18. Apps That Benefit from Windows Azure
Scale-Out Web Applications Scale-Out Compute
Departmental Applications Marketing or Social Applications SaaS Applications
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19. Scale-Out Web Apps On Windows Azure
Platform Enables Infrastructure Agility to Provide Apps with Availability, Scalability, and a Reduced TCO
Application Challenges
• Front-End Often Must be Highly Available
(Enterprise Apps; Web 2.0 Apps; Mobile) Scale-Out Web Applications
• Demand May [Or Not] be Predictable
(Fridays; Month End; Successful Groupon)
• Increased Scale Often Requires
Additional Resource Investment
Windows Azure Platform Benefits
• High Availability; Fault Tolerance Infrastructure
• Updates with No Downtime
• Scale Up or Scale Down as Needed
• Pay Only for Compute/Storage Used
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20. Scale-Out Compute On Windows Azure
Platform Enables Infrastructure Agility to Provide Supplemental Compute with Scalability and a reduced
TCO
Application Challenges
• Compute-Intensive Tasks Often Very Short-
lived Scale-Out Compute
(Financial Modeling; Scientific Calculations)
• Batch Processing Often has Predictable Peaks
(Month/Quarter End Processing; Financial
Reports)
• Burst Scenarios Often Require Purchasing
Hardware Resources That are Infrequently Used
Windows Azure Platform Benefits
• Scale Up or Scale Down as Needed
• Pay Only for Compute/Storage Used
• Automatic Bursting from On-Premises HPC
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21. Departmental Apps On Windows Azure
Platform Enables Departments to Self-Provision Resources to More Quickly Meet Departmental Needs
Application Challenges
• Departmental Needs May Not Match IT Needs
(Dashboards; BU AP/AR; BU Pipeline Departmental Applications
Management)
• Personal Apps Can Become Department-Critical
(“Under The Desk” and “Desktop Servers”)
Windows Azure Platform Benefits
• Rapid Self-provisioning by Departments
• High Availability and Central Control of Data
• Familiar Tools and Programming Model to
Build and Migrate Applications
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22. Marketing and Social Apps On Windows Azure
Platform Enables Easy Experimentation with Apps That May Either Fail Fast be Wildly Successful
Application Challenges
• Applications have Unpredictable Lifetime
(Marketing Campaigns; Social Media Apps; Marketing or Social Applications
Start-Ups)
• Unknown Demand has Potential to Overinvest
• Unknown Demand has Potential to Under-
Invest
(Overwhelmed Resources Can Impact Brand)
Windows Azure Platform Benefits
• Publicly Experiment with Applications Without
Upfront Resource Investments
• Quickly Add Resources if App is Successful
• No Unnecessary Resources
• CDN Improves Performance and User Experience
Using High-Bandwidth Delivery Closer to User
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23. SaaS Apps On Windows Azure
Platform Enables ISVS to Build Saas Scalable Apps That Expand Business
Opportunities and Quickly Reach New Markets
Application Challenges
• Meeting a Variety of Customer Needs
(On-Premise App Extension; Customer V SaaS Applications
Partner)
• Increased Scale Requires Additional Investment
(Server/Networking Infrastructure; DB; Load
Balancing)
• Geo-Expansion Required to Expand Reach
Windows Azure Platform Benefits
• Highly Available; Fault Tolerant Infrastructure
• Easily Scale Up and Down with Customer Base
• Encourage Customer Trials Without Fear
• Geo-Dispersed Data Centers and CDN
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Notas do Editor
As you evaluate your application portfolio, there are five common application types that benefit from the Windows Azure application development model right away.These include:Scale-Out Web Applications that you would commonly find in the enterprise today, mostly with some web or service-based front-end applicationScale-Out Compute applications that perform massively intensive work using back-end computeDepartmental Applications that typically come about and evolve to solve departmental issues around productivityMarketing or Social Applications that arise to solve an short-lived need and that either grow or fail…fastAnd, lastly, Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS) applications created by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) or Central IT<*Next slide*>
For scale-out web applications, Windows Azure provides a platform that provides agility to the development team – freeing them from having to write lower level code to obtain availability and scalability for an application that requires these core capabilities. These applications typically have a variable load, which can either be predictable in nature, or completely unpredictable.Sample apps include:Enterprise apps with predictable peaks – such as payroll processingWeb 2.0 apps that scale [out] as needed – examples of which seem to crop up each month that passes by (such as Yelp or Groupon).Back-end services for mobile apps – again, examples of which seem to show up on a regular basis (one example of such, Foursquare)For these applications, Windows Azure frees the application owner from having to worry about predicting resource needs and having to buy appropriate resources leading up to the application’s launch, and having to maintain that resource pool for the life of the application (maintenance such as patching, cycling in new hardware, predicting pool growth over time). And, especially for seasonal demand peaks, a PaaS service such as Windows Azure allows for the bill to be dynamic as well, only paying for what is used.<*Next slide*>
