Bridging the gap between Windows Server and Azure
When Microsoft’s Ryan Dunn mingled with attendees at the TechEd conference in New Orleans in June, he got several questions about how developing software applications for the cloud and monitoring them in production will differ from developing them for on-premise deployment.
“They thought perhaps there was a new model,” said Dunn, Microsoft’s Windows Azure technical evangelist; a video of an interview he did during TechEd was posted today. “The reality is we still have the same things you want to do.”
Those things, he continued, include performance monitoring, crash dump analysis, following Trace messages and other testing and debugging methods.
However, Dunn acknowledged “a little bit of a gap” between the development tools and capabilities available in Windows Server and those available for Azure, but added that the gap is narrowing.
“These things are on a natural trajectory towards each other and I think you’re going to see a lot of the tooling that we have on premises become available at some point in Windows Azure,” he said.
Until then, Azure developers have to use additional tools to perform some tasks that they don’t need in Windows Server, Dunn explained. They include the Windows Azure Management Tool (MMC) to upload, deploy, upgrade and otherwise manage hosted services, as well as configure and run diagnostic tests on those apps. Another tool is the Windows PowerShell command list, a task-based scripting technology for managing system administration.
Microsoft released the Windows Azure software development kit (SDK) version 1.2 at TechEd, which includes, among other things, IntelliTrace, which Dunn described as “like a DVR for your code.”
IntelliTrace allows a developer to see what was going on in the code at the precise point at which an anomaly occurred, without having to repeatedly restart the application, thus saving loads of time. IntelliTrace loads code logs into Microsoft Visual Studio, the integrated development environment for Windows. However, IntelliTrace is only available to users of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
While one of the chief values of cloud computing is cost containment, Dunn acknowledged cost monitoring in Azure is still a work in progress. “We don’t have a billing API,” he said in the interview. Still, there’s a way to calculate costs based on the number of CPU cycles used and the hourly rate typically charged -- Dunn used 12 cents an hour as an example -- times the number of server cores running your application in the cloud.
Microsoft took other steps to further develop the Azure platform, announcing at TechEd the addition of .NET Framework 4 to the SDK to build Web-based applications that run in the cloud, Network World’s Jon Brodkin reported. It also moved the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) from beta to production; a CDN service places copies of data at several places on a network to avoid a bottleneck of multiple users trying to access that data on just one server.
While Dunn is evangelizing -- as his business card reads -- Windows Azure by promoting its ever improving features and capabilities, developers in the real world may have a different view. Let me know your experiences developing and running applications in the cloud on Azure and whether the experience matches that of doing the same on Windows Server.
No comments:
Post a Comment