Eric Kraus

azure

Internet of Things (IOT) – Part II

In Part I, I went over the overview of use cases, scale, ingestion and storage. In Part II, I will cover the real-time streaming of data to longer-term storage for analytics. I will also go over the configuration of Power BI for real-time Q&A analytics.

Data Movement

Once the data arrives in an Event Hub, it won’t stay for long. Event Hubs have a configurable retention period of 1-7 days, so you need to “read” the data out fairly quickly. To do this, you need a service that can scale to millions of records per second and offer the flexibility to interpret the data along the way by minor forms of aggregation. For this, Azure Stream Analytics is the perfect solution.

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Internet of Things (IOT) – Part I

If you’ve been following the cloud buzz, you’ve inevitably heard of IOT or Internet Of Things. At a high level, the concept is simple: connect a bunch of devices that weren’t previously accessible and use intelligent data to inform other devices or take some action. A couple simple examples might include sensors on doors, vending machines or robots. Where in the past, a repair person might have to repair a motor on a scheduled basis, sensor data could inform that individual to take action sooner (or postpone) based on what the data is saying.

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Microsoft and Docker – Overview

Microsoft and Docker recently announced the expansion of their partnership, bringing Docker to Windows Server and Azure.

What is Docker?

There are a number of use cases that make Docker excited and valuable to organizations

  • Automating the packaging and deployment of applications
  • Creation of lightweight, private PaaS environments
  • Automated testing and continuous integration/deployment
  • Deploying and scaling web apps, databases and backend services

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Dev Tools For All

Microsoft is executing on its vision of continually bringing the best of Microsoft to other platforms (not just Windows).  Today is an important day in that journey.  Several announcements were made today at Microsoft Connect () related to developer tools / platform.  Here is a brief summary:

.NET / Visual Studio

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Azure AD – Not Just a Directory in the Cloud

What is Azure AD?  At an architect level, Azure AD is a high-availability, geo-redundant, multi-tenanted, multi-tiered cloud service that has delivered 99.99% uptime for over a year now. We run it across 27 datacenters around the world. Azure AD has stateless gateways, front end servers, application servers, and sync servers in all of those data centers. Azure AD also has a distributed data tier that is at the heart of our high availability strategy. The data tier holds more than 500 million objects and is running across 13 data centers.   Azure AD Architecture

Figure 1. Azure Active Directory Architecture

 

It’s Not Just Another Directory to Manage

For starters, there are no costs for using Azure AD. The directory is a free resource. There is an additional Azure Active Directory Premium tier that is licensed separately and provides additional features such as company branding and self-service password reset. Azure AD offers many benefits, other than just typical “directory services”. When using a Microsoft cloud service like Office 365 or Microsoft CRM Online, the identities for those platforms are using Azure AD.  This comes with huge benefits because those platforms instantly benefit from the features within Azure AD.  For example, if you are an Office 365 user, you have access to thousands of other applications that integrate with Azure AD (assuming your organization leverages that SaaS vendor).  Users could also benefit from additional services like multi-factor authentication to Office 365, Azure Rights Management Service, for encrypting documents/emails and Self-Service Password Reset.

Single Sign On

Azure AD’s gallery of pre-integrated SaaS applications grows pretty much every week and it is now supporting over 2300 total apps! Also, Azure AD now provides integrated SAML support for over 50 applications, including all of the apps pictured below. Azure SaaS Apps

Figure 2. Azure AD SaaS SAML Integrated Apps

 

Multi-Factor Authentication

Azure Multi-Factor Authentication prevents unauthorized access to both on-premises and cloud applications by providing an additional level of authentication. Protect your business with security monitoring and alerts and machine learning-based reports that identify inconsistent access patterns to mitigate potential threats.

Self-Service Password Reset

Tasks such as resetting passwords and the creation and management of groups to your employees should be self-service. No sense paying a help desk resource to reset a password when that can be done by the user (possibly faster than placing a phone call).  Azure AD offers Self-service Password Change and Reset and Self-service Group Management with Azure Active Directory Premium.   For more information, see Azure Active Directory.

