Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings

Category: Windows Azure App Fabric

  • Book’s Sample Chapter, Articles and Press Release

    The book is now widely available and our publisher is starting up the promotion machine.  At the bottom of this post is the publisher’s press release.  Also, we now have one sample chapter online (Mike Sexton’s Debatching Bulk Data) as well as two articles representing some of the material from my Content Based Routing chapter (Part 1 – Content Based Routing on the Microsoft Platform, Part II – Building the Content Based Routing Solution on the Microsoft Platform).  This hopefully provides a good sneak peak into the book’s style.

    ## PRESS RELEASE ##

    Solve business problems on the Microsoft application platform using Packt’s new book

     Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform is a new book from Packt that offers an architectural methodology for choosing Microsoft application platform technologies. Written by a team of specialists in the Microsoft space, this book examines new technologies such as Windows Server AppFabric, StreamInsight, and Windows Azure Platform, and their application in real-world solutions.

     Filled with live examples on how to use the latest Microsoft technologies, this book guides developers through thirteen architectural patterns utilizing code samples for a wide variety of technologies including Windows Server AppFabric, Windows Azure Platform AppFabric, SQL Server (including Integration Services, Service Broker, and StreamInsight), BizTalk Server, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).

     This book is broken down into 4 different sections. Part 1 starts with getting readers up to speed with various Microsoft technologies. Part 2 concentrates on messaging patterns and the inclusion of use cases highlighting content-based routing. Part 3 digs into bulk data processing, and multi-master synchronization. Finally the last part covers performance-related patterns including low latency, failover to the cloud, and reference data caching.

     Developers can learn about the core components of BizTalk Server 2010, with an emphasis on BizTalk Server versus Windows Workflow and BizTalk Server versus SQL Server. They will not only be in a position to develop their first Windows Azure Platform AppFabric, and SQL Azure applications but will also learn to master data management and data governance of SQL Server Integration Services, Microsoft Sync Framework, and SQL Server Service Broker.

     Architects, developers, and managers wanting to get up to speed on selecting the most appropriate platform for a particular problem will find this book to be a useful and beneficial read. This book is out now and is available from Packt. For more information, please visit the site.

    [Cross posted on Book’s dedicated website]

  • And … The New Book is Released

    Nearly 16 months after a book idea was born, the journey is now complete.  Today, you can find our book, Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform, in stock at Amazon.com and for purchase and download at the Packt Publishing site.

    I am currently in Stockholm along with co-authors Stephen Thomas and Ewan Fairweather delivering a 2 day workshop for the BizTalk User Group Sweden.  We’re providing overviews of the core Microsoft application platform technologies and then excerpting the book to show how we analyzed a particular use case, chose a technology and then implemented it.  It’s our first chance to see if this book was a crazy idea, or actually useful.  So far, the reaction has been positive.  Of course, the Swedes are such a nice bunch that they may just be humoring me.

    I have absolutely no idea how this book will be received by you all.  I hope you find it to be a unique tool for evaluating architecture and building solutions on Microsoft technology.  If you DON’T like it, then I’ll blame this book idea on Ewan.

  • Do you know the Microsoft Customer Advisory Teams? You should.

    For those who live and work with Microsoft application platform technologies, the Microsoft Customer Advisory Teams (CAT) are a great source of real-world info about products and technology.  These are the small, expert-level teams whose sole job is to make sure customers are successful with Microsoft technology.  Last month I had the pleasure of presenting to both the SQL CAT and Server AppFabric CAT teams about blogging and best practices and thought I’d throw a quick plug out for these groups here.

    First off, the SQL CAT team (dedicated website here) has a regular blog of best practices, and link to the best whitepapers for SQL admins, architects, and developers.  I’m not remotely a great SQL Server guy, but I love following this team’s work and picking up tidbits that make me slightly more dangerous at work.  If you actually need to engage these guys on a project, contact your Microsoft rep.

