Mashed Articles

For the last 2 1/2 years Microsoft DPE has been putting on a series of events called ArcReady (short for architecture readiness).  We have run the events in the area that Microsoft calls its Central Region (which is the 18 states in the middle of the United States between Canada and Mexico and Nebraska and Tennessee).  The events have been interesting and well attended and I thank each and every person who took the time to attend one of the 35 events on 10 different topics that I personally helped to deliver in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.  But ArcReady as an event series has come to an end. 

We started the ArcReady series because our customers were telling us that Microsoft had a lot of great developer tools and technologies, but we did not talk enough about architecture; that we focused on products and not solutions.  You talked and we listened and created ArcReady and (we think) delivered that architecture message very successfully.

After a year we launched another series of events called MSDN Unleashed, which was the developer oriented companion to the ArcReady series and we ran that from September to this last may in the afternoon (right after the ArcReady events).  We heard from our customers that many of you did both development work and architecture work (you wore both hats).  You did not want separate topics between the architecture and development sessions.  You also did not want to have to take a whole day off work in order to hear our architecture and developer discussions.  You also wanted us to continue to talk about solutions and not just products.  You talked and we listened.

So we made the following changes:

• We eliminated ArcReady as a separate event and as a separate name
• We will have architecture conversations during our developer events
• We will focus on solutions and include Real World applications and case studies in all events
• Our events will be 1/2 day, so as to have less impact on your work schedule
• We have gone back to the MSDN Events name for developer events (no more Unleashed)
• We will also added a 1/2 day event for IT Professionals under the name TechNet Events if you prefer to talk about servers and networks instead of code – these TechNet Events will also include an architecture discussion

We hope that you like the changes to the event format.  We know that your time is valuable and we want to make your investment of that time in one of our events as rewarding as possible.  If it is not, please talk to us and we will listen.

Announcing Real World Azure with Microsoft IT

Our first event under the new format will be on cloud computing and specifically the Windows Azure Platform.  Cloud computing is a big topic in the industry these days, Microsoft is not the only player in the space, but we are pretty proud of our Windows Azure Platform.  This topic will talk about the nuts and bolts of the platform, but will also showcase an application built on the platform, “Project Austin”.  Here is information on the TechNet Events and MSDN Events.

TechNet Events Presents – Azure for the IT Professional

In this event, we will discuss:

• Azure architecture from the IT professional’s point of view
• Why an IT operations team would want to pursue Azure as an extension to the data center
• Configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications
• The Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
• Azure storage options
• Azure security and identity options
• How Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premises applications
• How operations teams can manage and monitor Azure-based applications

Dates & Location (click on city name to register)

8/18/09 – Columbus, OH
8/19/09 – Mason, OH
8/19/09 – Downers Grove, IL
8/20/09 – Indianapolis, IN
8/20/09 – Dallas, TX
9/16/09 – Grand Rapids, MI
9/17/09 – Southfield, MI
9/17/09 – Overland Park, KS
9/17/09 – Houston, TX
9/22/09 – Cleveland, OH
9/24/09 – Waukesha, WI
9/24/09 – Austin, TX
9/29/09 – St. Louis, MO
9/29/09 – Nashville, TN
9/30/09 – Knoxville, TN
10/1/09 – Chicago, IL
10/27/09 – Bloomington, MN

(All TechNet events are from 8:30am to noon)

MSDN Events Presents – Azure for the Developer & Architect

• Cloud computing architectures in general and the Azure architecture in particular
• Several aspects of Azure from the developer’s and architect’s perspective
• Azure roles (web, web service and worker)
• Azure storage options
• Azure security and identity options
• How Azure-based applications can be integrated with on-premise applications
• Configuration, deployment and scaling Azure-based applications
• How development teams can optimize their applications for better management and monitoring

Dates & Location (click on city name to register)

8/18/09 – Columbus, OH
8/19/09 – Mason, OH
8/19/09 – Downers Grove, IL
8/20/09 – Indianapolis, IN
8/20/09 – Dallas, TX
9/16/09 – Grand Rapids, M
9/17/09 – Southfield, MI
9/17/09 – Overland Park, KS
9/17/09 – Houston, TX
9/22/09 – Cleveland, OH
9/24/09  – Waukesha, WI
9/24/09 – Austin, TX
9/29/09 – St. Louis, MO
9/29/09 – Nashville, TN
9/30/09 – Knoxville, TN
10/1/09 – Chicago, IL
10/27/09 – Bloomington, MN

(All MSDN Events are from 1:00pm to 5:00pm)

Yesterday I had to go from Belfast to the East Midlands of England for a business meeting. The travel arrangements had been hastily done, and were not ideal. At 7am, the airport security man looked at me strangely and said ‘No mobile?’ as I flung my netbook, keys and ‘liquids’ out for scanning.

No mobile. Indeed I hadn’t. And no time to go back and get it. I knew I’d most information that I needed on my netbook, so I didn’t panic. In fact, I was a bit curious to see how I’d get along. A case of planes, trains and no-mobiles.

