There’s no question: web mashups are integral part of Web 2.0. Besides the social aspect of Web 2.0, mashups have been more and more prevalent in the Web 2.0 world. It is hard to imagine a Web 2.0 app not having content from other sources: a map from Google, pictures from Flicker, avatars from Gravatar,  or movies from YouTube. Many web providers now exposed proprietary content through API’s. ProgrammableWeb has the most comprehensive list of Web 2.0 API’s I could find. The list is growing every day. Instead of opening their content to outside world, many websites opened their doors and let other developers deploy applications on their sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce and many others, all providing proprietary platforms. The users can then combine applications from various vendors and use them.

On March 14th 2006, Amazon started the Cloud Race with the release of Amazon Web Services Platform. At the end of 2006, Microsoft realizes that the Cloud is the new big thing as they start development of their own version of cloud offerings and release after two years a comprehensive suite of tools and services (Windows Azure) which makes Microsoft one of the main players in the field. Other players are trying to catch up: VMWare, EMC, Google, HP, etc.

So what’s the future of the Cloud? How it will change our lives? Continue reading…

Here’s Windows Azure (started in late 2006 by Dave Cutler with the codename ”Red Dog”) explained in 145 seconds. Enjoy!

CloudFront, the new service from Amazon, will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

CloudFront was designed to meet the following goals:

• Allow developers and businesses to get started easily, with no dollar or volume commitments. Like other services, this one will be pay-as-you-go.
• Be simple and easy to use. In fact, a single API call is all that’s needed for you to start delivering your content.
• Work seamlessly with Amazon S3, for durable storage of the definitive versions of your content.
• Have a global presence, using edge locations on three continents in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location

Like all Amazon other services, CloudFront was designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.  There are no minimum usage commitments, no monthly fees, and no need to even talk to Amazon. Here’s what you do: Continue reading…

One of the more active “azure groups” inside Microsoft is the SQL Services team.  They have the so called “SQL Services Labs” where they keep the incubations and innovations, giving us an early look at what they’re working on. One of the things it got our attention (besides Data Mining In The Cloud which we covered here) is “Huron” - the new Desktop Database Sharing - a solution for enabling sharing of desktop and device databases with business partners, mobile users and other desktops. It is using the Microsoft Sync Framework which Microsoft is pushing hard to developers for adoption.

“Huron” provides synchronization capabilities within SQL Data Services to enable occasionally connected applications to easily and efficiently enable content flow through the data hub. It consists of: 
Continue reading…

Microsoft is pushing HARD with the Software + Services strategy, they released yesterday Nov 17, 2008 the Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online for businesses of all sizes in the United States. Press release here.

Businesses can buy or try the new services at http://www.microsoft.com/online. As part of the Microsoft Online Services product family, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are available separately or as a suite together with Office Live Meeting for conferencing, Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services and Microsoft Office Communications Online for instant messaging and presence.
Continue reading…

There are so many similarities between the Amazon S3 and Azure Data Storage REST APIs, I believe that soon somebody will write a cross-cloud Data Storage Library. If anybody knows about such library, please let me know! The table below shows only a few similarities between S3 and Azure Data Storage APIs. Continue reading…

Sriram Krishnan, Azure Program Manager at Microsoft, published a Python wrapper on top of the Azure Storage APIs. The code is hosted on Github here.

Slowly but surely, Microsoft is releasing to open-source community lots of free code, in order to promote their new services. Not too long ago, the SQL Services team released a Ruby library for accessing the SQL Services. The code is also hosted on Github.

In case you’ve missed it, Micro Focus, announced at PDC this year, that will enable secure, reliable and scalable enterprise COBOL applications to run on the Azure Services Platform. They were working with Microsoft for a while. Micro Focus enables corporations to move existing enterprise COBOL applications into the cloud either as private cloud services, available only to that company, or as cloud applications available to the marketplace as a whole. 

“Current experience clearly demonstrates the value of moving to an open, agile platform with operating costs decreasing by between 50 and 90% for each application. Cloud computing models enable further consolidation and virtualization of the single global operating model, and are expected to reduce future investment requirements by a similar factor,” (Stuart McGill, CTO Micro Focus).

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, Micro Focus is providing CLR-compliant COBOL .NET compilers and Visual Studio plug-ins to import the COBOL code and run it natively on Windows for a while now.

Also, Alchemy Solutions, announced its formation, a result of the purchase of the legacy modernization products and associated business unit from Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation. Alchemy Solutions also secured the distribution rights for the Fujitsu NetCOBOL line of products outside of Japan.

When there’s “cobol” and “cloud” in the same sentence, for some weird reason I hear … “Mainframe“.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard about the newly unveiled Azure Services Platform Operating System for the cloud. What does it mean for delivering enterprise-class software as a subscription service? See what benefits Azure holds for corporate developers, and find out more about Azure Services, including Live Services and SQL Services. 

As you begin reusing services and composing new applications, new requirements arise for the application server, because composite apps are typically more complex to develop, deploy, manage, and change. Enter next platform wave: .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows Server “Dublin”. Microsoft is introducing a set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities codenamed “Dublin” that will offer greater scalability and easier manageability, while extending Internet Information Services (IIS) to provide a standard host for applications that use workflow or communications. This is another step towards on-premises cloud computing. So what’s the sales speech for corporate developers? Continue reading…

In the struggle to keep up with the new technologies, Microsoft realized that REST becomes more and more popular, so they’re trying to add REST support in all web technologies they offer. If you missed the news at PDC (not hard to, we’ve got our years full of new buzz words), Microsoft added REST support to WCF. The REST Starter Kit is a preview of features that are being considered for WCF 4.0, released early on CodePlex so you can download it, look at the code, play with it, and give feedback to Microsoft so they will deliver the right REST features in WCF 4.0. You can find everything you need to learn about RESTful WCF at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/wcf/rest. It has links to download the Starter Kit from CodePlex, a white paper and series of screencasts on using the Starter Kit, overview documentation, release notes, and even hands on labs.