Three
main components of Azure are currently available: Windows Azure 2008/
2008 R2 Server Edition Compute Services, Windows SQL Azure instances and
storage facilities. These components are sewn together by Microsoft's
AppFabric, an orchestration system for messaging, access control and
management portal.
However, none of the Windows Azure instances
are currently capable of being controlled by Microsoft's System Center
management system. They can't be touched by an organisation's Active
Directory infrastructure today, only by beta pre-release features.
Instance availability through mirroring or clustering is currently
unavailable, too.
Overall, it's far too early to recommend
Windows Azure. The architectural diagram looks very interesting, and
while some pieces appeared ready in testing, big chunks of the Azure
offerings aren't ready for enterprise use.
How we tested
We
controlled our Microsoft-supplied Azure account from our laptops
(MacBook Pros, sometimes running Window 7 VMs) and through our network
operations centre resources (numerous Dell, Tyan and HP servers, 10GB
Extreme Switch, Compellent SAN, 100Mbps connection hosted at
nFrame.com).
We installed the Azure related development
environment on a Windows 7 VM, which includes SQL Server 2008 R2
Express, IIS7, Visual Studio 2010 Express, Azure SDK and other
components using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.
Then we
proceeded to create a CGI Web Role using Visual Studio. We created a
simple test PHP app connecting to the SQL Azure database to make sure we
had it working correctly. We also had to get all the configuration
settings correct in Visual Studio's config files.
Afterwards,
we setup the Wordpress blog to use SQL Azure as the database, and added a
plugin, which used Azure Storage for uploaded images/files. We then
found about how rebooting an instance causes local drive storage, where
our WordPress pilot application was stored, to go away. Even application
monitoring claimed the application was working despite the fact that
the HTML was missing.
We also pushed the buttons and clicked
AppFabric features, and learned Azure and SQL Azure navigation,
provisioning and management components.
What you get today
Windows Azure provides production application support through Windows
Azure 2008/2008 R2 Server Edition Compute services, Windows SQL Azure,
and several forms of data storage. Customers can buy these services in
graduated instance sizes, and deploy them into various geographies, and
different Microsoft data centers within some of the geographies.
What's available today is a subset of the grander Windows Azure future
architectural roadmap. Buying into the Azure vision may turn out to have
great value in the future, and the pieces that are running today worked
well, but they don't satisfy the wide number of use cases associated
with IaaS or PaaS.
Another component of Microsoft's PaaS push
is Azure Marketplace, where developers can buy, sell and share building
blocks, templates and data sets, plus finished services and apps needed
to build Azure platform apps. The DataMarket section's offerings are
limited, while the apps section isn't commercially available yet.
Microsoft intends to expand the limited Azure Marketplace offerings
with both community and also marketed development tools, Azure-based
SaaS third party applications, and other business offerings. Ostensibly
third parties will replicate and offer the Azure model to clientele from
these and other sources.
Virtual machine roles
Windows
Azure components are defined by roles, currently Web Roles and worker
roles (based on IIS and .Net functionality), which can run against SQL
Azure database instances. The deployed processes are managed through
AppFabric, whose functionality exists inside the Azure resource pools as
a management layer and messaging infrastructure.
Glaringly
absent is the Virtual Machine Role. VM Roles are the commodity-version
of Azure Windows Server licences. We've seen them, but because they
aren't available yet, extreme constraints are imposed on the current
Azure platform.
Lack of a fully-loadable virtual machine
capability means that Azure doesn't fit a number of use cases that have
become associated with IaaS cloud services. For example, you can't
upload your own VM, even if it's religiously bound by all Windows 2003/8
Server R2 constraints, and run it in Azure.
As a result, you
can't currently use VM commodity-type services and use-cases found
through Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Bluelock, your own internal cloud and
other provisioning processes, most of which will digest your Windows
2003/8 R2 Server Edition applications and run them with glee.
Traditional licensing models currently imposed by Microsoft today mean
that there is no licence portability for the Windows server instances in
Azure. They must be Azure-specific instances and licensed in that way.
If you already have Windows 2008 instances, they're not portable into
the Azure cloud.
Also, you can't take one of your current
on-premises versions of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server or .Net into
Azure as a Virtual Hard Disk/VHD-booted instance today. When the VM Role
becomes available, Microsoft proposes hypervisor support for Windows
2003+ licence use on Windows Azure, where licence transfer via VM use in
the IaaS model will likely be possible.
Microsoft has
developed the Azure infrastructure fabric to be emulated and replicated
by future managed services providers (MSP), likely at the point when
both PaaS and IaaS become available. Microsoft's half dozen data centres
will be the core development platform for Azure, but Windows Azure will
be rented in a franchise-like fashion in the future, according to
Microsoft product marketing spokespeople, much in the way that VMware
has service providers renting vCenter.
The final portions of
Azure are storage and content distribution (CDN). Windows Azure allowed
us to store in the familiar folder (Drive C: style) or via an API which
supports BLOBs (Binary Large Objects), tables and queues. Stored data
doesn't even have to be in the same data centre or geography, although
we found it's a great way to run up data transport costs when we did it
accidentally.
