Consumer web applications today need to be web-scale to handle the increasing traffic requirements. One of the key components of the contemporary web application architecture is storage. Social networking and media sites are dealing with massive user generated content that is growing disproportionately. This is where Cloud storage can help. By leveraging the Cloud storage effectively, applications can scale better.

Windows Azure Storage has multiple offerings in the form of Blob, Table and Queues. Blob are used to store binary objects like images, videos and other static assets while Table is used for dealing with the flexible, schema-less entities. Queues allow asynchronous communication across the role instances and components of Cloud applications.

In this article, we will see how PHP developers can talk to Azure Blob storage to store and retrieve objects. Before that, let’s understand the key concepts of Azure Blobs.

Azure Blobs are a part of Windows Azure Storage accounts. If you have a valid Windows Azure account, you can create a storage account to gain access to the Blobs, Tables and Queues. Storage accounts come with a unique name that will act as a DNS name and storage access key that is required for authentication. Storage account will be associated with the REST endpoints of Blobs, Tables and Queues. For example, when I created a Storage account named janakiramm, the Blob endpoint is http://janakiramm.blob.core.windows.net. This endpoint will be used to perform Blob operations like creating and deleting containers and uploading objects.

Many architects face the challenge of mapping and aligning the physical architecture with the Cloud architecture. This is primarily due to the wide array of choices on the Cloud and also due to some of the constraints introduced by the Cloud. Storage is one of the most critical players influencing the availability, reliability and cost of a Cloud application. This article summarizes various Cloud storage choices that are offered by Windows Azure. The objective is to identify the key role played by each of the storage services and highlight the common use case for that service.

In the traditional environments, the storage choices are typically based on the following -

• Direct Attached Storage
• In-Memory
• Message Queue
• Storage Area Network
• Network Attached Storage
• Databases
• Archival / Backup

However, on the Cloud, the terminology and the analogy of Storage is different from a classic on-premise storage terminology. For example, emulating SAN or NAS is difficult in the Cloud. But at the same time, Windows Azure offers a variety of storage choices to build web-scale application on the Cloud. We will now take a look at these choices to understand the scenarios and use cases.

• Local Storage
• Azure Drive
• Azure Blobs
• Azure Tables
• Azure Queues
• Azure Cache
• SQL Azure
• Custom Databases

In part 1 of this series, we have been through the process of signing up with Windows Azure. In this part, we will setup the development environment required to get started with your first Cloud application.

Firstly, you need to download and install Microsoft Visual Studio. For this, visit microsoft.com/visualstudio and click on Visual Web Developer Express from the Product link.

Windows Azure is the Platform as a Service offering from Microsoft. Though it started as the preferred Cloud platform for .NET developers, it has come a long way to become a true polyglot PaaS. Windows Azure supports running .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js and even PERL, Ruby, Python and other applications. Its tighter integration with Visual Studio and Eclipse makes it productive for the developers to design, develop, test and deploy applications on Windows Azure.

In this series, we will see how to develop and deploy your first application on Windows Azure. Since the objective of this tutorial is to make you familiar with the life cycle of a Cloud application development, the application in itself is kept simple. We will focus on the key concepts and steps involved in going live with your first application.

For the big picture of Windows Azure, take a look at the detailed analysis covered on CloudStory.in.

Having covered Cloud Foundry, Force.com, Google App Engine and Red Hat OpenShift, we now take a look at Microsoft’s PaaS offering, Windows Azure.

Microsoft Windows Azure Platform is a Platform as a Service offering from Microsoft. It was announced in 2008 and became available in 2010. Since then Microsoft has been constantly improving the platform by adding new features.

Let me first explain each of the components of Windows Azure Platform and then walk you through the scenarios for deploying applications on this platform.

Many customers evaluating Public Cloud will invariably consider Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. With both the stacks adding new services at a rapid pace, it becomes hard to understand how the features stack up. This is an attempt to put them side by side and do a quick comparison of the features. We will be updating this grid to reflect the latest additions to either stacks.

