Handling certificates for Azure management API calls
Continue reading "Handling certificates for Azure management API calls" »
March 15, 2010
February 15, 2010
ws2007HttpRelayBinding and Windows Azure Client
Recently we have faced this issue of not being able to consume a WCF service which was exposed using ws2007HttpRelayBinding from Windows Azure Web Role as a client. We had registered a service on AppFabric Service Bus with ws2007HttpRelayBinding; below is the service registration code for the service.
Continue reading "ws2007HttpRelayBinding and Windows Azure Client" »
SaaS makes financial accounting easier
It’s been so much talked and written about technical benefits of Cloud computing. I thought of looking at it from financial accounting point of view. Comparing the traditional IT expenses with Cloud computing expenses especially SaaS model, might give a different picture of the income statement. Before I go ahead and try putting forward my interpretation, want to make a disclaimer that I am no way finance or accounting expert, this is just a plain interpretation of what I understood. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.
January 27, 2010
My First Tryst with Certificates
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.
December 02, 2009
Unknown user base – Think of Cloud!!
As Cloud computing is gaining momentum and slated to become mainstream, the most prominent question that every one asking today is “Which applications are most suitable on Cloud? Which are first to go on Cloud? What are the characteristic that one should look for?
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!!
November 20, 2009
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.
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 - 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.
Points to notice while migrating data from traditional database to Azure SQL
Generally when it comes to migrating heavy data from one SQL server to another, among others following approaches are widely used:
1. Using SSIS package
2. And using BCP.
One needs to keep in mind a few points for the fruitful migration without any anomaly.
Continue reading "Points to notice while migrating data from traditional database to Azure SQL" »
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.
Continue reading here
November 18, 2009
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.
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.
Continue reading "MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 2" »
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.
Continue reading "MYOC - Building RESTful services on Azure" »
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
Continue reading "Deploying non-microsoft applications on Azure" »
November 16, 2009
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...
Continue reading "Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 2" »
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.
Continue reading "Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 1" »
November 05, 2009
Rising of the enterprise to the clouds - An adoption approach for the Enterprise
How would Cloud Computing help an Enterprise bring about IT consolidation, an approach that can help reduce ongoing running costs as well as help respond to business needs faster?
Enterprises globally are growing at a rapid pace both organically and inorganically. A few years back IT build systems for businesses which would last a time frame ranging anywhere from 5 to 10 years. Systems used to be built to last. But today, systems have to be designed to handle change. Change, which is inevitable today, is not in years but months and sometimes even days. The IT delivery cycles are expected to shrink and meet the demands of the business faster.
Click here to continue reading..
MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 1
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…
Continue reading "MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 1" »
July 31, 2009
Future of Desktop Computing
Imagine tomorrow when you switch on your LCD set to watch a movie, browse internet or do some official work. Am i talking about one device performing similar task as done by another…what’s new…Convergence is already achieving that…ok fine…how about buying the personalize desktop from some xyz vendor like Tata Sky, Airtel, Infosys … and accessing that through LCD. Accessing personalized desktop through LCD…what’s that…simply put desktop with some basic computing, processing, spreadsheet, browsing, etc. capabilities that can help you do basic stuff or your kid do homework, take exams, do certifications, etc.. Hmm…where is this going… office work, home work, without having a dedicated laptop/desktop.
July 21, 2009
Transaction Based Pricing (TBP) has arrived!!
Pricing models like Fixed Price (FP) where application pricing is charged for delivering complete working application to customer, Time and Material (T&M) where IT resources (primarily no. of people) are charged based on the time spent on the project. Both these models have been around for some time and are thoroughly tested with their pros and cons.
Over a period, clients have been demanding more stringent pricing models where investments in IT and success of projects are directly tied to the business outcomes through models like risk-reward pricing. While in some selective cases risk reward based pricing has been happening, agreeing and negotiating risk reward pricing contract is not easy for both clients and service providers. Hence this has not been widely adopted into the main stream.
Transaction based pricing is a model where a consumer is charged based on the units of functionality consumed e.g. $1 per person charged for a train ticket from xyz portal. The unit here is a train ticket per person. The transaction unit mentioned above could vary from application to application and context to context. With marketing intelligence, the pricing model can get more intuitive where offers can be devised like within a year if you buy 100 tickets, the company will refund the charges for 10 tickets and so on.
Continue reading "Transaction Based Pricing (TBP) has arrived!!" »
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.
July 13, 2009
Catalyzing Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship has been identified as the primary growth engine of any Economy. In the early 1990s when India opened up its markets to Globalization, we saw the spirit of entrepreneurship receiving a tremendous impetus cited with several instances of Startups or Small and medium sized businesses growing leaps and bounds benefiting the nation’s economy. Infosys has been an excellent example of how entrepreneurship has contributed to India’s growth and that too both in tangible and intangible value terms bringing global recognition of India’s Knowledge driven economy. However Entrepreneurs face several challenges which impediments to their growth. A few of the challenged being
· Limited exposure to capital for running their businesses
· Limited access to experienced IT resources
· Lacking processes and systems which can help grow their businesses
· Inability to Innovate
IT has been the catalyst which helps businesses to foster growth, which Entrepreneurs have not truly been able to leverage very effectively. This primarily being due to the high entry barriers, primarily owing to the high capital which needs to be invested upfront in terms of hardware and software, associated in building applications and systems even before the Enterprise would have started earning any revenue. Due to this the traditional IT delivery model has not been conducive for Entrepreneurs to innovate as the risk associated with failure is very high.
With the latest computing paradigm aka “Cloud Computing”, the IT barriers have dropped and entrepreneurs can now look at leveraging IT as a tool for innovation which can script more growth stories.
