provides a single-sign-on experience to Windows Azure applications by integrating with enterprise directories and Web identities.
• Release of the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service in the next 30 days, which will accelerate the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications.
• A community technology preview (CTP) of Windows Azure Traffic Manager, a new service that allows Windows Azure customers to more easily balance application performance across multiple geographies.
• A preview of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming capabilities, which allows developers to upload IIS Smooth Streaming-encoded video to a Windows Azure Storage account and deliver that video to Silverlight, iOS and Android Honeycomb clients. A CTP of this service will be released by the end of this fiscal year.

Windows Azure Platform Offer Changes

Microsoft also announced several offer changes today, including:

• The extension of the expiration date and increases to the amount of free storage, storage transactions and data transfers in the Windows Azure Introductory Special offer. This promotional offer now includes 750 hours of extra-small instances and 25 hours of small instances of the Windows Azure service, 20GB of storage, 50K of storage transactions, and 40GB of data transfers provided each month at no charge until September 30, 2011. More information can be found here.
  • An existing customer who signed up for the original Windows Azure Introductory Special offer will get a free upgrade as of today. An existing customer who signed up for a different offer (other than the Windows Azure Introductory Special) would need to sign up for the updated Windows Azure Introductory Special Offer separately.
• MSDN Ultimate and Premium subscribers will benefit from increased compute, storage and bandwidth benefits for Windows Azure. More information can be found here.
• The Cloud Essentials Pack for Microsoft partners now includes 750 hours of extra-small instances and 25 hours of small instances of the Windows Azure service, 20GB of storage and 50GB of data transfers provided each month at no charge. In addition, the Cloud Essentials Pack also contains other Microsoft cloud services including SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. More information can be found here.

Please read the press release or visit the MIX11 Virtual Press Room to learn more about today’s announcements at MIX11. For more information about the Windows Azure AppFabric announcements, read the blog post, “Announcing the Commercial Release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching and Access Control” on the Windows Azure AppFabric blog.

Follow @MIXEvent or search #MIX11 on Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates throughout the event.

VMware to Acquire Shavlik Technologies: Virtual Environment Security is an important differentiator

VMware Inc., has announced it will acquire Shavlik Technologies, extending the company’s security portfolio into patch and configuration management.

“With the Shavlik acquisition, VMware will be able to provide simple to use and affordable management services developed to address the specific demands of SMBs,” Raghu Raghuram, senior vice president and general manager of cloud infrastructure and management at VMware, said in a statement.

VMware has slowly built up its security arsenal starting with the acquisition of Determina in 2006, which sold host-based intrusion prevention system (HIPS) technology that were configured to work in a variety of virtual scenarios.  It acquired BlueLane Technologies in 2008. BlueLane can sit between the hypervisor and the virtual machine for application-aware firewalling, visibility of traffic between virtual machines and intrusion prevention capabilities.

In 2010, VMware acquired Tricipher for identity and access management services. Tricpher provides secure authentication and single sign-on access for SaaS-based software.

VMware’s acquisitions make it clear that it expects to grow out the features of its security product sets.

Today’s announcement builds upon the successful relationship built between  VMware and Shavlik via VMware GO™, a joint SaaS offering assisting SMBs with  rapid deployment and management of VMware vSphere®.

“VMware continues to make investments to extend its leadership within the SMB  market. With VMware vSphere® Essentials and VMware Go™, VMware is delivering  tremendous value to hundreds of thousands of SMBs,” said Raghu Raghuram, Senior  Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware.  “With the Shavlik acquisition, VMware will be able to provide simple to use and  affordable management services developed to address the specific demands of  SMBs.”

Following are some of risks faced by VMware:   (i) the successful integration of Shavlik and VMware technologies; (ii) competitive  factors, particularly with Microsoft System Center products, (iii) VMware’s ability to protect its  proprietary technology; (iv) VMware’s ability to attract and retain highly  qualified employees; and (v) friction with existing management partners.

