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5/30/2009

A Perspective on Cloud Computing

I had the opportunity to attend a talk by David Chappel (http://www.davidchappell.com) of David Chappell & Associates on Friday about his perspective on Cloud Computing. The talk occurred Friday May 26th at the Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen(http://www.mdcc.dk), otherwise known as the MDCC. At first I thought this was going to be a talk aimed at a small group of people, but a large group of probably 150 ended up attending. While the majority of the attendees were Microsoft employees, there were a large amount of people from outside of Microsoft.

He started off with a warm up generally covering the services that are out there such as Google's AppEnginge, Amazon's EC2 and Microsoft's Azure. After an overview he started getting deep into a comparison of the services that are out there, and here are some highlights that I thought were worth mentioning.

  • Google's AppEngine gives you 10 seconds to handle a request before spinning down the instance chosen to handle the request.
  • The two buckets these services fall into are now archaiac, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service are two restrictive and don't adequately categorize the services that are starting to mature.
  • The Azure Services are all individually built by separate teams at Microsoft… for now.
  • There is a difference between platform lock in and portability, mainly in custom development languages such as force.com.
  • SQL Services has a hard limit of 10gb, so scaling beyond that would take some finesse.
  • Table Storage in Azure is meant for very scalable applications
  • Queues in Azure are meant as an intermediary for data between web roles and worker roles
  • Each instance of a Web Role and Worker role is a "VM" within Azure

This is just a short example of the information that David was presenting, to find out more information about Cloud Computing from David Chappell, check out his blog where at lot of this information is featured. http://www.davidchappell.com/blog/index.php

 

Update: A slide deck very similar to the one that was presented at the MDCC can be found here: http://www.davidchappell.com/CloudPlatformsToday--APerspective--Chappell.pdf

Posted at 20:11 by Isaac Stith | Category: .Net C#; Micorosft Azure | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

5/11/2009

Generating Test Tables with Azure Development Storage Fails

I ran into the following error when trying to create the Test Storage Tables from Within Visual Studio 2008.

Unhandled Exception: System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

         at System.Reflection.Module._GetTypesInternal(StackCrawlMark& stackMark)

         at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes()

         at Microsoft.ServiceHosting.DevelopmentStorage.Table.DatabaseGenerator.GenerateDataBase(String server, String dbName, String[] assemblyPaths, Boolean forceCreate, ValidationHandler validationHandler)

         at Microsoft.ServiceHosting.DevelopmentStorage.Table.Program.Main(String[] args)

Took me forever to figure out what the problem was, but essentially the Azure tools try to generate entities from every dll referenced in your project, and it expects the dlls to be in either the GAC or the Bin folder of the WebRole. Now if you've integrated other projects into your Azure project, this might not be the case. The solution then is to run DevGenTables Manually using parameters similar to below.

"c:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\DevtableGen.exe" /forceCreate "/database:YourDatabaseNameHere" "C:\pathtoproject\Azure_WebRole\bin\Azure_WebRole.dll;C:\pathtoproject\Azure_WebRole\bin\StorageClient.dll;C:\pathtoproject\Azure\AzureWorker\bin\Debug\AzureWorker.dll"

 

You'll need to change the command to specify the dlls you are using in your project, but once that is done, you should see a message like this:

Windows(R) Azure(TM) Development Table database generation tool version 1.0.0.0 for Microsoft(R) .NET Framework 3.5
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

DevTableGen : Generating database 'Azure'
DevTableGen : Generating table 'TableStorage' for type Azure_WebRole.TableStorageEntity'

Posted at 12:26 by Isaac Stith | Category: Micorosft Azure | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)