It was indeed a pleasant experience to participate HP APJ (Asia Pacific & Japan) Media Event in Singapore last 18 and 19 Oct. This two-days event was actually targeting media reporter or journalist in APAC and Japan Region. More than 100 of them were invited to the event. They came from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and so many more.

Reza Faisal and Raymond Englebert were Indonesia MVPs that join us on the event as well. And surprisingly, I met my Windows Azure MVP fellow from Australia, Steven Nagy. I knew Steven online from blog, forum, distribution-list, but never met him face-to-face before.

Despite of media event, a few prominent technology bloggers in the region were invited as well. I believe from HP’s perspective, bloggers are like informal online journalist, yet could be key influencers as well.

I am glad that I was also invited to the event. The event is organized in Marina Bay Sands, one of the most awesome hotel in Singapore .

Here’re quick summary from me.

Day 1

First part of the agenda of the day were done by several gentlemen from HP.

• It was started Wolfgang Wittmer, GM of Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking from HP Asia Pacific & Japan. Wolfgang described about the growth of Cloud Computing were mainly triggered by economic factor, social factor, and technology transformation factors.
• The presentation was continued by Steve Dietch, Vice President, Marketing, Cloud Solutions & Infrastructure from HP. He explained about strategies of HP in answering the complete solution of Cloud Computing Innovation.
• The next session was presented by EJ Bodnar, WW Marketing Director, Technology Consulting Services from HP that highlighted the growth of data center in APJ Region. It’s predicted that China will become the second biggest data center in worldwide by 2012.
• Tom Joyce, Vice President of Storage Marketing, Strategy & Operations from HP that illustrated HP 3PAR Utility Storage that is mainly designed for Virtualization and Cloud Solution.

The second part of the agenda was the Panel Discussion amongst a few cloud computing practitioner from the industry where they share what they have done on cloud computing and how it helps their business. The panelists were as following:

• Hostworks (Adrian Britton, General Manager of Technology, Strategy & Innovation)
• SingTel (Alvin Kok, Head Infocomm Services)
• Cloudsite (John Drossos, CEO)
• Monash University Sunway (Edmund Turner, Director ITC)

Having done the lunch and second part of panel discussion. We then proceeded to Cooltown Tour… What is “cooltown” anyway? It is actually an Innovation Centre located in Singapore that delivers a unique experience of how Business Technology drives business outcomes with hands on technology and real world scenarios.

Day 2

Day 2 is purposely plan for technical blogger where the content are much more deep-drilled. The sessions were not only on presentation, but also some interactive live demo.

The following topics were covered:

• HP 3PAR Storage System
• Cloud System Matrix
• HP Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop
• Virtual System

Some photos taken

The second part of the agenda was SingTel Cloud Data Center Tour. The tour was to show us how the data center of SingTel Cloud Alatum works. What I can tell, that was awesome experience. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to take any photo of it.

So, sorry guys, no photo uploaded .

Summary

That was a quick summary from me. I believe other bloggers may have their own as well. I really enjoy the event, that’s indeed a great exposure. Hope to see you guys again!

For those who tweet regularly, you can check out Twitter tag #HPAPJ. I believe many folks there were tweeting very actively.

All in all, I would like to thank:

• HP that inviting us and make this event happened
• Ivyworldwide (Nick and Terri) for your kind arrangement and assistance
• Bloggers for sharing and participating the event. It”s nice to meet bloggers from various country with various background, experience, culture, and knowledge.

See you on the next event.

Recently, a few people asked me similar questions:

Can we install custom software on Windows Azure?

In a nutshell, I will yes, it is possible! Next, the question:

How to do it? How complex it is?

Before answering those question, I’ll start this discussion with some basic concept first.

Start with Basic Concept First

Cloud Design Philosophy: Scaling for capacity and redundancy

Windows Azure is the cloud environment to enable customer to elastically scale in and out where necessary.

• Scale out means to increase # of VM so that can process / compute more (of course you may more).
• Scale in means to decrease # of VM because we may not need too many VM (of course you pay less).

This might lead to the rule-of-thumb:

Stateless Internally, State-full with External Durable Storage

Local Storage Inside VM Instance

When specify the VM Size of our Windows Azure service, the VM eventually will come with the Compute power and internal local storage. The internal local storage itself is actually the local virtual hard-disk which size varies from 20 GB (Extra Small) – 2 TB (Extra Large), mounted as Drive C:.

Please refer to my previous post of A Deep Look Inside Windows Azure VM for more detail.

Caveats

Although there’s some dedicated local hard-disk space inside each VM, there are some caveats:

1. Not Persistence

Local Storage is considered not-persistence. Meaning the data stored inside the local storage may be gone when scenario such as:

• That’s the node that deleted when we scale-in (# of instances is reduced)
• Due to hardware failure, Windows Azure will spin up the VM on another node for us

2. Not Centralized

If we store data inside the VM, the data could only be accessed by that VM instance, not the rest of the VM. This obviously doesn’t make sense when we have many VM instance running on.

