This document provides an overview of the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, including its data center infrastructure, categories of services, and key projects. Some of the main points covered include: - Windows Azure uses globally distributed data centers housed in shipping containers to maximize server density and efficiency. - It provides various compute, storage, data, connectivity, security, and application services through a generalized cloud application model. - Key projects expand on services for identity/access management, caching, service hosting, information delivery, and more.

1. Windows Azure Platform

2. Microsoft in the Cloud
(15 years)
450M+
active users
(13 years)
550M
users/mth
(12 years)
Largest non-
ICP/IP cloud
service
x100M users
(11 years)
320M+
active
users
(11 years)
2B
queries/mth
(15 years)
450M+
active users
(7 years)
5B conf
min/yr
(6 years)
4B emails/day

3. Bing – “Auto Pilot” Architecture
Web & Structured
Data Indices
~100,000 Servers in Multiple Data Centers

4. Generalized Cloud Application Model
Federated
Scale-Out
Elastic
Staged Production
Self-Service
Multi-Tenant
Model-Driven
Always Available
Failure Resilient
Service-Oriented

5. The Microsoft Cloud
> Purpose-built data centre to
accommodate containers at
large scale
 Cost $500 million, 100,000 square foot
facility (10 football fields)
> 40 foot shipping containers can
house as many as 2,500 servers
 Density of 10 times amount of
compute in equivalent space in
traditional data centre
> Can deliver an average PUE of
1.22
 Power Usage Effectiveness benchmark
from The Green Grid™ consortium on
energy efficiency
Data Center Infrastructure

6. The Microsoft Cloud
Data Center Infrastructure

7. The Microsoft Cloud
Data Center Infrastructure

8. The Microsoft Cloud
~100 Globally Distributed Data Centers
Quincy, WA Chicago, IL San Antonio, TX Dublin, Ireland Generation 4 DCs

9. The Microsoft Cloud
Highly available, scalable, and consistent application fabric environment

10. Platform Services
Software Services
Application Services
Infrastructure Services
The Microsoft Cloud
Categories of Services

11. Storage
Unstructured
Data
Blobs
Message
Queues
Distributed
Filesystem
Content
Distribution
Data Transact-SQL
Data
Synchronization
Relational
Database
ADO.NET,
ODBC, PHP
Connectivity
Composite
Applications
On-Premise
Bridging
Service Bus
Security
Claims-Based
Identity
Federated
Identities
Secure Token
Service
Declarative
Policies
Application Services
Application
Marketplace
Information
Marketplace
Personal Data
Repository
Frameworks
Workflow
Hosting
Distributed
Cache
Services
Hosting
Windows Azure Platform
Compute C/C++
Win32 VHD

12. Compute
Storage
Data
SQL Azure
Data Sync
Connectivity
Project
“Sydney”
Security “Geneva”
Application Services
Frameworks “Dublin” “Velocity”
Windows Azure Platform
ServiceBus
AccessControl
Table Storage Blob Storage Queue Drive
Content
Delivery
Network

13. Windows Azure Compute
Compute
> Development, service hosting, & management environment
• .NET, Java PHP, Python, Ruby, native code (C/C++, Win32, etc.)
• ASP.NET providers, FastCGI, memcached, MySQL, Tomcat
• Full-trust – supports standard languages and APIs
• Secure certificate store
• Management API’s, and logging and diagnostics systems
> Multiple roles – Web, Worker, Virtual Machine (VHD)
> Multiple VM sizes
• 1.6 GHz CPU x64, 1.75GB RAM, 100Mbps network, 250GB volatile storage
• Small (1X), Medium (2X), Large (4X), X-Large (8X)
> In-place rolling upgrades, organized by upgrade domains
• Walk each upgrade domain one at a time

14. Windows Azure Diagnostics
Compute
> Configurable trace, performance counter, Windows event log,
IIS log & file buffering
• Local data buffering quota management
• Query & modify from the cloud and from the desktop per role instance
• Transfer to storage scheduled & on-demand
• Filter by data type, verbosity & time range