Windows Azure Platform Training Kit April 2011 Update

Windows Azure Platform Training Kit April 2011 Update

The April 2011 Update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is now available. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes hands-on labs, presentations, and samples to help you understand how to build applications that utilize Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure AppFabric. This is a significant update of the kit that includes several new and updated hands-on labs. Some of the new/updated content includes: New HOL for Windows Azure Traffic Manager · New HOL for SQL Azure Reporting· New HOL for Windows Phone 7 and the Access Control Service· Updated HOL for Windows Azure Connect Refresh· Updated HOL for CDN Refresh· Updated Access Control HOLs· Updated Service Bus HOLs for the Service Bus portal update The setup scripts for all hands-on labs have also been updated to use the Windows Azure SDK 1.4 release and to support VS 2010 SP1. You can download the April 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training kit from here: http://bit.ly/WAPTKApr11. We’re also continuing to publish the hands-on labs directly to MSDN to make it easier for developers to review and use the content without having to download an entire training kit package. You can browse to all of the HOLs here: http://bit.ly/WAPCourse . Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco During Scott Guthrie’s keynote on Day #1 at Mix11, Niels Hartvig the founder of Umbraco also talked about Windows Azure. Umbraco is a very popular open source, .NET-based CMS application that is powering over 85K sites today. In the keynote, Niels talked about how Umbraco has been working with the Windows Azure Platform to provide it as an option for running Umbraco sites. He announced the Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco and also showed an example of Umbraco’s next major release, which will have integrated support for Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco is now available for download from CodePlex. This accelerator is designed to make it very easy to deploy an Umbraco application quickly to Windows Azure. The accelerator includes a step-by-step guide, scripts, and a simple deployment tool to make it easy to get started. I would also recommend watching this 7 minute screencast created by Umbraco.

For more information about Umbraco and Windows Azure, please visit Umbraco’s Windows Azure page at: http://umbraco.com/azure.  In addition to the keynote presence at Mix11, three sessions where Umbraco, DotNetNuke, and Kentico all talked about how they are enabling Windows Azure for their apps. You can find a list of these specific sessions and learn more about running CMS applications on Windows Azure from this new page on WindowsAzure.com.

VMware announced Cloud Foundry, an open PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) project,may look appealing on a slide?

What was announced?

 

VMware is calling Cloud Foundry as Industry’s first Open PaaS platform. The core value prop of Cloud Foundry has three pillars:

• Choice of develo per frameworks
  • Currently supports Spring for Java, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js as well as other JVM-based frameworks like Grails.  Work is underway for other frameworks.
• Choice of application infrastructure services
  • Initially supports MySQL, MongoDB and Redis for database.
  • In the coming month, will add support for other app services, including 3^rd party services as well as vFabric services (RabbitMQ for messaging, GemFire for caching, Hyperic for monitoring & management, ERS for Web Server and Load Balancer).
• Choice of clouds
  • Public and Private
    • Public cloud: CloudFoundry.com hosts applications inside VMware operated data centers and accepts free trials by invitation only today. In the future, they are planning to run Cloud Foundry on other public clouds, including existing and new VMware partners. Cloud Foundry may be run by the Mozy team.
    • Private Cloud: In the future they will offer a commercial version for Enterprise customers to deploy in a private cloud.
  • VMware and non-VMware
    • It can be deployed on top of vSphere and vCloud infrastructure as well as other infrastructure clouds (Rightscale is demonstrating the deployment of CF on AWS) or other infrastructure technologies like Eucalyptus or Openstack.
  • Micro Cloud
    • A version of CloudFoundry running in a single VM. This is for developers to build and test their apps on their own machine, very similar to our DevFabric today.

With the announcement today, I see the following challenges with their approach

• Cloud Foundry mainly provides deployment and middleware layers to improve developer productivity. However, a true PaaS offering couples platform-level services (automated service management, development and deployment tools, and middleware services) with a highly optimized infrastructure layer. CloudFoundry.com is only a test environment and VMWare is still relying on partners to deliver the infrastructure layer for production apps.
  • Cloud economics: While the idea of a mix and match cloud may look appealing on a slide, the economic promise of cloud computing demands scale – tens of thousands of servers at the infrastructure layer. By taking this out of the equation, VMware is ignoring one of the primary value propositions of cloud computing.
  • Complexity: There are so many unanswered questions. For example, it’s still unclear where data will be stored, where apps will run, and who is ultimately responsible for managing everything.  Businesses have told us they are concerned about security, data sovereignty, and geo-location – today’s announcement from VMware doesn’t address any of those concerns. 
  • Community driven: VMware is putting the onus on the developer community to build out these services, but undertakings of this scale fall apart without a process in place for ensuring services are created, delivered and maintained in a high quality and timely manner. This is uncharted territory for VMware and developers will pay a heavy price if it doesn’t go well.

Other Limitations

Since VMware’s Cloud Foundry is still in beta, other limitations include

• The first generation service will be a development and test environment only, hosted by VMware. It remains to be seen if the entire layer will show up in more mature public cloud environments, and what level of integration, performance and productivity it will offer.
• Pricing is not yet announced and the business model is still unclear.
• Unclear how the billing/account/management relationship is handled at non-VMware clouds.
• Unclear whether public cloud providers have to opt-in to the part of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem.

