Windows Azure provides web-based services cloud computing for oil and gas industry customers

The fielding system provides two powerful web-based services for the large and small upstream oil and gas companies, helping operators streamline production activities and increase field operations management, remote monitoring, and production analysis. Each application includes a fully functional mobile version that allows all customers to access their data and operate from any modern smartphone, including the iphone, Android, and Windows phone.

Fieldvisor is a domain automation and data  application that can be used to track any movement in oil and gas production operations. Users can track production, equipment, services, processing history, tasks, and many other aspects of production operations. Fieldvisor is more focused on manual input of data instead of paper and pen and provides robust analysis and reporting. Scadavisor monitors remote devices such as flowmeters, Pump-off controllers, tanks, compressors, PLC ' s, manual lifts and other real-time monitoring devices. In the same category it is the only truly cloud-based service, because it is supported by our own cloud-based communications and polling engines called Visorbridge.

All fielding system applications are hosted in our own datacenter. These applications were upgraded to take full advantage of Windows Azure and were completely migrated to Windows Azure in July 2011. The decision to migrate to the cloud is because we want to focus and resources on cutting-edge technology instead of spending a lot of effort on managing the servers, backups, and networks of each application. We recognize that companies typically spend a lot of time and resources supporting their business rather than concentrating on technology, and cloud computing allows us to do so. Migrating to the cloud also facilitates significant cost savings by reducing excess server resources and the expensive costs involved in maintaining software licenses for data center and host hosting. By measuring the various options for the cloud, we chose Windows Azure because it provides us with a more powerful development platform. Windows Azure offers faster market-access and better scalability than other services, taking advantage of this and actually hosting only virtual machines.

Migrating to Windows Azure initially only saves the cost of rack space, power, backup, and auxiliary hot-war host hosting for existing data centers. However, after the migration, costs have been falling as we expand our services and our customer base.

Architecture

Fieldvisor, Fieldvisor Mobile, Scadavisor, and Scadavisor Mobile have separate single tenant SQL Azure with each customer in Windows Azure The form of a multi-tenant Web application for a database exists. These applications are supported by a central SSO management application that manages the users, roles, security, and other application configurations, along with multithreaded worker roles for handling alerts and notifications, maintaining customer databases, and performing remote data from field devices.

Currently, we take advantage of almost all aspects of Windows Azure, including:

Computing instance: multiple Web and worker role blob storage: BLOB storage for site incremental upgrades and automated backup of SQL Azure databases using BACPAC. Table storage: Table is used to process centralized data and to provide performance calculation data for computing system records. Queue storage: Queue for event scheduling, real-time device data requests, automatic notifications, and worker role management. SQL Azure: All customer Application data is kept in a single tenant database with several multi-tenant core management databases. SQL Azure reports: Fieldvisor and Scadavisor reports are supported by the SQL Azure report. Customers use the report View asp.net control to select Run reports and have a user-defined schedule with a worker role control to manage all scheduled reports. Caching:caching is treated as a session provider in each application with the cache supported by each Web application. Caching is also used to limit the load on each SQL Azure database.

We considered a number of operations that use table storage when upgrading each application. Because of the complexity of the data and the need for an existing SQL database, we decided to take advantage of the database for all major processes, but attached to a pub model for background processes, data inserts, automatic import/export, and remote device polling choices.

Single sign-on (SSO)/Central multithreaded worker role

Our custom single sign-on (SSO) service handles scheduled tasks, notifications, automatic import/export, and other processes that need to reside in several small instances, along with all worker roles. Most of the actual work and processes are performed in SQL Azure in smaller units, so the cost of these computational instances is lower.

Application

Fieldvisor and Scadavisor, and their mobile versions support Web and OData services, are hosted in two medium computing instances. Our multi-tenant deployment process handles rollouts and manages IIS to start new sites and services. The chart describes a single tenant database for each application.

SQL Azure Report

When deploying applications to Windows Azure for the first time, we must make sure that the instances of SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting services are running, handling all reports of Fieldvisor and Scadavisor. Since then, we have migrated all reports to the SQL Azure report, one of the first companies to produce using SQL Azure reports.