Azure Search

Azure Search is getting rolling and customers may have questions, or will have questions, about where it makes the most sense. First and foremost, doing Search is hard, and it can also be expensive. Azure Search is targeted at three core scenarios in this iteration:

Online retail/ecommerce

Most customers of ecommerce applications/sites will find products by using search first. Azure Search fits nicely into this space with its range of features including filtering, category counts (faceting), scoring, filters, sorting, paging and projection.

User generated/social content

There are many different flavors of user-generated content applications, but most share similar requirements when it comes to search. Examples of these kind of applications include recipe sites, photo sharing sites, user-contributed news sites and social network applications that have a Web and mobile presence. These applications deal with a large volume of documents, sometimes many millions, particularly when they allow users to comment and discuss on items. Geo-spatial data is often involved, related to location of people or things. Relevance tends to be driven by text statistics in addition to domain-specific aspects such as document freshness and author popularity.

Business applications

Users of line of business applications often navigate through their content using pre-defined menus and other structured access paths. However, when search is incorporated into these applications a lot of friction can be removed from general user interaction making it quicker and more efficient to retrieve this information.

Azure Search supports these scenarios from mobile devices to web sites and everything in between. A great introduction to using the cloud to provide app capabilities that used to be very hard in a quicker, easier fashion.

 

Check out the Azure Search blog post for more information/scenarios.

Azure + Chef

Keeping the topic of Open Source going…I thought I’d share a bit of information on Microsoft’s partnership with Chef with Azure.

About 18 months ago, Opscode announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft Azure to support rich Chef integration:

Maximizing the power of public cloud platforms is best accomplished through the use of a dynamic, consistent automation engine. With Windows Azure and Opscode Chef, organizations can now make the most of all Windows Azure offers for Microsoft and Linux-based environments alike, delivering maximum flexibility and ease of use in bringing ideas to market and adapting to business change.

-Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode

 

See it in Action

Below is a video of Ross Gardler (Senior Technical Evangelist from Microsoft Open Tech) doing a demo of building cloud resources in Azure with Chef cookbooks. Skip to 7:27

 

Resources

 

Microsoft and Open Source

Wanted to share some updates on the work Microsoft is doing in the open source space.

Open Compute Project

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ack in January, we announced a contribution to the Open Compute Project.  Microsoft is sharing what they call their ‘Microsoft cloud server specification‘: the designs for the most advanced server hardware in Microsoft datacenters delivering global cloud services like Windows Azure, Office 365, Bing and others.

We are excited to participate in the OCP community and share our cloud innovation with the industry in order to foster more efficient datacenters and the adoption of cloud computing.

more details on that can be found here.

Port25

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nother interesting set of investments in open source comes from the Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. team.  It’s a group of people building bridges between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies…powering interoperability through open standards and open source.

Here are some of the projects they are working:


Azure Announcements

 

Two significant announcements were made last week that are worthy of a call out. They are a clear sign of the commitment and investment Microsoft is making in the cloud.

 

Microsoft Cloud Solutions Demonstrate Ability to Support Qualified GxP Applications

Microsoft becomes the only major combined IaaS, PaaS and SaaS public cloud provider to enable life sciences organizations to meet GxP qualification requirements, Helping Life Sciences Organizations Achieve and Maintain Compliance in the Cloud

Press Release: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-24MSDIAPR.aspx

Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lifesciences/archive/2013/06/24/compliance-in-the-cloud-and-why-you-should-care.aspx   

 

Microsoft/Oracle Enterprise Partnership

Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. today announced a partnership that will enable customers to run Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure. Customers will be able to deploy Oracle software — including Java, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server — on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and receive full
support from Oracle.

Press Release: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jun13/06-24WSNewsPR.aspx

Oracle Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud/entry/oracle_and_microsoft_join_forces