In the long run, as this offering becomes more and more mature with multiple global scale cloud providers as partners, it might become a true useful PaaS offering.

VMware’s Cloudy vision: with a chance of rain?

VMware certainly holds the technology pieces needed to fulfill its mission — hypervisor, management platform, dynamic tools, application platform, applications and even a public cloud presence. It can presently provide IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings, and continues to evolve its capabilities in all of these areas. And its overwhelmingly large hypervisor footprint means there are hundreds of thousands of existing customers that will look to VMware for their cloud needs.

Whether VMware can maintain a higher market share than the rest of the field combined over the long term is not such an easy answer. It has competition at every turn, and the competitors are getting bolder as they continue to chip away at VMware’s advantage. VMware is entering a new market based on their experience providing large-scale, complex virtualization technology to IT departments. Microsoft compared to VMware is a long-established leader providing a complete enterprise infrastructure platform solution, which includes relational database technology, identity and security management, automated service management, and familiar application development tools. Microsoft is the leading provider of internet scale services and enterprise-class services and support.

More over VMware delivers vCloud Express through 3rd party partners. Using VMware vCloud Express means adding another company to a customer’s vendor portfolio. Using Windows Azure probably raises fewer vendor management issues, because most fi rms already have a relationship with Microsoft. Additionally, Microsoft provides a variety of customer support options and enterprise-class Service Level Agreements.

The hypervisor eventually will become a commodity, which leaves management software and cloud platforms as the ultimate competition spaces. It’s still anybody’s game at this point.

Windows Azure Billing: Moving to Invoice billing from credit card

Since 12th July any Windows Azure user can choose to move to Invoice billing from credit card charges.

Following are the steps to request for Invoice billing:

 

1. Click on https://mocp-support.custhelp.com  . It will open a service request screen.

2.    Provide email id if not logged in with live ID.

3. Provide following details

a.    Subject: Invoice Billing

b.   Question: Move my account to invoice billing. Our VL program and agreement number is ……………(You might get a credit check request if not a Microsoft VL (Volume Licensing) customer)

c.    Topic: Subscription Billing Support

d.   Phone Number: ….

4.    On pressing continue button, you will receive a service tracking number.

 

It might take 2-3 business days to get confirmation from Microsoft about invoice billing. You can also call MOCP support with service number for status

Windows Azure Buying Process and Account Management

Last week I had an opportunity to meet many CIOs in “CIO conference” at Microsoft campus. Some of them have already deployed workloads on Windows Azure. In all my discussion, there was a common question on Windows Azure account management. Therefore I decided to write new blog post on Windows Azure account management.

Windows Azure account management is an integrated process involving two portals i.e. Microsoft Online Commerce Portal (MOCP) and Windows Azure Developer Portal (DevPortal).

Microsoft Online Commerce Portal (MOCP) is a Web portal you use to try or buy subscriptions   to Microsoft Online Services. Windows Azure Developer Portal (DevPortal) is a web portal you use   to create services and deploy your code. A subscription on MOCP is mapped to a project in DevPortal.

Windows Azure buy work flow is below:

 

1. Determining an “Account Owner”

The Account Owner can create and manage subscription(s), view billing and usage data and specify the “Service Administrator” for each subscription under the account.  There can only be one Account Owner Windows Live ID (WLID) per Microsoft Online Customer Service Portal (MOCP) billing account.  Each Service Administrator may manage resources in each subscription they are associated with (see Subscriptions and Service Administrators below)

2. Creating multiple MOCP accounts

The Account Owner can at any time create multiple MOCP accounts.  A customer may choose to create multiple MOCP accounts in order to design a meaningful account structure that supports or reflects the customer or global business strategy.  Some examples where you may need to create multiple MOCP accounts:

• Reflecting your geographic footprint (e.g. Europe, North America, etc.)
• Reflecting your business lines (e.g. Technology Solutions, Consulting, etc.)
• Reflecting your unique customer (e.g. Bank, Retail, MFG, etc.)

3. Subscriptions and “Service Administrators”

For each MOCP account, Owner can create one or more subscriptions.  For each subscription, the Account Owner can specify a Service Administrator.  This WLID can be the same or different as the Account Owner.  The Service Administrator is the user that actually consumes Windows Azure platform services.  Only the Account Owner can reassign a subscription’s Service Administrator.

4. Creating multiple subscriptions

The ability to create multiple subscriptions within an account gives you more flexibility in managing your business.  Multiple subscriptions may give you the ability to classify your products or services in relevant classifications (e.g. development, testing, production, etc.).