15. Windows Azure Storage
> Rich data abstractions – tables, blobs, queues, drives, CDN
• Capacity (100TB), throughput (100MB/sec), transactions (1K req/sec)
> High accessibility
• Supports geo-location
• Language & platform agnostic REST APIs
• URL: http://<account>.<store>.core.windows.net
• Client libraries for .NET, Java, PHP, etc.
> High durability – data is replicated 3 times within a cluster,
and (Feb 2010) across datacenters
> High scalability – data is automatically partitioned and
load balanced across servers
StorageStorage

16. Windows Azure Table Storage
Table Storage
> Designed for structured data, not relational data
> Data definition is part of the application
• A Table is a set of Entities (records)
• An Entity is a set of Properties (fields)
> No fixed schema
• Each property is stored as a <name, typed value> pair
• Two entities within the same table can have different properties
• No schema is enforced

17. Windows Azure Blob Storage
Blob Storage
> Storage for large, named files plus their metadata
> Block Blob
• Targeted at streaming workloads
• Each blob consists of a sequence of blocks
• Each block is identified by a Block ID
• Size limit 200GB per blob
> Page Blob
• Targeted at random read/write workloads
• Each blob consists of an array of pages
• Each page is identified by its offset from the start of the blob
• Size limit 1TB per blob

18. Windows Azure Queue
Queue
> Performance efficient, highly available and provide reliable
message delivery
> Asynchronous work dispatch
• Inter-role communication
• Polling based model; best-effort FIFO data structure
> Queue operations
• Create Queue
• Delete Queue
• List Queues
• Get/Set Queue Metadata
> Message operations
• Add Message
• Get Message(s)
• Peek Message(s)
• Delete Message

19. Windows Azure Drive
Drive
> Provides a durable NTFS volume for Windows Azure
applications to use
• Use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive
• Durability and survival of data on application failover
• Enables migrating existing NTFS applications to the cloud
• Drives can be up to 1TB; a VM can dynamically mount up to 8 drives
> A Windows Azure Drive is a Page Blob
• Example, mount Page Blob as X:
• http://<account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<blob>
• All writes to drive are made durable to the Page Blob
• Drive made durable through standard Page Blob replication

20. Windows Azure Content Delivery Network
> Provides high-bandwidth global blob content delivery
• 18 locations globally (US, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America),
and growing
> Blob service URL vs. CDN URL
• Blob URL: http://<account>.blob.core.windows.net/
• CDN URL: http://<guid>.vo.msecnd.net/
• Support for custom domain names
> Access details
• Blobs are cached in CDN until the TTL passes
• Use per-blob HTTP Cache-Control policy for TTL (new)
• CDN provides only anonymous HTTP access
Content
Delivery
Network

21. SQL Azure
Data
> Highly available, scalable, and consistent distributed relational
database; geo-replication and geo-location of data
> Relational database, provided as a service
• Highly symmetrical development and tooling experience (use TDS protocol
and T-SQL)
• Highly scaled out, on commodity hardware
• Built on the SQL Server technology foundation
> Editions: Web (1GB), Business (10GB)

22. SQL Azure Data Sync
SQL Azure
Data Sync
> Tools for data synchronization with SQL Azure
• Connect on-premises apps with the cloud
• Create cached-mode clients
> Built on Microsoft Sync Framework and
ADO.NET Sync Services

23. AppFabric Service Bus
Connectivity ServiceBus
> Securely connect applications
• Over the internet
• Across any network topology
• Across organizational boundaries
> Primary application patterns
• Eventing – notify applications
and/or devices
• Service Remoting – securely project
on-premises services out to the
cloud
• Tunneling – app-to-app
communication with NAT/Firewall
traversal

24. AppFabric Access Control
Security AccessControl
> Provides outsourcing of claims-
based access control for REST
web services
> Key capabilities:
• Usable from any platform
• Low friction way to onboard new
clients
• Integrates with ADFS v2
• Supports OAuth WRAP / SWT
• Enables simple delegation
> Used today by Service Bus and
“Dallas”