Amazon DynamoDB is the latest NoSQL offering from AWS. It is a managed, scalable and on-demand database with provisioned throughput. Provisioned Throughput will let you state your read and write throughput requirements upfront based on which the cost will be calculated. For an introduction to DynamoDB, refer to this article we covered on CloudStory.in.

This tutorial is meant for the .NET developers to get started with Amazon DynamoDB. I will show you how to create a Table and perform CRUD operations on it. Amazon DynamoDB provides a low-level API and an Object Persistence API for the .NET developers. In this tutorial, we will see how to use the Object Persistence API to talk to Amazon DynamoDB. We will model a component that represents a DVD Library with capabilities to add, modify, query and delete individual DVDs.

One of the popular instance types supported by Amazon EC2 is the Micro Instance. In November 2010, Amazon announced the free tier and started offering 750 hours of Micro Instance usage free per month for the first one year. Initially this offer was available only to Amazon Linux instances but last month AWS announced that they are extending this to Microsoft Windows Server instances.

Looking at the technical specifications, the Micro Instance type doesn’t have the muscle required for heavy lifting. It comes with burst CPU capacity that can go up to 2 Elastic Compute Units (ECU). That means the CPU performance is not predictable. The main memory offered is 613MB! This is just not sufficient for running any serious workloads. Of course, storage can be added through EBS and the free tier covers up to 30GB of storage.

But it doesn’t mean Micro Instances are totally useless. They offer excellent value in certain scenarios. In this article, I want to share how to get the best out of the Amazon EC2 Micro Instances and the dos and don’ts of using them.

Let me start by asking this question – what differentiates a platform from a product? A product is typically targeted at consumers and the only metric to measure the success of a product is the number of consumers using the product or the market share. But what is a platform? A platform is a product that goes beyond the consumers and builds a thriving ecosystem around it. Majority of this ecosystem consists of developers and other product companies that embrace and extend the original product. Facebook is undoubtedly a platform. That is because there is a very healthy ecosystem around Facebook that literally brought everything from the digital storefronts to the commercial e-learning services into Facebook platform. The other example is Amazon.com, which is one of the early companies that realized the advantage of building a platform and not just an online ecommerce store. That enabled Amazon to quickly become the only digital outlet for traditional brick and mortar retail companies. In the recent past many companies successfully transitioned from a product company to a platform company. Apple and Google are the examples of the new generation platform companies. Of course, Microsoft made sure that everything that they built is a platform by encouraging its partners to complement the functionality. Do you know that the most popular consumer product of Microsoft, Microsoft Office is a strong platform? There are tens of thousands of companies whose products and business models revolve around the Microsoft Office platform.

Technically what turns a product into the platform is the Application Programming Interface or API. An API is a hook for developers to tap into the power of a product. This opens up many avenues for the developers to extend the scenarios that go beyond the original intent of the product. An API lets developers automate the functionality without going through the user interface. For example, if you are an ecommerce website, you can integrate your product tracking page with the Blue Dart API to provide a unified and seamless experience to your customers to track the status of their order. Interestingly, once a product starts exposing the basic API, the consumers of the API will drive the innovation and will influence the evolution by shaping the roadmap. Over a period of time, the API becomes mature and starts powering other successful products and services thus transforming the original product to a complete platform.

Read the complete article at CloudStory.in

]]> http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/are-the-indian-tech-startups-building-platforms-or-just-products/feed 0 http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/are-the-indian-tech-startups-building-platforms-or-just-products http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JanakiramM/~3/U6AhLYn0Mvw/my-interview-with-jishnu-bhattacharjee-of-nexus-venture-partners http://www.janakiramm.net/blog/my-interview-with-jishnu-bhattacharjee-of-nexus-venture-partners#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:01:23 +0000 Jani http://www.janakiramm.net/?p=2846

Last week I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners on what Cloud really means to a VC. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

The interview is available on CloudStory.in in two parts. Below are links to the articles.

Cloud Conversations: Cloud Specialist Janakiram MSV with Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners – Part 1

Cloud Conversations: Cloud Specialist Janakiram MSV with Jishnu Bhattacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners – Part 2

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