For scale-out compute applications are much like their web counterparts, except that scale is typically a much larger concern than sustained availability. In this case, an organization has computing needs that need to be met – needs that are typically more a burst in nature for a specific task, rather than satisfying the needs of a large mass of users. As with scale-out web apps, these applications may also have either a load that may be known or completely unpredictable and spiky.Sample apps include:Batch processing that runs in known intervals(e.g., financial reporting, nightly batch processing, monthly billing statement generation)Financial model applications, orBursting from HPC clusters, which can burst out to the cloud automatically from Windows HPC Server 2008 R2Because these applications are typically short-lived and bursting in nature, the application really benefits from the elastic nature of Windows Azure, allowing them to scale large when needed to accomplish the task – accomplishing it fast, and then scaling back down when completed. This frees up an organization from purchasing a large resource pool of advanced hardware that is only used perhaps 10% of the time. With Windows Azure, the organization only pays for what they use.<*Next slide*>
But Windows Azure isn’t only of interest to the big applications. Smaller departments in an enterprise find Windows Azure very compelling for getting the agility to experiment and self-provision hardware for systems that may not be mission-critical to the larger enterprise, but they are essential for departmental needs. Developers of these applications are typically building applications geared towards solving an immediate (and local) productivity need, typically using the back-end as a data repository or service layer to a web app, a thick-client, or even an Office-based UI.Sample apps include:Central IT can “upsize” applications from “under the desk” into a more managed environmentDepartmental applications created to be quickly provisioned without long procurement process(e.g., dashboards, BU AP/AR, BU pipeline mgmt)Using Windows Azure, these app owners are able to quickly provision resources that run their applications that solve their departmental needs without creating new ‘servers’ that live under the desk. In this way, Windows Azure helps protect the entire organization from unmanaged systems that could present a risk to the larger organizations, while also providing the departmental app owners with much desired agility.<*Next slide*>
A special case of the Scale-Out web applications cited earlier is the marketing and social apps. For these, developers are often creating web applications that, from the start have an unpredictable life. The developers ideally seek an environment that enables agility to experiment with applications and put them out into the market to see if they are either wildly successful or fail completely.Sample apps include:Marketing campaign applicationsSocial media applicationsStart-up applicationsTo help these app owners, Windows Azure provides a resource pool that can start very small and ramp up to massively large scales as they become successful. And for short-lived marketing campaigns, it can them ramp back down to a shallow presence again once the demand spike from the campaign is over. This means that IT doesn’t need to provision up front for the peak, and no unnecessary resources need to be retained afterwards. And, for the start-up, this means that they only need to spend as much money as there is interest in their business.And, particularly for the media-intensive web applications, the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) provides a global distribution network for caching high-bandwidth content (media such as movies or images) close to the users – thereby vastly improving your user experience without requiring the developer to do anything more than enable the service.<*Next slide*>
Lastly, is the case of the Software as a Service (SaaS) application. While not as common as the other four scenarios, ISVs or Central IT can find Windows Azure an excellent place for building…Applications that enhance traditional on-premises packaged application offerings with additional services in the cloudApplications that offer multi-tenant scale to provide additional options and potentially bring in more customers, and, lastlySolutions that provide more options to customers & partners with different needs in different parts of their organizationThe technologies that make up Windows Azure platform were originally designed and built as an environment for Microsoft’s own Live services SaaS offering, before being made available to customers for more generalized workloads. Since being released to the market, we have had many successful customers adopt the platform to deliver elastically scalable SaaS solutions.<*Next slide*>