Windows Azure Management Portal gets a facelift !!

Microsoft released a new UI for the Windows Azure Management Portal.
     - The new layout is far more intuitive then earlier one.
     - I am glad that they have not over-utilized Silvelright animations. Silvelright Animations are look cool when demonstrating or selling someting, but i have serious doubts about their usability in a day-to-day operational UI implementation.
     - Integartion of your all your Azure services and subscription in a single portal is a good, welcoming and much needed enhancement. I am especially loving the SQL Azure admin features built into the portal. Infomration Cube with DB usage statistics is nice feature as well that points to the increment level of maturity SQL Azure is going to see over new few releases.
     - Ribbon UI will also go a long way towards establishing consistent experience with other Microsoft Offcie products. I hope to see Ribbon also getting incorporated into Microsoft's Server and tools business over next few months and years.

    Azure still needs several cycles and set of services to be a true app dev platform, but this new portal seems to be a good step towards creating an experience for users that can be extended to new services ( as and when they are launched).

  I also like that they have link to the old portal, in case someone is in the middle of a project and doesn't want to get familiar with new portal, they can always swicth to the old portal. So not like some of Microsoft's other software releases !! :)

There are few glitches in the portal, but I hope they will get fixed in next few weeks/months.
Enjoy!!

Windows Azure SDK 1.3 release!!

I got a demo from Microsoft of some of the goodies that is being shipped with Windows Azure SDK 1.3 release. It's made significant progress since the previous release, especially in the area of IAAS (infrastrucutre  as a service). The new Windows Azure management portal (Silverlight front-end) is also streamlined to support new features and services. Here's some of the key features budled in new release. Cannot wait to try them out:

• VM Role (Beta): Create your own custom VHD based on Windows Server 2008 R2 and deploy it to the cloud. This feature makes it so much easier to migrate existing applications to the cloud, reducing management and hosting costs.
•  Extra Small Instance Size (Beta): Run an extra small compute instance for only $0.05 per hour.
•  Remote Desktop Access: Connect to individual service instances with the remote desktop client as you would with any deployment in a hosted scenario.
•  Full IIS Support in Webroles: Host your web applications in IIS and configure IIS to suit your needs.
•  Elevated Privileges: Perform tasks in a service instance with elevated privileges.
•  Virtual Network (CTP): Use Windows Azure Connect to accomplish IP-level connectivity between on-premises en the cloud.
•  Network Enhancements: Restrict inter-role communication and use fixed ports on InputEndpoints.
•  Performance Improvement: Experience better performance when developing in the development fabric.
Cheers!!

De-mystifying Windows Azure AppFabric

There seems to lot of confusion about the Windows Azure AppFabric. Lot of it is primarily because of many people trying to over-sell the capabilities of Azure Appfabric based on the marketing collaterals published by Microsoft. Another big reason behind the confusion is the similarity in name of an entirely different product from Microsoft called as "Windows Server AppFabric".

"Windows Azure AppFabric" Vs "Windows Server AppFabric":
            1.  They are two very different product designed for two very different purposes.
            2.  "Windows Server App Fabric" has come out of Microsoft projects like Dublin and Velocity; whereas "Windows Azure App Fabric" is the next version of what was called as "Windows Azure .NET Services".
            3.  As I will explain in below post, they can compliment each other to enable some really cool capabilities.

Windows Server AppFabric:
   1. It's part of Windows Server (on-premise)
   2. It aims to help developers who are trying to build on-premise web applications
   3. Following are the key areas where it tries to provide help (also called as core capabilities):
                   a. Caching: This is used to speed up access to frequently accessed data such as session info in an ASP.NET application. This is done using a feature called as "AppFabric Caching Service".
                   b. Hosting of composite applications: These are typically the applications built using "Windows Workflow Foundation" or "Windows Communication Foundation". The AppFabric management is integrated into the IIS , and can be used to deploy, manage, and control your services.

Step 1 of the the wizard that you will go through to configure App Fabirc for a windows server gives a good high level overview of some of the core capabilities:

 
    Additionally, tight integration with PowerShell and System Center can also help streamline various capabilities provided by Windows Server App Fabric.

Windows Azure AppFabric:
        Initial focus was to enable applications hosted in cloud be able to talk to applications hosted behind firewalls (on-premise)  in a streamlined secure way. The product has evolved to enable many different new scenarios such as "mobility - consumption of cloud hosted services by mobile and smart devices", "messaging relay for communication between multiple desktop/on-premise/cloud applications" and other features typically associated with an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) implementations.

        Currently it comprises of two key components (aka services), but I definitely see this feature going multiple enhancements as cloud and on-premise technologies start to merge. Here is the official definition of the two features:
            a. Service Bus - Helps to provide secure connectivity between loosely-coupled services and applications, enabling them to navigate firewalls or network boundaries and to use a variety of communication patterns. Services that register on Service Bus can easily be discovered and accessed, across any network topology.

            b. Access Control - Helps you build federated authorization into your applications and services, without the complicated programming that is normally required to secure applications that extend beyond organizational boundaries. With its support for a simple declarative model of rules and claims, Access Control rules can easily and flexibly be configured to cover a variety of security needs and different identity-management infrastructures.

                            

 Conclusion:
     While Windows Server AppFabric is a product that is targeted to make life easier for developers who are writing WCF and WWF based application to be hosted in IIS, Azure AppFabric is focused on enabling consumption of those (on-premise) services/workflows from cloud. The combination of these two products can enable unprecedented level of  integration between organizations (vendors/suppliers/customers/public services/etc).