When it is useful?

A few useful scenario of using Local Storage:

1. Storage Temporary Data

Local Storage is very useful when storing temporary data which doesn’t require any persistency guarantee.

2. A cache copy of Windows Azure Drive

Windows Azure Drive provides an optional local on-disk cache of the drive’s data. Employing the cache is useful to reduce the transaction cost of accessing the blob service.

Scalable, Persistence Storage – SQL Azure / Windows Azure Storage

We could achieve durability, scalability, and persistency when using SQL Azure or Windows Azure Storage. By doing so, regardless how many VM instances we have, they are able to access the centralized storage appropriately.

Having understood the basic concept, here’re a few techniques that may help you install custom software on Windows Azure.

Start-up Task

Since SDK 1.3, Microsoft introduced a concept called Start-up Task. The idea of the start-up task is enable us to run a set of command script or PowerShell script before our instance starts. Typically, you can configuring anything with start-up task as long as it must be scripted.

Here’re some example of what can we do with start-up task:

• Downloading from a link
• Install some custom software
• Configuring environment variable
• Configuring registry
• etc.

Although many tasks are achievable using start-up task. I will be focus on “Installing Software” in this case. In the example below, I use start-up task to download and install WinRar on Windows Azure.

How to?

1. Prepare your startup script.

Here is the example of startup.cmd file:

1: powershell -c “set-executionpolicy unrestricted”
2: powershell -c “(new-object system.net.webclient).downloadfile(”http://mystorage.com/download/winrar-x64-40b7.exe”, ”winrar-x64-40b7.exe”)
3: winrar-x64-40b7.exe /s

• The first line is to set the execution policy of my Powershell script to unrestricted.
• The second line is to download a file from the given URL to local storage.
• The third line is to run the installer “winrar-x64-40b7.exe” using silent mode (/s). (Note that each installer may have different silent mode installation parameter). By doing so, there’s no prompt screen which require us to click next – next – finish anymore.

I would recommend you to create the file using notepad or other ASCII editor, since textfile created by Visual Studio seems to have a byte order mark that will make it fail.

Please make sure that set “copy to output directory” to “copy always”, to ensure that the script will be included inside your package.

2. Modify your ServiceDefinition.csdef file by adding Startup – Task section.

• The commandLine attribute requires the path of our startup script
• The executionContent attribute requires us to choose either:
  • elevated (which will run as admin-role) or
  • limited (non admin-role)
• The taskType, with the following options
  • Simple [Default] – System waits for the task to exit before any other tasks are launched
  • Background – System does not wait for the task to exit
  • Foreground – Similar to background, except role is not restarted until all foreground tasks exit

Since the start-up task is scripted using elevated admin mode, it has enough right to write to local disk. Also, since the start-up task will be run every time the OS is provisioned, the state will be persistence at the time the installation is done.

I can tell that start-up task will be the preferable option (if possible).

The Catch

Any activity that could be scripted-out could run well using Start-up Task. But, what if not? Not all installer could be scripted out. Or some installer could be started up, but requires some manual step of UI-based configuration…

In this case, sadly to say that you can’t use Start-up Task .

VM Role

VM Role is exactly created for the issue that couldn’t be addressed by Start-up Task. However, the name of the VM-Role is sometime misleading. Many people would think they can easily bring their entire VM and let it runs on the cloud directly and store whatever they want inside the VHD.

Well, this is true and false.

True that you will need to install the OS (and your intended software) by your own, configure necessary task (that you can’t scripted out), and bring your OS to the cloud.

False that the VHD itself is still non-persistence. Which means you still need to store your persistence data on Windows Azure Storage or SQL Azure. Remember, VM Role is not IAAS (Infrastructure-as-a-service).

VM Role LifeCycle

Here’s the lifecycle of the VM Role.

• Build VM Image
  • Convert product DVD to a VHD, or use existing VHD
  • Prepare the VHD
• Create Service
  • Create a service model with the above image.
• Upload Image
  • Store VHD in Windows Azure blob storage
• Deploy Service
  • Include in service model. Specify instance count.
  • Package as cspkg, upload cskpg.
• Maintain Service
  • Remote Desktop
  • Reboot / Reimage
• Upgrade Service
  • Repeat above steps, with a new OS image.

The Catch

1. With Web Role and Worker Role, Windows Azure will take care of the OS Update for you. Meaning that if there’s new patch of the OS, Windows Azure will automatically update our VM, which is the Guest OS. While with VM Role, you will have responsibility to manage by your own.

2. The supported OS of VM Role is only Windows Server 2008 R2. Other OS is definitely out of question.

2. At the time this article of written, VM Role is still at beta. Any thing may change when it is released. So, consider carefully if your company policy allows running beta / CTP software on the production.

Remote Desktop to Perform Manual Installation

This is actually not a good technique but I will include in this post as well since it maybe useful occasionally especially when doing testing or staging.

The idea of this technique is to enable remote desktop on our Windows Azure service and install the software using remote desktop.

