Even where organisations cannot make full use of public cloud for reasons of security or because of bandwidth limitations, many of the advantages of flexibility and rapid deployment can be made by providing a private cloud where the IT department manages the service but allows users to use the resources as their requirements change. Could Private Clouds provide a new paradigm for enterprises, irrespective of the public cloud?… Read more
It is wrong to assume that moving to a managed cloud platform means never having to be concerned with upgrades to the operating system: It is important to be aware of how these updates are applied, and how they can affect the availability and maintainability of your cloud-based applications… Read more
Any IT application will suffer a failure at some point. A well-designed application can accomodate failure by reacting in such a way as to minimise the effect: to fail gracefully. Good Cloud software design should plan around mitigating the consequences of failure of any part of the system… Read more
Windows Azure Acess Control Service (ACS) provides a way of authenticating users who need to access web applications and services without having to factor complex authentication logic into the application itself. It is surprisingly easy to create a custom login page that delegates the authentication process to an identity provider… Read more
Windows Azure Blob Storage Windows Azure Storage is one of the core components in Windows Azure that offers a scalable, highly available, and competitively priced storage option. Amongst others abstractions in Azure Storage (Table Storage and Queue Storage), Blob Storage is perhaps the most widely-used service. Blob Storage allows us to store any unstructured text … Read more
It makes sense, when developing Azure applications, to offer better security than the traditional ID & password. It is better to allow customers to use some of their existing online identities such as Microsoft Live ID, Google, Yahoo or Facebook. Security tokens provide a neat way of doing this.… Read more
There are more steps involved in debugging or running a Windows Azure Project than a typical ASP.NET project, so it takes longer. Although you can debug or run the ASP.NET project more quickly when developing a Windows Azure project, there are some restrictions and caveats, as Wely Lau explains.… Read more
So how easy is it to set up a database-driven application on Azure, using the tools that one is familar with. There are several different ways of doing it, and Bud decides to find out which is the best way… Read more
The elasticity of a PaaS solution allows you to react quickly to increasing load, but at a cost. How do you test your software to make sure that it can scale without denting your profits? Fortunately, you can set up a test lab easily and reasonably cheaply to spot bottlenecks and budget for the cloud provision.… Read more
There are some essential tasks to be done in move existing applications to the cloud, because of the differences between the on-premise and cloud architecture, though the move from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Azure is generally straightforward. … Read more
By caching static content on the Content Delivery Network CDN, the web server can offload the serving of content that doesn't change, and so will have more resources for processing requests for active content. Browser-based users of your application will get static content delivered with less latency from a server that is closer to them.… Read more
Imagine that you are running a website that is subject to wide fluctuations in demand, such as a ticket-selling system for events. How would you plan for migrating a seemingly-ideal candidate for a cloud platform to Windows Azure? … Read more
There are four major changes that are required when moving applications to the cloud: Architectural, Application-level security, overcoming shortcomings, and diagnostic logging and monitoring. It is likely that the changes to the architecture of applications will take the most effort if you are to get the most advantages from the cloud.… Read more
When you are planning to implement a cloud system, there are twelve architectural guidelines that can help you to get the most out of the advantages that a cloud platform can provid… Read more
This is the second article of a two-part introduction to Windows Azure. The first part discussed the Windows Azure data centers and examined the core services that Windows Azure offers. This article explore additional services available as part of Windows Azure which enable customers to build richer, more powerful applications.… Read more
Migrating applications from physical servers to a new set of virtual machines on Amazon Web Services (AWS) has proved to be a rewarding experience. It was more expensive than expected but has proved to perform well, and given a means of rapid scaling up horizontally and/or vertically when required … Read more
Shameer continues in his quest to use the Toto Blogging engine and Git to create a fast blogging platform on Heroku. In part 1, he showed how to get a basic blogging platform up and running. Now he shows how to customize a Toto template and engine, and edit the engine to have more sophisticated functionality such as tag clouds or related articles.… Read more
Windows Azure is the Microsoft cloud computing platform which enables developers to quickly develop, deploy, and manage their applications hosted in a Microsoft data center. As a PAAS provider, Windows Azure not only takes care of the infrastructure, but will also help to manage higher level components including operating systems, runtimes, and middleware.… Read more
In the Cloud, services come in the form of Software (SaaS), Infrastructure (IaaS) and platform (PaaS). when moving a service to the cloud, IaaS and PaaS provide two different service models and provisioning steps of solutions. A PaaS providers has more responsibility for your solution than an IAAS provider. wherase an IaaS solutionmay offer more flexibility at lower level. Wely Lau explains.… Read more
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