25. “Geneva”
“Geneva”
> Next generation identity and access management platform
• Claims-based access and single sign-on for on-premise and cloud-based
applications in the enterprise, across organizations, and on the Web
> “Geneva Framework“ (Windows Identity Foundation)
• Provides .NET development tools, which includes pre-built, user-access
logic that externalizes authentication from applications. It helps
developers build claims-aware .NET applications, plus build custom
security token services (STS)
> “Geneva Server“
• An STS for IT that issues and transforms claims and other tokens,
manages user access and enables federation and access management for
simplified single sign-on
> “CardSpace Geneva”
• For helping users navigate
between multiple logons for
simplified single sign-on while
providing complete user control
and transparency for how
personal information is shared

26. “Velocity”
“Velocity”
> Distributed in-memory cache platform for developing
scalable, available, and highly-performance applications
• Caches any serializable CLR object and provides access through simple
cache APIs
• Supports enterprise scale: tens to hundreds of computers
• Configurable to run as a service accessed over the network
• Supports dynamic scaling
and automatic load
balancing
• Supports continuous
availability of cached data
by storing copies on
separate cache hosts
• Integration with
administration and
monitoring tools such as
Event Tracing for Windows
(ETW) and System Center.

27. “Dublin”
“Dublin”
> Evolution of WAS/IIS and Windows App Server
role to run and manage WF and WCF services
• Enhances the hosting of Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow (WF) in the
Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)
• Simplified deployment and management of WCF and
WF services hosted in WAS
• Configuration of persistence for durable workflows
• Customizable tracking profiles with dedicated,
queryable storage for tracked data
• Customizable monitoring of hosted services

28. “Dallas”
> Information-as-a-service
> Discover, acquire, and consume structured, blob,
and real-time data to power any application – on
any platform and any screen size
> Brokerage Business – partner driven ecosystem
and global reach to deliver data and functionality
to developers and information workers
> Analytics and Reporting – single click analysis to
augment private data with public data
> Built on Windows Azure and SQL Azure

29. Compute
Storage
Data
SQL Azure
Data Sync
Connectivity
Project
“Sydney”
Security “Geneva”
Application Services
Frameworks “Dublin” “Velocity”
Windows Azure Platform
ServiceBus
AccessControl
Table Storage Blob Storage Queue Drive
Content
Delivery
Network

30. Platform of Choice

31. 3 Key Takeaways
> Platform-as-a-service fabric cloud
> Hybrid on-premise software and cloud
services platform
> Consistent programming model and tools

32. Sign up at the Windows
Azure Platform
developers’ portal
Windows Azure access
Developer tools
White papers
Sample applications
Plan pilot applications,
proofs of concept, and
architectural design
sessions with Windows
Azure partners
http://www.azure.com

33. Purchasing Models
Promotional
Offers
Partner
Discount
Development
Pricing
Integration with
Programs

34. Windows Azure Platform

35. AppFabric Service Bus

36. AppFabric Access Control

37. SQL Azure
Application
Internet
Azure
Cloud
LB
TDS (tcp)
TDS (tcp)
TDS (tcp)
Applications use standard SQL
client libraries: ODBC,
ADO.Net, PHP, …
Load balancer forwards ‘sticky’
sessions to TDS protocol tier
Security Boundary
SQL SQL SQL SQL SQLSQL
Gateway Gateway Gateway Gateway Gateway Gateway
Scalability and Availability: Fabric, Failover, Replication, and Load balancing
Gateway: TDS protocol gateway, enforces AUTHN/AUTHZ policy; proxy to backend SQL

38. Table Storage Concepts
EntitiesTablesAccounts

39. Queue Storage Concepts
MessagesQueuesAccounts

40. Blob Storage Concepts
BlobContainerAccount
sally
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41. Blob Storage Concepts
Blocks or
Pages
BlobContainerAccount
sally
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