The Catch

The big and fatal disadvantage of this technique: there is no guarantee that the changes or the installation that we’ve done will be persistence. Because, we are installing or making change the stateless VHD inside the VM. (Refer to the basic concept we’ve discussed above).

When it is helpful?

Nonetheless, a few advantage of this technique are:

1. Easy-to-do and Simple

We don’t have to bother about scripting out start-up task nor uploading the entire big VHD. Just Remote Desktop in and performing your installation as per normal condition.

2. Purely for testing purpose that can tolerate the catch

There may be some scenario that we’re just purely doing some testing and we can tolerate if the changes gone. If you can accept the catch, of course it’s fine for you.

But of course, word of warning: do not use this technique in PRODUCTION.

Conclusion

To conclude, I began with explaining the Windows Azure scaling concept and available storage. Subsequently, I discuss about three techniques (Start-up Task, VM Role, and Remote Desktop) with the explanation of how to achieve that, the advantages and the catch.

Hopefully this post will be helpful to you.

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Packt Publishing to help on reviewing a book entitiled “Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook” by one of Windows Azure MVP, Neil Mackenzie.

Although never meets Neil face-to-face, I know that Neil is one of the very active contributor in MSDN Forum. Neil is also a great blogger that could be able to share his knowledge comprehensively.

Disclaimer

This review is written upon request of the publisher without any incentive provided. It is purely based on my personal opinion: input, suggestion, and recommendation for positive / better improvement. Not meant to criticize, insult, or disrespect any relevant parties including the writer, publisher, editors, or anyone else. You may disagree with my opinions as there is no right or wrong in this case.

Relevant parties including writer, publisher, or editors may consider the following review as reference or suggestion. However, it is eventually up to them to decide how do they want to proceed in future edition.

Review

And here’re the review…

What I like about this book

1. Clear explanation on each walkthrough

Having done explaining the concept of each topic, the book includes the “how to do it” section which guide step-by-step how to achieve the goal and “how it works” which explain how it actually works under the hood.

I would believe reader with Visual Studio could easily follow the walkthrough.

2. This book covers deep topics

This book covers deep enough topics which may not easily found on other book or event web resources. They are such as:

• Managing Blob Access Policy with Shared Access Signature
• Optimizing Blob Upload and Download
• Performing Asynchronous and Parallel Queries
• Choosing Partition Key and Row Key on Windows Azure Tables
• Using Service Management API

3. Clear Warning and Tips-and-Tricks Provided

Along the chapters, there’re some warning and tips-and-tricks to provide reader to digest the information better and in more detail. I would say this is very useful approach.

How it could be improved

1. Start with Introduction

This book straight away jump into the topic of “Controlling Access in the Windows Azure Platform” without any introduction.

I am aware that it is clearly written (on the preface) that this book is for experienced Windows Azure developer or architect. However, I would prefer to always start something with a clear introduction or big picture what’s the topic that we will be covering in the rest of the chapter.

This may includes things such as:

• Brief introduction about cloud computing
• Brief history on Windows Azure (starting from old-days of Red Dog project)
• Windows Azure Platform Building Blocks (each component of Windows Azure Platform including Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and Windows Azure AppFabric)

2. Provide Explanation with IMAGES

I completely understand that in writing a book, images are supposed to be included only where necessary. Unlike hands-on-lab or training kit like Windows Azure Platform Training Kit, where every steps are followed by very detail of screenshot.

However, I just find that this book really lack of images. The only image that I found in the book is at the cover , please correct me if I am wrong.

I am not saying that it must include bunch of images on each topic or walkthrough-steps. But (Images + explanation) would be a great combination to enable people comprehend more easily on the subject. Something like this may probably bring more sense for the readers.

3. Suggested Topics

As stated clearly that this book is meant for experience developer or architect, I would suggest to also include topic such as:

• Inside Windows Azure:
  • covering the under-the-hood view of Windows Azure.
  • Mark Russinovich has done bunch of great talk at: TechEd, PDC, and BUILD. It may be used for references
• Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS)
  • I notice that Chapter 9 which covers about AppFabric did not explain ACS in detail.
• The future of Windows Azure, that covers upcoming / CTP / beta technologies:
  • SQL Azure Data Sync
  • SQL Azure Reporting
  • AppFabric Service Bus Messaging: Topics and Queues
  • Windows Azure Traffic Manager
  • etc.

Conclusion

As conclusion, I would say that Neil has done a great job on this book. He’s indeed very knowledgeable on the subject. Thus, I would recommend you to check out the book .

Links: http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-windows-azure-development-cookbook/book

I hope this short review is useful for any relevant parties including writer, publisher, editors, or readers.

As invited over here, last Tuesday, I had a presentation entitled A Deep Look on Windows Azure and Its Virtual Machine. It was actually a user group meeting for Windows Azure User Group Singapore (AzureUG.SG).

It was attended by about 15 enthusiast participants from different background.

A lot of material in my presentation was derived from Mark Russinovich’s session in TechEd, PDC, and BUILD.

Detail of the presentation and slide could be found below.