Continue reading "Catalyzing Entrepreneurship" >>
March 27, 2009
How “Open” is the Open Standards Cloud Manifesto? MS creating a stir on the cloud…
March 04, 2009
Will my business operations come to a standstill, if the Cloud is not available?
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..
February 22, 2009
Video of Infosys Solution on Channel 9
Watch the Infosys video on Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Inside+Out/Infosys-Data-Integration-in-the-Cloud/ where we talk about how can Infosys Integration Solution help organizations augment the power of Cloud Computing with their existing IT investments and realize scenarios of Partner Integration and Collaboration.
February 13, 2009
Business capabilities met on the cloud
January 22, 2009
Web, SOA and Virtualization influencing the emergence of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a style of computing that defines the way IT functions are going to be delivered or acquired in the future. This can essentially be contributed due to the emergence of revolutionary technologies such as Virtualization, Service oriented Architecture and the Web.
Continue reading "Web, SOA and Virtualization influencing the emergence of Cloud Computing" »
January 21, 2009
Consuming .NET Services on the Windows Azure Platform
Microsoft .NET Services as part of Azure Services platform, offer building blocks which provide the necessary infrastructure to develop cloud aware applications. One scenario we wanted to try out was to be able to have a on-premise services to be consumed by an application hosted on Windows Azure.
Continue reading "Consuming .NET Services on the Windows Azure Platform" »
December 24, 2008
Financial implications of the Cloud
Cloud computing is a new style of computing which packages computing resources such as processing power, storage, connectivity etc as a service and delivering the same to the consumer in a scale-free, cost efficient and timely manner over the web. Applications get into production much quicker than the traditional models by which applications are provisioned. This entails a shift in the way applications would be built, executed and also managed in the future.
In an attempt to understand the financial implications of the new cloud based model used for deploying and running web applications over the traditional client server web application model a little better, we shall discuss this in the context of a hypothetical scenario which would highlight differences one would observe in both the cases.
December 10, 2008
Why does the SQL Data Services (SDS) not adopt to the RDBMS model which the SQL Server has been essentially built upon
Here are some of my thoughts on this:
1. The current version of the SDS entity design is based on a free-form schema-less model unlike the rigid schema based approach which most RDBMS such as SQL Server, Oracle work on. SDS builds on an Entity definition model wherein the data object constructs gets abstracted to a much higher level. The approach makes the process of low-level object creation such as tables, constraints, relations etc… a job of the SDS layer. As far as the End user is concerned he/she would only be concerned about the Entity definition, this will include attributes along with the data types of those attributes. Though relationships are not supported in the current version of SDS, which the SDS team intents to provide in some future version .And this should not be difficult, they can be inferred easily from the entity object associations which could translate to a low-level parent key- foreign key relationships in the RDBMS parlance
December 09, 2008
Windows on the Cloud released at the PDC 2008!
MS released Windows Azure at the PDC 2008, a code name used for the work done as a part of the Azure (MS Cloud) initiative. More details on these are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx
Continue reading "Windows on the Cloud released at the PDC 2008!" »
November 26, 2008
Enterprise systems available on the cloud as services
Suppose an enterprise has a set of services that it feels can be exposed to the internet for business or for its own usage, there are two ways to address it.
1) Setup the services on a DMZ thereby exposing the services in a secure manner to the internet.
2) Open up ports on the enterprise firewall to allow inbound access from outside machines to the services running. [This is not allowed as it has the potential to allow users to exploit the enterprise network]
The first mode of setting up a DMZ is the preferred way, but its limitation would be allowing access of DMZ machines onto the enterprise network. If the DMZ needs to access internal systems like a Mainframe, then there could be deployment and security issues.
Continue reading "Enterprise systems available on the cloud as services" »
November 07, 2008
Cloud computing made possible with Azure
Continue reading "Cloud computing made possible with Azure" »
November 05, 2008
Infosys Session on Azure at Microsoft PDC2008
My name is Jitendra and I am a Principal Architect on Cloud Computing work we are doing at Infosys. Microsoft announced their Cloud Computing platform “Azure” last week and with that also made lot of the technologies which we were working with them as public information. This enables me to blog on the work we were doing with Microsoft since last 8 months around their Cloud Computing platform.
I did a session at the Microsoft Professional Developer conference event last week where Microsoft announced the Azure platform. My session was a walkthrough on one of the Partner Integration solutions we developing on this Azure Platform. You may view the recording of the session on the channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB56/. Infosys Case Study on this can also we found at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/casestudies.mspx.
Enabling partner integration and extending the enterprise boundaries to external partners and customers is one of the core enabling functions of a Cloud computing platform. This gives enterprises an incredible value to expand their boundaries to public facing endpoints and make the overall business process more straight through. For instance, the AReIS solution described above helps dealers to collaborate and share information with other Dealers over cloud based infrastructure. In my next blog I would touch upon the how we used the appliance based architectures patterns to realize the solution and why such patterns would be more relevant in the world of cloud computing for large Enterprises
Recent Posts
Categories
- .NET 2.0
- .NET Fwk 3.0
- .NET Fwk 3.5
- .NET MicroFramework
- .net 4.0
- ASP .NET
- Cloud Computing
- Collaboration
- Expression Blend
- General
- Infrastructure Optimization
- Legacy Modernization
- Microsoft Business Intelligence
- Microsoft Design Technologies
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Microsoft Products & Technologies
- Orcas
- SharePoint Technologies
- Silverlight
- Software Factory
- Solution Accelerators
- Testing
- Unified Communications
- VS2008
- Vista
- Win 7
Infosys on Twitter
Archives
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006