As it turned out, I didn’t get along terribly badly, but not terribly well either. I’d 2 main problems. (a) boredom and (b) anxiety

Let’s look at (a) boredom first.

I use my iPhone for listening to language learning MP3s (loving Michel Thomas at the moment), gaming, reading books, twittering, email and browsing the web. And these are all things that fill those endless endless snatches of downtime when you’re travelling.

Standing in the slow coffee queue waiting to put your breakfast order in? Check tweetie. Sitting eating your breakfast in the cafe? Check emails, browse tweets. Waiting to board the plane? Catch up on news. On the plane? Plug into Michel Thomas French while playing Bejewelled and you land in England a wiser woman than you were in Ireland. And so it continues.

I was deprived of all this. So I bought a magazine. Scientific American Mind, to be precise, at the ridiculous cost of £4.70. An hour later, I’d read everything in the magazine, even the pointless letters to Editor that all talked about articles I hadn’t and couldn’t read.

Reading this magazine really brought home the fact that print is dead for me. I bought a magazine that looked relatively interesting. But in fact only maybe 30% of it was something I enjoyed reading. The rest of it I would’ve skipped over online. And the bits I enjoyed were stymied by the fact I couldn’t learn anything more – I couldn’t click deeper.

After finishing the magazine I was still left with about 12 hours of travel. If I wanted to read something educational on my iPhone, I could have read for HOURS and not paid a penny. If I wanted to spend £5, I really would’ve got a whole lot more value for money on the apps store.

Now, let’s look at (b) anxiety.

I get anxious when I don’t have enough information. This is particularly true of travel. Without a mobile internet connection to check my travel details, I had to go from coach to train station to train station to taxi just *hoping* that things would be OK. They weren’t as it turned out – I missed most connections by five minutes, and spent hours sitting around waiting for the next one.

Then when I got onto a train I’d no real clue where I was, how long it would take me to get to the next point, or what was going on. I spent a lot of time being anxious. And what with having nothing to distract myself, I had a lot more time to be anxious!

The *sort-of* upside

The *sort-of* upside to all this was what happened when I had to ask people for help or information. I was shocked at how lovely everyone was. Everyone was hugely helpful, funny and kind. One gentleman told me I had the loveliest accent. Another wished me Bon voyage. I entered into little mini-conversations with strangers.

Of course, I have spontaneous social contact with strangers all the time online, but that’s not such a novelty.

iPhone fail

Incidentally, I forgot my iPhone because it hadn’t charged properly *again*. I woke up at 4am to find a very hot iPhone with a quarter charge. I had to disconnect it, let it cool down, and try again that morning as I got ready to go. This has happened twice now. And both times have been directly before I had to fly to England for an all-day meeting. What’s going on?

Holidays in beautiful Umbria (Italy) give the opportunity to do some reading. With a strong interest in clould computing, I read Cloud Application Architectures by Georges Reese this summer. Around the same time last year (2008), I read Programming Amazon Web Services by James Murty.

The book “Programming Amazon Web Services” was really good in 2008. It describes the different Amazon offerings and how to invoke the API’s using Ruby. But Amazon is extending its offering a a rapid pace, e.g. with fixed IP addresses and block storages (like NAS). So James Murty’s book is in need for a 2nd edition.

“Cloud Application Architecture” goes up the stack to a higher abstraction level and explains how to deploy (“architect”) application on the Amazon cloud. Georges Reese has gained practical experience while deploying the Valtira (Web Marketing) application on Amazon.

Reese covers some very interesting topics:

• Load balancing with software load balancer in the cloud vs. HW load balancer on premise
• Cost comparison with sample calculation; : making the comparison with operating application on own hardware or in the cloud
• (High) Availability with some sample calculations
• Use of stateless application servers
• (Virtual) Machine images: outweihing generic vs. specific machine images; the use of startup-scripts with user-data
• Privacy: example on how to separate private information and encrypt it with key generated for each customer/partner/…
• Database management: outweighing clustering vs replication, whereby replication is usually considered the better option; the slave(s) can be used for read operations and backups; solutions for primary key generation and optimistic locking
• Data Security: e.g. through file system encryption
• Network security: security groups as alternative to firewalls, the fact that network intrusion detection cannot be used in Amazon context, why network level encryption still makes sense even if machine cannot see eachother’s traffic at Amazon, system hardening (Bastille), Host intruction detection (OSSEC), anti-virus
• Disaster Recovery, backups, recovery, redundancy,
• Scaling & capacity planning, the non-sense of auto-scaling

A real joy to read, but sometimes I would have loved that the author went into some more depth. One thing definitely became clear to me: deploying application on the (Amazon) cloud requires specific approaches and skills with obviously a sound and well-thought architecture. Also specific tools will be helpful and needed: Rightscale and enStratus are mentioned in the book. That’s probably the reason why Reese is also the CTO of enStratus.

We may expect many more cloud books in the coming months but “Cloud Application Architectures” brings quality content well ahead of the pack.

PS: podcast with interview of George Reese available here, same quality and content