If you are a software developer and didn’t read this paper you should. This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud. Most importantly, the paper discusses some specific strategies on how to architect your application to leverage the benefits of the cloud benefits. Although you’ll see some specific tactics on how to use different Amazon Web Services features and services (the paper is written by Jinesh Varia, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon), the principles can be applied using any cloud providers (Windows Azure).

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Microsoft announced today at TechEd India — a show running simultaneously with TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, a new software development kit for people interested in building apps in PHP for Windows Azure cloud.

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure, a.k.a. PHPAzure, is an open source project, available for download from Microsoft CodePlex. The SDK provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables, Queues).

Program Manager, Peter Galli, said Microsoft also is announcing “the launch of a series of projects that offer samples and a toolkit that enable PHP developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and IE Webslices and Accelerators in PHP web applications; as well as automatically generated a simple Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) PHP application from a table in SQL Server.”

A Technology Preview of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure will be released under a BSD license, while a functionally complete version of the SDK, which will support tables and queues, should be available for download by this fall of 2009, but the team is calling on developers to provide feature requests, test the toolkit, and join the user forum.

Meanwhile you can read the Getting Started Guide here.

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…