Comments on: Guest post: Windows Azure – review from a developer

By: Azure Thoughts « Tales from a Trading Desk

Azure Thoughts « Tales from a Trading Desk — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:53:23 +0000

[...] I’m hoping that in the next few weeks I’ll get time to do some Azure work. I’ve got a couple of financial application ideas that I’d like to try out. There [...]

By: Thom

Thom — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:45:47 +0000

I’ve linked an article on my blog about Azure.
While I appreciate the way it works, I think there are some bigger questions about Azure that need to be answered. I’m not sure it is ready for adoption unless the plan provides a better path for corporate customers.

http://blog.thommccann.com/2008/11/microsoft-windows-azure.html

By: Karun AB

Karun AB — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:12:24 +0000

Good job David. Long should make a wordpress account for you and let you write guest posts yourself rather than have him post them for you

I personally liked the post. Hopefully people will realise how 7 and Azure are two very very different OS’ and how each of them is necessary

Hoping to hear more from you

By: Fire

Fire — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:51:17 +0000

Really awesome entry. I now understand the importance of cloud computing, as well as the possible challenges that accompany it.

By: robin

robin — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:17:29 +0000

nice post (added by Mobile using Mippin)

By: James

James — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 07:32:18 +0000

Very nice post. Thank you.

By: theoriginalsomeone

theoriginalsomeone — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:41:41 +0000

Nice writeup. The explanation by Mary Jo (http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1671) was also damn good. But the OS itself is pretty much boring unless you own a data center. The services platform may be of interest to developers.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:32:41 +0000

Excellent Post .. guest postings is an excellent idea. I also like the fact you got some one form outside the United States to give there opinon … keep up the great work

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:32:03 +0000

ya the container stuff really does seem to be quite a nasty bunch of limitations but if they fix it i can really see it as being spectacular.

By: RyanLM

RyanLM — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:43:25 +0000

I to am working with Azure. I was able to get access to it about a week ago. So far it has been pretty good. It is a much smarter approach to cloud computing than what amazon is doing, its not a massive cloud of VMs.

The out of the box stack is nice, however I think SQL Data Services needs the most work. I like where they are going but the current limitation are a bit harsh. The model is Schema”less” you do not make columns or tables, but containers and put objects in them, and the objects themselves are just property bags, they call them flex entities. You put entities in containers, and containers live in authorities. A container holds any type of entity you throw at it. The current limitation is that containers have to be small, right now 100 meg, my guess is that this will be a couple gig when released, but that still is small. You also cant search automatically between containers with a select, you have to do them individually. A speaker at PDC said they are working on this. The speaker also said they are going to cross the ADO Data Services and SQL Data Services, giving SDSS a more “Schema” like appoarch.

The container part is still my biggest concern, I have tables alone that are many many gig and I cant logically split them up into containers. MS does this for scale-out, that is the trick – you get the massive scale by moving your data around multiple servers, to do this, the data has do be in chunks. Maybe they can make some massive map reduce auto container middle layer that handles this, I do NOT what to think “how am I going to break out my 10 million records into 20 containers”. It does sound like the team knows this is an issue, and will find a way, and they seem excited about it.

The other services are very interesting, I am just now playing with the .NET Service Bus which is game changing for a very large client / server model app, it could be the backbone for a IM app.

So far, happy, just needs a bit more time in the oven. Not even looking at Amazon anymore, though they REALLY need to release pricing on this puppy – it should be less than what Amazon is as there is far less overhead.