Microsoft Gambles on cloud computing: Windows Azure Dew

After SOA and WEB 2.0, cloud computing has become the hottest it technology today. As Microsoft's Chinese head, Dr. Zhang, says, cloud computing is changing the entire IT industry.

So what is cloud computing? Why is cloud computing so powerful? Let's just quote Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, "Cloud is a revolutionary computing model that connects the computing devices at hand with the processing and storage capabilities of large data centers, Transforming computing from limited resources to almost limitless platforms, regardless of where they are, connects users to the information they need. "Ballmer confidently pointed out that to invest 9.5 billion dollars this year, to build Windows Azure as the core cloud computing technology, and corresponding to 70% of the staff into the cloud-related products and services, next year, this number will become 90%."

This allows the author to think about it giant IBM's a well-known business case. 48 years ago, IBM President Wossen invested 5 billion dollars in developing IBM mainframe SYSTEM/360, becoming the biggest commercial gamble in IBM's history. Today, the Z series evolved from SYSTEM/360 became IBM's most lucrative machine.

Why is Microsoft so confident about Windows Azure, and what is Windows Azure?

I know, according to the service model classification, cloud computing can be divided into Saas,iass,paas. SaaS is the most commonly used service mode, in which users obtain software services directly from the service provider through the network, according to some kind of protocol SLA. IaaS refers to the provision of IT infrastructure as a service through the network. In this service mode, users do not have to build a data center themselves, but instead use the infrastructure services, including servers, storage, and networks, by leasing. PAAs refers to a complete application running platform as a service to the customer. In this service mode, customers do not need to purchase the underlying hardware and platform software, but only with the PAAs platform, they can create, test and deploy the application.

Windows Azure platform itself is a PAAs solution that provides hosting and running services for applications. From an architectural perspective, Windows Azure Plaform includes a cloud computing operating system, Windows Azure, Cloud Relational database SQL Azure, and a set of services for developers. NET Services. For developers, it is possible to deploy to an azure platform and use the services provided by the Azure platform, both in the development and creation of applications. The goal of Windows Azure platform is to allow developers to focus on business logic instead of deploying and managing the cloud services infrastructure, thus saving time and expense for deployment.

Windows Azure
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From a high point of view, understanding what is the cloud computing operating system Windows Azure, this is not difficult: it is a cloud running Windows applications and storage of its data platform, to provide computing services and storage services. Windows Azure runs on many machines. These machines are distributed across the world's data centers and can be accessed via the Internet. Windows Azure organizes these huge amounts of computing and storage resources into a whole through a fabric controller. Windows Computing services and storage services are built on this fabric architecture.

Next, we discuss the computing services and storage services for Windows Azure respectively.

Computing services for Windows Azure

Users can use Visual Studio,windows Azure for Visual Studio Plug-ins, as well as Windows Azure SDK Development, debugging, testing, deployment applications. For example, use the ASP.net development Web site, WCF development web SERVICE,WF development workflows, and so on.

Windows Azure will run applications on the platform called managed services and be divided into different roles: Web role and worker function. Each role can have multiple instances, each of which corresponds to a VM. The core technology behind providing virtualization services is Windows Azure Hypervisor. From this perspective, Windows Azure runs multiple Windows 2008 servers in the data center, providing cloud computing services with the help of Hyper-V customized virtualization services.

Simply, we can interpret web role as a Web site or Web service. The worker role is used to host generic code that performs some long-term, non-interactive tasks. For example, the worker role can be used to host Apache Tomcat.

The corresponding instances of WEB role and worker role are run independently on different virtual machines, and their communication mechanisms can be either synchronous direct network calls or Message Queuing asynchronous delivery.

The management of Web role and worker role is implemented through an API called the Windows Azure SDK. These APIs, as part of the Windows Azure SDK, can be used to develop Windows Azure applications locally.

Storage services for Windows Azure

Windows Azure's storage service is an extensible, high-availability, persistent service that can store any type of application data. By type, Windows Azure storage services can be divided into:

Large binary objects are designed to store large binary objects, such as pictures, videos, audio files, and Blob:blob.

Windows Azure Drive: Provides a virtual hard disk stored in Windows Azure that allows users to read and write data as if they were working on an NTFS hard disk.

Table: Corresponds to a relational database for storing data that is large and relatively simple in structure.

Message Queuing: A data type designed for reliable asynchronous messaging.

Summary

In the coming months, Microsoft will focus on the development of a new generation of Windows Azure cloud Platform, the goal is to promote Windows Azure from the PAAs to the Laas Cloud Service Strategy transformation, Microsoft will focus on three aspects, adjust the Azure platform virtual machine implementation way, Implement SQL Server and SharePoint applications by enabling users to run freely in Windows and Linux virtual machines; Windows Azure will add a new persistence feature; We also look forward to Windows Azure Computing services and storage services getting better.