5. “Project” (on the Azure portal) Definition

For each subscription, there is one project, which you can by default create up to 6 hosted services  (see Services below) and 5 storage accounts per subscription.  A project by default is also limited to 20 compute instances. If you need more than six applications, you can contact Windows Azure Support to request an increase. You can also create additional Windows Azure subscriptions, each of which will allow you to create up to six applications. The compute instances are shared between all the running services in the project (including Production and Staging environments), so you can have multiple services with different number of compute instances, up to the number of maximum available for that project.

6.    Services Definition

You can have a total of 6 hosted services per project. The services are space where applications are deployed. Each service provides two environments: Production and Staging.  This is visible when you create a service in the Windows Azure portal.  A service can have a maximum of five roles per application. This is any combinations of different web and worker roles on the same configuration file up to a maximum of 5. Each role can have any number of virtual machines.  See example below:

     

   Figure 1: Standard 3 tier application: Web-Business-Data Tiers to Windows Azure Roles

In the example above, the service has 2 roles, each role with a specific worker role.  The Web Role (web tier) takes care of the Web interface. The Worker Role (business tier) is responsible for the business logic.  Each role can have any number of virtual machines/cores, to the maximum available on the Project.  From a resources perspective, if deployed this service would be using the following resources:

1 x Service:

-   Web Role = 3Small Compute Nodes (3 x Small VMs)

-   Worker Role = 4 Small Compute Nodes (2 x Medium VMs)

-   2 Roles used

Total resources left on the Project:

-   Services (6 -1) = 5

-   Small Compute Nodes (20 – 7)= 13 small compute Instances

-   Storage accounts = 5

Notes about Services: You will get billed for role resources utilized on a deployed service, even if the roles on those services are not running (i.e., “suspended”).  If you don’t want to get charged for a service, you need to delete the deployments associated with the service.

Figure 2: this diagram shows the relationship between all components of account setup process.  The current diagram shows the current configuration:

• The components in “blue” are the ones that are upgradable.
• The 20 small computes instances could be any combination of VM sizes so long as the total number of cores across all slots and services within the project does not exceed 20.

7. Business Rules

1. Once SA is assigned for a subscription on MOCP.

• AO will have no access to DevPortal
• SA will have no access to billing information in MOCP
• Both the AO and SA can change SA any time
• By default, the account owner is listed as the service administrator.

2.  Account owner can buy multiple subscriptions at MOCP.

• Each subscription will result in a project on the DevPortal
• Each  subscription can be assigned an SA (May be different for each subscription)

3. Account owner can use credit card or invoice (in some instances) to pay for a subscription.

• AO can buy multiple subscriptions
• Each subscription can be paid using one or more cards or invoice
• Billing details against subscription can be changed any time by AO

4. Qualification for purchase by Invoice

• Minimum account level commitment $500 in USA ($250 outside USA)
• Enhancements coming in mid-June via the MOCP 1.7.1 release
• Enable switching from credit card to invoice if account meets invoice criteria OR customer is flagged as pre-approved.
• Pre-approved customer will be able to sign up for new subscription on invoice
•  Customer may be subject to credit check

5. The “Purchase Order No.” input field in the payment options page can be used by customer to identify their subscriptions

6. We are sending notifications to users when they are approaching their offer limits each month (which will reduce surprises)

7. We’ll send daily notifications to customers that reach 75%, 100% and 125% of the amount included in their offer (based on the first meter to hit one of these thresholds).

8. Request a Quota Increase

Please refer to our support page for instructions: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/support/

To process your request, we will need the following information:

• The Subscription ID associated with your service.
• The Windows Live ID associated with the Account Owner of your subscription.
• The resource(s) for which you desire a quota increase.
• Large quota requests may require a credit check,  an additional questionnaire filled out and review/approval by our capacity team

9. Team development scenarios

    Scenario 1

• Joe has a team of developers to work on a project
• Joe buys subscription using his live id Joe@live.com (AO) and credit card
• Joe assigns SA to a live ID Joe-team@live.com . Credential shared among developers
• Joe is responsible for billing.
• Development team is responsible for creating services and deployment.