Test results
We asked for access to the Azure
Business Edition and SQL Server Business Edition. Whatever is done
inside of the Azure Cloud is controlled by Microsoft's AppFabric, which
will place an instance of a pre-determined/pre-selected size in one of
its data centres, which are defined by region and specific data centres.
We could choose one of five instance types, ranging in cost from a
nickel an hour to nearly a dollar an hour based on platform strength.
Storage costs $0.15/GB/month plus a penny per 10,000 storage
transactions.
Systems mirroring is currently not available
within Azure, unlike Amazon Web Services (which recently and famously
crashed despite availability constructs). Availability can be somewhat
accomplished by setting the number of instances created in an
application to two or more.
VMware-based IaaS services often
offer mirroring or other availability services that don't currently
exist, except as future clusters, inside of Azure. You'll also be
charged for traffic between data centres, even within regions, we found,
thus making long distance clustering and/or mirroring for safety quite
expensive.
It's important to understand what's not production quality today, since we didn't test these features. These are beta or CTP:
Virtual Machine Roles - uploadable VM payloads based on virtual
hard disks (VHD), Hyper-V features are beta and CTP for eventual use in
both IaaS and PaaS models
Azure Connect - Provides secure
IP-level connectivity between Windows Azure and your enterprise, no
current VPNs for public/private cloud constructs in production
Azure Traffic Manager - Load balancing traffic management to multiple
host environments with three qualities: performance, failover or
round-robin balancing, this is an IaaS feature not currently seen often
in PaaS models
SQL Azure Reporting -which is both CTP and invitation-only
Connectivity to Microsoft's SaaS BPOS services
Federated identity options, Active Directory doesn't work today
Public/Private interaction via the Windows Azure Appliance Platform
works only for a few private customers, and is likely CTP
Mirroring or cluster creation is unavailable
Microsoft Systems Center modules don't really work because Active Directory federation isn't possible (among other reasons)
Our current product licences aren't transferrable - SQL Server,
Windows 2008R2, and .Net licences aren't usable on Azure, but might be
after VHDs work. After all, on a VHD you can load what you want
Developers and business partners can't use Microsoft Service Provider
Licensing Agreements to cover Windows Azure use currently
Local
storage persistence is CTP - only BLOB storage is guaranteed to be
persistent after an instance reboot. Drive C is as good as the instance
not rebooting unless you unload it from a BLOB first, after the local
NTFS drive is initialised after a reboot
We tested Windows
Azure by obtaining an Azure account. Once the account was in service, we
chose an instance size, a role, then started to work testing the
instance with Microsoft Visual Studio.
Eclipse, and a stunning
number of third party tools largely using REST communications, are used
to talk to .Net functionality inside of an instance. The Windows Azure
Server instance storage drives are NTFS volumes, and made using page
BLOBs as an NTFS-formatted Virtual Hard Drive.
SQL Azure
databases can be connected and used by an Azure 2008 R2 instance, and
SQL Azure instances are able to be communicated with via client-side
APIs from an external source.
Azure instances are controlled
through AppFabric, which is an Azure-resident cloud middleware API and
messaging infrastructure, a service bus in Microsoft parlance. It's used
for access control, instance setup and chooses how, given the choices
we made, an instance would be hosted.
Eventually, AppFabric can
be used to provide proposed access identity control between distributed
and connected apps or potentially (beta alert) internal appliance-like
applications. Storage/metadata caching services are also available from
AppFabric, but these were not tested.
Windows Azure runs
programs and stores data, and is used in the context of roles that are
similar to how Windows Server thinks of roles. Today, using Microsoft's
Visual Studio or development suites like Eclipse, you can develop code
to run with an IIS web interface, or background Worker Roles which do
not use IIS.
We tested Web and Worker Roles along with the SQL
Azure Role using a Microsoft Developer Network blog-recommended
implementation of Wordpress blogging software into the Azure cloud. The
process used a Web Role that accessed Azure storage and used SQL Azure,
with the well known WordPress blogging app.
We installed
WordPress using Visual Studio Express to create our WordPress Website.
After we created a Windows Azure Web Role as an Azure project, we had to
add the php SQL Server library, the Azure PHP SDK, php and Wordpress
files all in the Visual Studio project. We reacquainted ourselves with
the hell of configuration files.
All worked fine until an
upgrade demanded a reboot of the instance. Then we discovered that NTFS
local storage isn't guaranteed to be persistent, although Windows Azure
Drives and BLOBs are. Indeed our storage disappeared as we'd mistakenly
chosen NTFS local storage, after we rebooted the instance.
The
Azure Web Role WordPress application we used ran within a "medium"
Windows Server 2008 instance with two cores at 1.6GHz with 3.5GB of RAM
with 490GB of disk space. It costs $0.24 per hour for the instance (not
including the SQL Azure costs, which vary per database from $9.95 to
$499.95 per month).
