Information on different Key Value stores
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The commoditization of technology has reached its pinnacle with the advent of the recent paradigm of Cloud Computing. Infosys Cloud Computing blog is a platform to exchange thoughts, ideas and opinions with Infosys experts on Cloud Computing
March 18, 2010
March 15, 2010
Handling certificates for Azure management API calls
I had a very tough time in one of my projects where we were using the Azure management API from a web application (deployed in Azure cloud). Before this project, we had successfully used these APIs in a windows based application but this is first time we were using in a web application. And apparently had a good amount of learning in a very new dimension.
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February 23, 2010
Accessing CouchDB for Data Storage and Retrieval
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February 19, 2010
Accessing Hadoop DFS for Data Storage and Retrieval
Distributed File Systems (DFS) are a new type of file systems which provides some extra features over normal file systems and are used for storing and sharing files across wide area network and provide easy programmatic access.
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February 04, 2010
Key Value stores: Usefulness in Cloud environment
Cloud Databases are a new type of non relational (key-value oriented) databases which are used for storing internet scale data and provide easy programmatic access. Databases like Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Project Voldemort and many others falls in the category of non relational databases and has been widely used and are quite popular.
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December 14, 2009
MYOC - Offload compute intensive tasks on Azure using the Offline Processing pattern
In this post on the MYOC cloud development series, I will share an offline processing design pattern where certain computation tasks are offloaded to another execution task using queues and that can help reducing the overall processing time of online transactions. This is a very useful pattern to use, if you plan to build highly scalable and compute intensive application on the web today. This patterns is also used by many popular websites. Here I will demonstrate how we've used this pattern to help reduce the poll creation time.
November 30, 2009
Dallas – Information as a Service
We are witnessing information explosion over the internet, tons of information is getting accumulated in. However, we still struggle to get the “Accurate and Authentic Data”. Have you ever needed the zip code of a city, route to reach a place, dining menu of restaurants, weather forecast and history, crime rates in a specific area of city? This list just goes on. How do we get this data? Search this information on our favorite search engines and rest in peace when we find it!! But, do we really know whether the data which we got is really accurate?! It could be stale, misleading or just plain inaccurate!! Why can’t you get information as easily as you can get a size 40 Creamy white Louis Philippe shirt or maybe a striking green 8 GB IPOD shuffle; because INFORMATION is not commodity yet!!
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November 20, 2009
MYOC - Telephony with Twilio to Vote
MYOC (Make Your Opinion Count) – an online poll application hosted on Microsoft Azure, uses Twilio to make it easier for people to participate in the online polls. Twilio is telephony in the cloud which exposes RESTful APIs to build scalable voice applications. It supports both inbound and outbound telephony calls. Pricing is developer friendly with pay-as-you-go model.
MYOC uses Twilio in two ways –
1. Poll creator can place a call for participant to caste his/her vote
2. A participant can dial-in for a particular poll to caste his/her vote
Let’s see what all it takes to use twilio in MYOC to call a participant and accept his/her vote or to handle an incoming call to cast a vote.
Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 2
In this blog, I will continue the discussion on a possible migration scenario of migrating existing ISV application to Azure. If you haven’t read my previous blog on this topic, then you can go here...
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November 19, 2009
Get Agile, Get on Azure
Software engineering methodologies are evolving to address the complexity and probable dynamism of the business requirements. One of the methodologies –Agile - helps teams respond to the unpredictability of building software through incremental, iterative work cadences, also known as sprints. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. is continually revisited throughout the lifecycle creating high visibility of the progress to all the stakeholders in the application development process. Traditional methodology involves creating the requirements for the complete application and then the development team almost goes into hibernation to develop the application and more often than not ends up giving unpleasant surprises to business. Nobody inclusive of the SMEs sometimes is able to visualize the final application state; moreover the demands are changing and creating chaos in the development process. AGILE comes to rescue as all the stakeholders are involved in the application development process beginning with the first iteration. Instead of building what developer understands or rather interprets and showing end product collectively, we prefer to show application in pieces take feedback and improve in an iterative manner. It becomes a continuous improvement process. AGILE gives a good visibility on development process, application feature sets and planning process to all stakeholders.
MYOC - Update Twitter Status
In this blog we’ll see in details how sending a tweet from a particular twitter account programmatically works on Azure.
MYOC - E-mail Invite Notification
In this blog we’ll see how e-mail notifications can be sent to the participants to cast their vote for a poll using Microsoft Live.
November 18, 2009
MYOC - Building RESTful services on Azure
In this post on the MYOC series, we will look at how RESTful services can be build on Windows Azure. Building RESTful services may be no different than how you would do it traditionally on-premise. Nonethless this post will detail the steps in building REST services in Azure and additional steps which need to be considered while developing a service for Azure.
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MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 2
Following my previous blog, on the MYOC system requirements, here I shall be covering the solution design of MYOC.
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MYOC - Enabling Federation on Azure Applications using Windows Identity Foundation
As a part of the current work we are trying to provide Federated Authentication in Azure Application. We want to develop a web application in Azure which would outsource authentication service to another component which would in turn authenticate users with its own enterprise. The basic idea is to be able to provide access to authenticated users from trusted organizations. As a sample we will use MyCompany as one of the trusted organizations.
