Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

At PDC08 keynote, Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft has just announced the CTP launch of Windows Azure - The Cloud Computing Platform. In his words, its the 'World of parallel computing and world of horizontal scale" and Azure is the answer to cloud computing needs for the service age. It's a hosted 'app-engine' style cloud services housed in the microsoft data centers, first in the US and then internationally. However, its offers WAY beyond what an "app-engine" can do.



Windows Azure, dubbed as "the operating system for the cloud" allows, Windows Azure manages the complexity of data center management and cloud hosting and allows you to focus on the app development. The key features/points as are follows.

• Automated Service Management
• Scalable Hosting
• Manage Services, not just servers
• Service Model and Code
• High Availability
  
• Rich Developer Experience (test it from ur local machine using Visual Studio)

Windows Azure Hello World app can be seen here. hellocloud.cloudapp.net.

Ray demonstrated adding new nodes to the cloud via the management console. In his words, "it's (adding nodes) is so easy, even a CEO can do it". It's going to be an open platform offer REST Command line interfaces and management instrumentation via Windows Azure Development Fabric. The Operating System for the Cloud leverages Oslo based modeling which "fundamentally modifies the way we code today". A strong statement, let's see how it unfolds over time.

I am blogging this at a time when there are only 256 entries if you Google "Windows Azure" which is going to change very very fast. I'll keep posting as we at PDC gets early access to Azure CTP and get to host and play with this exciting new platform.

Azure Service Platform
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx

Windows Azure
http://www.azure.com/

Photos of the presentation are here.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=68816&l=ce60f&id=565127783

This is my tentative schedule for the PDC'08. Listing of all the sessions I want to attend however this requires human cloning and hence I might be watching streaming of the sessions I am unable to attend due to these scheduling conflicts. PDC08 Schedule for Adnan Masood Monday, October 27 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM   8:30 AM - 11:00 AM Keynote Hall A     11:00 AM - 12:15 PM A Lap around Cloud Services Part 1 Petree Hall CD   Live Labs Web Sandbox: Securing Mash-ups, Site Extensibility, and Gadgets 408B     12:45 PM - 1:30 PM Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks 403AB     1:45 PM - 3:00 PM ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap 153   The Future of C# Petree Hall CD     3:30 PM - 4:45 PM ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications 153     5:15 PM - 6:30 PM Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service Petree Hall CD   Framework Design Guidelines 403AB   Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 502A   Microsoft .NET Framework: Overview and Applications for Babies 411     Tuesday, October 28 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM   8:30 AM - 11:00 AM Keynote Hall A     11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Keynote Hall A     11:00 AM - 12:30 PM   12:45 PM - 1:30 PM Live Services: What I Learned Building My First Mesh Application 501B   WCF: Zen of Performance and Scale 515B   Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote 403AB     1:45 PM - 3:00 PM SQL Server 2008: Business Intelligence and Data Visualization 515A   How to Develop Supercomputer Applications 408A     3:30 PM - 4:45 PM   5:15 PM - 6:30 PM Architecting Services for the Cloud Petree Hall CD   ASP.NET and JQuery 403AB     Wednesday, October 29 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM   8:30 AM - 11:00 AM Keynote Hall A     10:30 AM - 11:45 AM Service Bus Services: Connectivity, Messaging, Events, and Discovery 406A   Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio Petree Hall CD     12:00 PM - 12:45 PM Showcase: Cloud Computing Platform Enables Next Generation Conferencing Solutions 408A   Improving Code Quality with Code Analysis 409A     1:15 PM - 2:30 PM Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale 403AB   Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability 153     3:00 PM - 4:15 PM A Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer Petree Hall CD   Developing with Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET for Server Core 515A   The Future of C# [REPEAT] 502A     4:45 PM - 6:00 PM Mono and .NET 515B   Architecture without Big Design Up Front 403AB   A Lap around "Oslo" [REPEAT] 502A     Thursday, October 30 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM Services Symposium: Expanding Applications to the Cloud 515B     8:30 AM - 9:45 AM SQL Server Data Services : Under the Hood 404A   Live Services: FeedSync and Mesh Synchronization Services 153   PowerShell: Creating Manageable Web Services 406A   Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft 151   Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex 403AB     10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Under the Hood: Inside the Cloud Computing Hosting Environment 151   ASP.NET: Cache Extensibility 403AB     10:15 AM - 11:45 AM Services Symposium: Enterprise Grade Cloud Applications 515B     12:00 PM - 1:15 PM Cloud Computing: Programming in the Cloud Petree Hall CD     12:00 PM - 1:30 PM   1:45 PM - 3:00 PM An Introduction to Microsoft F# 502A

I wrote/scavenge this while Amanda Laucher's F# talk yesterday. It's a beauty, this terse F# syntactically & semantically. Having worked with scheme, experimenting with F# comes naturally however James Iry during a 1-1 discussions begs to differ that they are QUITE different. I have yet to independently verify the merit of this claim.

open System.IO
open System.Net            
            
let GetUrl(url:string) =

    let req = WebRequest.Create(url)

    // Get the response, synchronously
    let rsp = req.GetResponse()

    // Grab the response stream and a reader. Clean up when we're done
    use stream = rsp.GetResponseStream()
    use reader = new StreamReader(stream)

    // Synchronous read-to-end, returning the result
    reader.ReadToEnd()

let result = GetUrl("http://www.google.com")
printfn "%s" result

A comparison of Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2 and Sun Project Caroline. Thanks to Rashid Kamran for pointing me to it.