May 27, 2010 Boston Azure Meeting

1. Michael Stiefel on use of relational databases in the cloud

At the May 27, 2010 Boston Azure meeting, Michael Stiefel was the main speaker. Michael gave a talk (slides here) on when you might want to use SQL Azure vs. “NoSQL” Azure in the cloud.

Some key phrases, highlights (very rough!):

• “Latency exists” – you need to care about it – and the speed of light matters - analogy to digging a hole: how fast you move the shovel
• “Bandwidth is limited” – you need to care about it – with hole-digging analogy, this is the size of shovel
• Computational Power gets cheaper faster than Network Bandwidth
• Connectivity is Not Always Available – welcome to the world of occasionally-connected devices like laptops on airplanes and the boom in mobile devices
• Waiting for Data slows computation
• Human Interaction – thinking time – can add latency to any operation
• Economics dictates scale out, not up
• Availability or Consistency? What is the Cost of an Apology?
• How consistent do you need to be? Weigh cost of consistency vs. cost oc of lost business… Business Decision!
• Design for Eventual Consistency

The meeting had around 25 people in attendance.

2. Discussion of Boston Azure Project

As part of the May meeting we discussed a proposal for the Boston Azure Project – an open source, collaborative, Azure-hosted coding project to “gently overengineer the bostonazure.org web site” – by Azurizing it. The proposal met with enough enthusiasm that it was adopted and we are moving forward with it.

3. Next: June 24 Meeting is All About The Code

In the June 24 meeting (RSVP here) we will get started on the Boston Azure Project. We will spend from 6:00 – 8:30 talking about it, organizing, and getting started. Bring your Azure-powered laptop!

The March 25th Boston Azure cloud user group meeting line-up includes the following:

6:00 – 6:45 PM – LAPTOP TIME! – if your laptop is capable of running IIS 7.x, bring it and we’ll help you configure it so you can program against Windows Azure. If you are already configured, come for LAPTOP TIME anyway and help out the others – or submit an entry to the Azure Code Project contest.

(pizza + salad will arrive during LAPTOP TIME)

6:45 – 7:00 – MAIN MEETING BEGINS with the Azure Update from Mark Eisenberg of Microsoft. Any questions about what’s happening with Azure? Want to hear some of the recent announcements? What’s moving and shaking in the Azure world? Join us at 6:45 to stay plugged in.

7:00 – 8:15 – INTUIT PARTNER PLATFORM – Intuit‘s Alex Barnett (Group Manager for Developer Relations) and his colleague Jarred Keneally (Developer Relations Engineer) will talk about the Intuit Partner Platform, the fantastic synergy with Windows Azure, the recently announced agreement between Microsoft and Intuit, and the opportunity for developers.

8:15 – 8:30 – WRAP UP – Boston Azure announcements, SWAG/Give-Aways, and Update on the Azure Firestarter we will be hosting on Saturday May 8th at NERD (all day learning event).

Please RSVP to help us with the list for front-desk security and to make sure we order enough pizza and salad. Hope to see you there!

Boston Azure meeting to feature Microsoft’s Curt Devlin on Identity in the Cloud

Thursday February 25, 2010 at NERD in Cambridge, MA

The following is an update to the agenda for the upcoming Boston Azure User Group meeting this coming Thursday.

To RSVP for the meeting (helps you breeze through security and helps us have enough pizza on hand), for directions, and more details about the group, please check out http://BostonAzure.org.

To get on the Boston Azure email list, please visit http://bostonazure.org/Announcements/Subscribe.

[6:00-6:30 PM] Boston Azure Theater

The meeting activities begin at 6:00 PM with Boston Azure Theater, which is an informal viewing of some Azure-related video. This month will feature the first half of
Matthew Kerner‘s talk on Windows Azure Monitoring, Logging, and Management APIs from the November 2009 Microsoft PDC conference.

[6:30-7:00 PM] Upcoming Boston Azure Events and Firestarter

Around 6:30, Bill Wilder (that’s me) will first show off an interesting CodeProject contest, then will lead a discussion about the future of the Boston Azure user group and the upcoming All-Day-Saturday-May-8th event.

Curt Devlin will take the stage at 7:00 PM.

Before the meeting, if you want a little more context, you may wish to read Kim Cameron’s essay The Laws of Identity, which is an insightful analysis of challenges around Identity.

[7:00-8:15] Featured speaker: Curt Devlin of Microsoft

Abstract

The Azure platform presents new challenges for identity management. As developers and architects, we will still have to answer the same two perennial questions: 1) Who are you? 2) And what are you allowed to do? But the traditional on-premise approaches to authentication, authorization and identity lifecycle control are not adequate to meet these new challenges. The Geneva suite of technologies for claims-based identity management can be help because cloud computing can be thought of as a “special case” of federation, with many similar requirements. Together these two paradigms appear to be converging to create the perfect storm of paradigm shifts. However, even WIF, ADFS 2.0 and CardSpace 2.0, will only take us part way to a complete solution in the near term. This session will provide a simple recipe for claims-based identity management in Azure using Geneva, discuss some of the most important reasons why this is necessary, and finally some of the shortcomings we will still have to contend with on the road ahead. The aim is to educate, motivate, and caution.

About Curt Devlin

Curt Devlin is currently an architect in Microsoft DPE (Developer & Platform Evangelism) focusing on distributed solutions across many industries and customer segments. Curt is a Microsoft veteran of many technology wars, with more than 20 years of experience developing solutions on the Windows and .NET. platforms. He is also a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander with avid interests in sailing, skiing and nearly everything else.

Curt blogs as the philosophical architect, plus you can check out his MSDN articles Enterprise Authorization Strategy and SaaS Capacity Planning: Transaction Cost Analysis Revisited.

Curt’s blog post announcing his participation in this meeting: http://blogs.msdn.com/curtd/archive/2010/02/23/an-evening-with-identity-in-the-clouds-and-the-boston-azure-user-group.aspx

This was the third meeting of the Boston Azure User Group! (You can get on the group mailing list here.)

We watched a clip from the first day of PDC where Ray Ozzie and others talk Azure in the keynote …

Discussed idea of an Azure Firestarter event – possibly for May 8, 2010 – and this seems to flow nicely from our scheduled April meeting where Jason Haley is scheduled to talk about getting started programming in Azure, such as with the Azure SDK.

Ben Day spoke on Windows Azure storage. Some quick notes / points from his talk:

• Relational databases have a schema – all rows in a table have same columns, structure is defined before pouring in any data, data is not repeated (third-normal form breaks out data to appear only once – no redundancy)
• … database will manage transactions across tables
• … though mixed with replication can provide performance challenges
• This changes for Azure Table Storage!
• … though Azure Table Storage can scale way better – horizontally (“out”) whereas traditional SQL RDBMs tend to scale best vertically (“up”) – to larger boxes – which is more limiting and tends to be more expensive.
• Do we need to rethink what needs to be transactional? Can we use a simplified transactional model – such as just within one table – or one instance of one table…
• … compensating transactions are another approach
• Securely storing data
  • Encrypt (compute is cheap)
  • If you encrypt a key, it won’t work for indexing
  • Search is harder if you encrypt
• String columns have a 64KB size limit for Table Storage – so reference larger objects in a Blob
• Unit testability
  • Abstract away you r persistent store, such as with Repository pattern – so you can unit test
  • Encapsulate business logic, such as with Service Layer and Domain Model patterns
  • Extract logic from UI using MVP (Model View Presenter)
  • Use Mock objects
• Ben will come back to finish the story!

Around 23 attended.