     Scenario 2

• Joe has two projects that need to be billed to separate cost centers in his company.
• Joe can buy two subscriptions linked to different credit cards or POs.
• Joe will receive two separate monthly billing statements or two entries in his credit card

10. Best Practices

• Only deploy when you are absolutely ready to do so – it is a very expensive operation (1 hour of CPU/instance – no matter how long you use it).
• Staging and Production apps cost the same… don’t assume that you’re not being charged because the app is in staging
• When an application isn’t used – DELETE IT – don’t just suspend it.  Suspended apps cost the same as running apps.
• Use the minimal number of VMs – particularly when testing.  Fastest way to blow through your hours is to deploy a single app with 20 instances… that deployment just blew away all of your free hours for the month, even if you only had it up for 1 minute.  If you don’t have an explicit reason to use multiple instances, don’t.
• Track your usage diligently on MOCP (https://mocp.microsoftonline.com )… but note, it’s 12-24 hours behind in the data that is shown.
• SQL Azure and AppFabric have separate (but linked) dev portals with separate provisioning experiences.
• Consider using the Neudesic cost calculator or our AppFabric calculator  for interpreting SQL Azure and AppFabric bills.

11. Windows Azure Support

When some asks you for help, please direct them to the standard support process via one of the links below.  This will ensure that the issue is tracked by the team and addressed appropriately.  This is very important so we can track the top issue drivers and to ensure that our support process is efficient and painless.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/support/

To create support tickets you can use the following links directly:

Developer – Work with a Windows Azure platform technical person to troubleshoot development of your application

-   https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?prid=13496&st=1

Live Site Issue – Report an operational issue with your application or the Windows Azure Portal

-   https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?prid=13185&st=1

Account Issues – Obtain answers to billing questions and get assistance with managing subscription(s)

-   https://mocp-support.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/mocp_support.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php?p_sid=inGOEwXj

Phone Support – If you prefer calling support directly select the relevant support phone number from the page below

-   http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=139808

12. Windows Azure Offer comparision

	Introductory Special	Development Accelerator Core	Development Accelerator Extended	MSDN Special	Consumption
Windows Azure
Compute	25 hours (small compute instance)	750 hours (small compute instance)	750 hours (small compute instance)	750 hours (small compute instance)	$0.12 per hour (small compute instance)
Storage	500 MB of storage	10 GB of storage	10 GB of storage	10 GBs of storage	$0.15 per GB stored per month
Storage Transactions	10,000 storage transactions	1,000,000 storage transactions	1,000,000 storage transactions	1,000,000 storage transactions	$0.01 per 10,000 storage transactions
SQL Azure
Web databases	1 Web Edition DBs** ≤ 1 GB RDB	N/A	N/A	3 Web Edition DBs** ≤ 1 GB RDB	$9.99 per database per month  ≤ 1 GB RDB
Business databases	N/A	N/A	1 Business Database ≤ 10 GB relational database	N/A	$99.99 per database per month ≤ 10 GB RDB
AppFabric
Access Control transactions	100,000 Access Control transactions	1,000,000 Access Control transactions	1,000,000 Access Control transactions	1,000,000 Access Control transactions	$1.99 per 100,000 transactions*
Service Bus connections	2 Service Bus connections	1 pack of 5 Service Bus connections	1 pack of 5 Service Bus connections	1 pack of 5 Service Bus connections	$3.99 per connection on a “pay-as-you-go” basis*
					$9.95 for a pack of 5 connections*
					$49.75 for a pack of 25 connections*
					$199.00 for a pack of 100 connections*
					$995.00 for a pack of 500 connections*
Data Transfers (per Region)***
North America and Europe	.5 GB in / .5 GB out	7 GB in / 14 GB out	7 GB in / 14 GB out	7 GB in / 14 GB out	$0.10 per GB in / $0.15 per GB out
Asia Pacific	.5 GB in / .5 GB out	2.5 GB in / 5 GB out	2.5 GB in / 5 GB out	2.5 GB in / 5 GB out	$0.30 per GB in / $0.45 per GB out
Commitment Term
	N/A	6 months	6 months	N/A	N/A
Savings
	N/A	Represents 54% off normal consumption rates	Represents 52% off normal consumption rates	Includes 5% discount on overage	N/A
Base Unit Price
	No Charge	$59.95	$109.95	No Charge for MSDN members	Pay as you go
*AppFabric rates are effective for usage beginning on April 9, 2010 at 12:00 AM GMT.  All usage for AppFabric prior to this date will not be charged.
**Web db is for first 3 months. Any usage in excess of the amount included with the subscription will be charged at the standard rates. This introductory special will end on June 30, 2010 and all usage will then be charged at the standard rates.
***Inbound data transfers during off-peak times through June 30, 2010 are at no charge.  Prices revert to our normal inbound data transfer rates after June 30, 2010.
NOTE: MPN prices are 5% less on all items except storage and data transfers.