To achieve this we explored Windows Identity Foundation (previously called as Geneva Framework). Windows Identity Foundation provides Claims based Identity Management. It means the applications would have only authorization logic as per the claims (attributes) of the users since these claims are certified by a trusted source; these claims are secured also and hence can be trusted by the authentication mechanism. Using this framework authentication can be outsourced to some other central application or central storage and develop a claim aware application. Hence there is no need to bother about plumbing of the authentication code; one can just make use of the trusted claims received from the application which takes responsibility for authentication.
You might have got the point; this claims based model can be extended to achieve Enterprise SSO / Web SSO / Federated Authentication.
November 17, 2009
Deploying non-microsoft applications on Azure
In my previous blog post, I had shown you a deployment model in which an application could leverage the capabilities of both on-premise as well as being on cloud. In that blog I had shown how application storage had been migrated from on-premise to the cloud.
In this post I will show you yet another deployment model possible on Azure and which may interest most of you who may have applications running on non-Microsoft technologies. I will discuss a model on how applications build on Java technologies can be deployed on Windows Azure and hence can reap the benefits of Cloud Computing.
More on "Infosys mConnect" in a Microsoft Paper is available here
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November 13, 2009
Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 1
Infosys on its part is helping Enterprises and ISV’s to adopt cloud.
Adopting this new paradigm of cloud computing; newer and innovative styles of using the cloud platforms will have to be explored. Here I shall walk you through one such case which demonstrates how we’ve helped one of our ISV customers, Volantis , to adopt cloud. The detailed case study on this project done by Infosys is available here
Volantis is a developer of innovative solutions for mobile carriers. The company’s Ubik.com software makes it simple for users to point and click to create custom Web sites that are optimized for mobile devices.Ubik.com is a free online service that allows small businesses and consumers to quickly build a mobile Internet site, without having to write a single line of code.
To cater the applications non-functional requirements of being highly available and achieve global class scalability, which would help meet the demands a rapidly growing user base, Infosys helped Volantis to offload Ubik’s data storage on to the Microsoft Azure platform.
November 05, 2009
MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 1
Following up from my previous blog, which talked about the preparatory steps an enterprise can take towards adoption of the cloud. Now let’s take a look at how one such peripheral app we can build on the cloud.
In this series, I will be walking you through an online poll application which at the very basic level is all about creating polls and participating in one. From a scenario perspective this may seem to be trivial and where every enterprise may have one or several of such apps exists out there today. However this is also a simple enough scenario to understand and demonstrate architectural and design concepts which are pertinent to cloud applications and those I have used to develop MYOC. Also further demonstrating how a simple application like this one can be enriched by leveraging cloud giving way to innovative capabilities. So let’s start…
In this series, I will be walking you through an online poll application which at the very basic level is all about creating polls and participating in one. From a scenario perspective this may seem to be trivial and where every enterprise may have one or several of such apps exists out there today. However this is also a simple enough scenario to understand and demonstrate architectural and design concepts which are pertinent to cloud applications and those I have used to develop MYOC. Also further demonstrating how a simple application like this one can be enriched by leveraging cloud giving way to innovative capabilities. So let’s start…
July 22, 2009
ISV migration to Cloud
Last week I presented a session at the Microsoft Worldwide partner conference in New Orlenes on the topic of migrating an on-premises application to the Azure Cloud. We took an real life example of the Infosys Green applications and demonstrated how did we migrated this application Azure with a minimal changes to the existing application.
July 20, 2009
Public Clouds,Are they any different?
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx
I have taken a stab at comparing the Azure pricing versus value proposition vis-à-vis that of the two other major cloud providers in the market today. Let me first call out, although Amazon’s compute services (EC2) are in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category and folks may argue that comparing it with the likes of other Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers is not really an apples to apples comparison.
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May 25, 2009
How do we ensure availability of our cloud enabled applications?
Cloud technologies being fairly nascent and the space evolving rapidly with the emergence of new players and re-positioning of leading platform players honing their products for the cloud has given way for several new and innovative opportunities to be explored but then its rapid adoption is being hindered due to several concerns primarily revolving around data privacy, loss of control, reliability etc... I shall touch upon reliability here.Read on.
May 21, 2009
Hands On: Building a Private Cloud using Open Source Solutions Part 1: Setting up Cloud Infrastructure using Eucalyptus Open Cloud Platform
In this series, I'll blog mainly on our experiences with open source technologies encountered in the course of setting up a fully functional private cloud, using open source technologies, inside Infosys SETLabs, Bangalore. I'll take you through analysis, deployment details and problems encountered while using technologies ranging from Distributed FileSharing Systems to Open Source Cloud Computing Infrastructure Solutions.
For ease of explanation I've divided this blog into parts:
Setting up Cloud Infrastructure using Eucalyptus Open Cloud Platform
Building Images with different flavors
Hadoop on Eucalyptus
May 18, 2009
Catalysts influencing the emergence of Cloud Computing
What makes up the cloud? Is it a product or a technology? What are the catalysts that have hastened the formation of the cloud?
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Open Source Cloud Computing Solutions - Part1 : Enterprise Private Clouds
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