    As for the Windows Server AppFabric CAT team, they also have a team blog with great expert content.  This team, which contains the artists-formerly-known-as-BizTalk-Rangers, provides deep expertise on BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric, WCF, WF, AppFabric Caching and StreamInsight.  You’ll find a great bunch of architects on this team including Tim Wieman, Mark Simms, Rama Ramani, Paolo Salvatori and more, all led by Suren Machiraju and the delightfully frantic Curt Peterson. They’ve recently produced posts about using BizTalk with the AppFabric Service Bus, material on the Entity Framework,  and a ridiculously big and meaty post from Mark Simms about building StreamInsight apps.

    I highly recommend subscribing to both these team blogs and following SQL CAT on twitter (@sqlcat).

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  • I’m Heading to Sweden to Deliver a 2-Day Workshop

    The incomparable Mikael Håkansson has just published the details of my next visit to Sweden this September. After I told Mikael about my latest book, we thought it might be epic to put together a 2 day workshop that highlights the “when to use what” discussion.  Two of my co-authors, Stephen Thomas and Ewan Fairweather, will be joining me for busy couple of days at the Microsoft Sweden office.  This is the first time that Stephen and Ewan have seen my agenda, so, surprise guys!

    We plan to summarize each core technology in the Microsoft application platform and then dig into six of the patterns that we discuss in the book.  I hope this is a great way to introduce a broad audience to the nuances of each technology and have a spirited discussion of how to choose the best tool for a given situation.

    If other user groups would be interested in us repeating this session, let me know.  We take payment in the form of plane tickets, puppies or gold bullion.

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  • Announcing My New Book: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

    So my new book is available for pre-order here and I’ve also published our companion website. This is not like any technical book you’ve read before.  Let me back up a bit.

    Last May (2009) I was chatting with Ewan Fairweather of Microsoft and we agreed that with so many different Microsoft platform technologies, it was hard for even the most ambitious architect/developer to know when to use which tool.  A book idea was born.

    Over the summer, Ewan and I started crafting a series of standard architecture patterns that we wanted to figure out which Microsoft tool solved best.  We also started the hunt for a set of co-authors to bring expertise in areas where we were less familiar.  At the end of the summer, Ewan and I had suckered in Stephen Thomas (of BizTalk fame), Mike Sexton (top DB architect at Avanade) and Rama Ramani (Microsoft guy on AppFabric Caching team).   All of us finally pared down our list of patterns to 13 and started off on this adventure.  Packt Publishing eagerly jumped at the book idea and started cracking the whip on the writing phase.

    So what did we write? Our book starts off by briefly explaining the core technologies in the Microsoft application platform including Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, BizTalk Server, SQL Server (SSIS and Service Broker), Windows Server AppFabric, Windows Azure Platform and StreamInsight.  After these “primer” chapters, we have a discussion about our Decision Framework that contains our organized approach to assessing technology fit to a given problem area.  We then jump into our Pattern chapters where we first give you a real world use case, discuss the pattern that would solve the problem, evaluate multiple candidate architectures based on different application technologies, and finally select a winner prior to actually building the “winning” solution.

    In this book you’ll find discussion and deep demonstration of all the key parts of the Microsoft application platform.  This book isn’t a tutorial on any one technology, but rather,  it’s intended to provide the busy architect/developer/manager/executive with an assessment of the current state of Microsoft’s solution offerings and how to choose the right one to solve your problem.

    This is a different kind of book. I haven’t seen anything like it.  Either you will love it or hate it.  I sincerely hope it’s the former, as we’ve spent over a year trying to write something interesting, had a lot of fun doing it, and hope that energy comes across to the reader.

    So go out there and pre-order, or check out the site that I set up specifically for the book: http://AppliedArchitecturePatterns.com.

    I’ll be sure to let you all know when the book ships!

  • How Do You Figure Out the Cost of Using the Azure AppFabric Service Bus?

    So the Windows Azure platform AppFabric was recently launched into production and made available for commercial use.  For many of us, this meant that Azure moved from “place to mess around with no real consequences” to “crap, I better figure out what this is going to cost me.” 

    I’ve heard a few horror stories of folks who left Azure apps online or forgot about their storage usage and got giant bills at the end of the month.  This just means we need to be more aware of our cloud service usage now.

    That said, I’ve personally been a tad hesitant to get back into playing with the Service Bus since I didn’t fully grok the pricing scheme and was worried that my MSDN Subscription only afforded me five incremental “connections” per month.

