As it was announced at MIX this year, Windows Azure Geo Location enables developers to choose data centers and group applications and storage. Today it went live and can be used, you can specify which geographical region you want your Cloud Service to run.

Why is this important?

• Performance — users want to have more choice on where the data is placed so that they could get it as close to their end users as possible and reduce network latency. 
• Legal/regulatory reasons — users have requirements on where they can place their code and data and where they cannot.
• Business continuity/backup — users want locations geographically spread. You can now make copies of your data across locations so in case of a natural disaster destroying one of Microsoft’s’ data-centers, your data would be safe

If you now go to create a new Hosted Service on the Azure Developer Portal, you will be presented with an option to put the service in an Affinity Group and select the region for that Affinity Group. Continue reading…

Today Microsoft Corp. announced the Release Candidate (RC) of Windows 7 operating system, now available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers at http://technet.microsoft.com. Broader public availability will begin May 5 on the Microsoft Download Center at http://microsoft.com/downloads.

New to the Windows 7 RC are advancements such as Remote Media Streaming, Windows XP Mode (beta) and the upcoming beta of the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.

System Requirements for Windows 7

With the RC, Microsoft is also providing guidance on the minimum system requirements for Windows 7, showing that Windows 7 will work on a broader array of hardware than any other release of Windows at launch:
  * 1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  * 1 GB of RAM (32-bit)/2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
  * 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit)/20 GB (64-bit)
  * DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher driver

I hope Windows Azure SDK will work fine on this release …

Confirmed: Windows Azure Local Development fabric works on the Windows 7 RC

The book written by Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, and Scott Guthrie is in stock at Amazon.com.

You can find the first chapter as a series of HTML articles. This is a great series which walks through the construction of the NerdDinner website. It touches upon most of the day-to-day aspects of ASP.NET MVC that you’ll want to know. It’s a great way to start understanding how the pieces largely fit together.

The rest of the book is for those who want to drill deep into the details of how the framework works. If you’re looking for reasons not to buy the book, see Rob’s post.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), today announced that it has formed a group dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The “Open Cloud Standards Incubator” will work to develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management.

No specific standards currently exist for enabling interoperability between private clouds within enterprises and hosted or public cloud providers. DMTF’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on addressing these issues by developing cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms to facilitate interoperability.

The Open Cloud Standards Incubator was formed as part of the DMTF Standards Incubation process, which enables like-minded DMTF members to work together and produce informational specifications that can later be fast-tracked through the standards development process. The incubation process is designed to foster and expedite open, collaborative, exploratory technical work that complements the DMTF mission to lead the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. The current incubator leadership board consists of: Continue reading…

Some time ago I had a bad feeling about Windows Azure. The reaction to the article was mixed - some agree with the “cloud” confusion and the lack of release dates, others (mostly Microsoft guys) asking for more time so the technologies will evolve; and last but not least people trying to explain how I don’t really understand Windows Azure and related technologies (to those, actually that was one of the points of the article - too much confusion).

So I find myself after six months since the release of Windows Azure looking at the same things as before. First, the “cloud” confusion. Everything running on the internet is now “cloud something”. I really appreciate Microsoft’s job of starting the real cloud race (let’s be honest, wasn’t a race until Microsoft came into play, it was more like a slow march), but I still believe they should take the lead and clear the sky of this everything-is-cloud-something confusion before it becomes a cloud jungle.

Second, although there are some advances in supporting other technologies in Windows Azure, like the PHP support released recently, we still don’t know the long term roadmap for supporting other non .NET technologies.

Third, I have to get back to the lack of information about when Windows Azure will be production ready and again, when are we going to have a Service Level Agreement (SLA). More and more companies (…) Continue reading…

Last week, at the Uptime Institute IT Symposium in New York City, management consultancy firm McKinsey a well respected professional services company that describes itself as “a management consulting firm advising leading companies on organization, technology, and operations”, released a report with the title “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing” claiming that large corporations could lose money through the adoption of cloud computing. The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. They argue that cloud offerings are most attractive for small and medium sized enterprises, large companies will spend less if using traditional data centers. 

The whole study was received with skepticism by all people interested in the cloud computing field, however, just the other day we’ve got an official rebuttal from Amazon and I’d expect something similar from Microsoft at some point.

Amazon Web Services Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, ex-Microsoft, James Hamilton, has a thoughtful response to the study in his blog. His conclusion: Continue reading…

VMware, Inc. today announced VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice. As the complexity of IT environments has continued to increase over time, customers’ share of IT budgets are increasingly spent on simply trying to “keep the lights on.” With the promise of cloud computing, customers are eager to achieve the benefits, but struggle to see the path to getting there.  Leveraging VMware vSphere 4, customers can take pragmatic steps to achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments.  With these “internal” clouds, IT departments can dramatically simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 4 will aggregate and holistically manage large pools of infrastructure – processors, storage and networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment.  Any application – an existing enterprise application or a next-generation application – runs more efficiently and with guaranteed service levels on VMware vSphere 4.  For enterprises, VMware vSphere 4 will bring the power of cloud computing to the datacenter, slashing IT costs while dramatically increasing IT responsiveness.  For hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 will enable a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers’ internal cloud infrastructures.  Over time, VMware will support dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling “private” cloud environments that span multiple datacenters and/or cloud providers. … Continue reading…

HDCloud, developed by Diversion Media, a New York-based startup that creates and operates consumer media properties, is offering automated, high-definition video encoding in the cloud for large-scale media companies. 

Whether you need 400 kpbs Flash, 1.2 Mbps MPEG-2, or 5 Mbps h.264, HD Cloud can produce high-quality outputs. Input formats range from MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 to AVI, Real Media, and 3GP. Output formats include H.261, H.263 (Spark), H.264, MPEG-2, and 3GP.

HD Cloud also provides RESTful API for integration with other systems, including VMS providers, file transfer accelerators, CDNs, security vendors, and legacy transcoding systems.

This is another success story in the “cloud”. By leveraging public and proprietary cloud technologies, HDCloud is able to scale horizontally without limits. Remember, video processing requires lots of processing power and results must be delivered in timely manner. 

Tatum Lade, co-founder and CTO of Diversion Media, was kind enough to provide some insights on the technologies used by HDCloud:  Continue reading…

Amazon SQS launched over three years ago and is the quiet workhorse behind many of the highly scalable applications running on Amazon EC2.

Today Amazon is rolling out some important new features for Amazon SQS including availability from within our EU region, control of access permissions, and more control over the visibility timeout.

Starting today, a complete, self-contained instance of Amazon SQS is available in Europe. You can now choose to build Amazon SQS-driven applications entirely based in Europe or span regions (US and EU) in order to provide geographic diversity.

AWS is also introducing additional permission features that control access to Amazon SQS and to each of its fundamental actions on a very fine-grained basis … Continue reading…