    Today I was pointed to the updated FAQ for AppFabric which significantly cleared up what “connections” really meant.  First off, a “connection” is established whether the service binds to the AppFabric Service Bus, and also when a client(s) bind to the cloud endpoint.  So if I have a development application and press F5 in Visual Studio, when my service and client bind to the cloud, that counts as 2 “connections.”

    Now if you’re like me, you might say “sweet fancy Moses, I’ll use up my 5 connections in about 75 seconds!”  HOWEVER, you aren’t billed for an aggregate count of connections, but a concurrent average.  From the FAQ (emphasis mine):

    That means you don’t need to pay for every Connection that you create; you’ll only pay for the maximum number of Connections that were in simultaneous use on any given day during the billing period. It also means that if you increase your usage, the increased usage is charged on a daily pro rata basis; you will not be charged for the entire month at that increased usage level.  For example, a given client application may open and close a single Connection many times during a day; this is especially likely if an HTTP binding is used. To the target system, this might appear to be separate, discrete Connections, however to the customer this is a single intermittent Connection. Charging based on simultaneous Connection usage ensures that a customer would not be billed multiple times for a single intermittent Connection.

    So that’s an important thing to know.  If I’m just testing over and over, and binding my service and client to the cloud, that’s only going to count as two of my connections and not put me over my limit.

    As for how this is calculated, the FAQ states:

    The maximum number of open Connections is used to calculate your daily charges. For the purposes of billing, a day is defined as the period from midnight to midnight, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).Each day is divided into 5-minute intervals, and for each interval, the time-weighted average number of open Connections is calculated. The daily maximum of these 5-minute averages is then used to calculate your daily Connection charge.

    So, unless you are regularly binding multiple clients to an endpoint (which is possible when we’re talking about the event relay binding), you shouldn’t worry too much about exceeding your “connection pack” limits.  The key point is, connections are not incrementally counted, but rather, calculated as part of concurrent usage.

    Hope that helps.  I’ll sleep better tonight, and bind to the cloud better tomorrow.

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  • Microsoft’s Strategy of “Framework First”, “Host Second”

    I’ll say up front that this post is more of just thoughts in my head vs. any deep insight. 

    It hit me on Friday (as a result of a discussion list I’m on) that many of the recent additions to Microsoft’s application platform portfolio are first released as frameworks, and only later are afforded a proper hosting environment.

    We saw this a few years ago with Windows Workflow, and to a lesser extent, Windows Communication Foundation.  In both cases, nearly all demonstration showed a form of self-hosting, primarily because that was the most flexible development choice you had.  However, it was also the most work and least enterprise-ready choice you had.  With WCF, you could host in IIS, but it hardly provided any rich configuration or management of services.

    Here in 2010, we finally get a legitimate host for both WCF and WF in the form of the Windows Server AppFabric (“Dublin”) environment.  This should make the story for WF and WCF significantly more compelling. But we’re in the midst of two new platform technologies from Microsoft that also have less than stellar “host” providers.  With the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus, you can host on-premise endpoints and enable a secure, cloud-based relay for external consumers.  Really great stuff.  But, so far, there is no fantastic story for hosting these Service Bus endpoints on-premise.  It’s my understanding that the IIS story is incomplete, so you either self-host it (Windows Service, etc) or even use something like BizTalk to host it. 

    We also have StreamInsight about to come out.  This is Microsoft’s first foray into the Complex Event Processing space, and StreamInsight looks promising.  But in reality, you’re getting a toolkit and engine.  There’s no story (yet) around a centrally managed, load balanced, highly available enterprise server to host the engine and its queries.  Or at least I haven’t seen it.  Maybe I missed it.

    I wonder what this will do to adoption of these two new technologies.  Most anyone will admit that uptake of WCF and WF has been slow (but steady), and that can’t be entirely attributed to the hosting story, but I’m sure in WF’s case, it didn’t help.

    I can partially understand the Microsoft strategy here.  If the underlying technology isn’t fully baked, having a kick-ass host doesn’t help much.  But, you could also stagger the release of capabilities in exchange for having day-1 access to an enterprise-ready container.

    Do you think that you’d be less likely to deploy StreamInsight or Azure Service Bus endpoints without a fully-functional vendor-provided hosting environment?

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