Windows Azure & How to Deploy Wordress

Editor's Notes

• #2: Slide objectives: Welcome & introductionsSpeaking Points: THANK YOU! – First, I want to thank you for investing your time to learn about the Azure Services Platform. We do not take it lightly when we have partners and customers take their time to learn about our new technologies. I hope that this is an informative and beneficial event. Notes:
• #3: Slide objectives: Explain the agenda and set expectations about what attendees will learn about in this presentation.Speaking Points: For the next 75 minutes in this session, you will learn about Microsoft’s Cloud Services initiatives and receive a very quick tour of the Azure Services Platform. The objective for this session is to help you understand what Azure is, how to use it, how to get started, and how to dig deeper.Polling questions: By a show of hands, how many of you heard about the Azure announcements made at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in October? How many of you would consider yourselves ISVs? Enterprise organizations? Small/medium businesses? System Integrators? Other?You have no doubt heard a lot of noise about “Cloud Computing”, “Utility Computing”, and “Cloud Services”. Before diving into the details about Azure, we will first talk about what is happening in the industry around the cloud. We will then define the Azure Services Platform and discuss some of the individual services that make up the platform.I will summarize the SDKs and service availabilityFinally, I will share the high-level roadmap and we will have some time for Q&A. Scope:This is a overview level session. I will show some brief demos and some code, but we will spend most of the time defining the Azure Services Platform and giving you an overview of the services through slides. I will intentionally show you simple demos to help you understand the concepts for the services and how they can be used. We will dive much deeper in the following sessions.Notes:
• #4: Slide objectives: Provide some context for why there is hype/interest in the cloud by focusing on some of the practical issues developers face when building web applications. Speaking Points: Today there are a number of challenges that you face when building web applications.For example, imagine you are building what you hope will be the next big social networking site or online game. Or perhaps you are building a commerce site for selling tickets to sporting events. One of the first things you have to try to guestimate is the number of users. How many people do you expect to use your web application or service? After 1 month? After 6 months? Or after a year?Do you expect that the number of users will continue to scale up?How do users translate into capacity? Into servers? Or storage requirements?How do you scale up or down your web application over time? If you consider the online gaming scenario, you can imagine that when a new game is launched there is a spike in traffic and usage, but overtime the usage slows.How can you handle peak loads? For example, if you are selling tickets for a major sporting event and the tickets go on sale at a specific time – how do you ensure that you can scale to thousands of concurrent users?How do you provide high availability – not just during the peak loads, but how do you ensure a quick response time for all of your worldwide users?What are the upfront capital costs to build out the infrastructure? How quickly will the infrastructure be available? Or if you have an established application, how can you reduce your operations costs?Most of these challenges have little to do with which programming languages, tools, or application frameworks you are using.These are some of the problems that we believe the cloud can help address.
• #5: Slide objectives: Explain what the cloud is in relationship to on-premises servers and hosted severs. Speaking Points: To put the cloud in perspective, let’s first think about the available options for deploying and running your application today. Today, there are a few established approaches for deploying and running applications.ServerOn one side you have on-premises servers or a self-hosted model. With on-premises servers, you bring your own machines, connectivity, software, and in some cases software licenses.You have complete control of the environment, the software stack, the hardware, etc.However, you also have complete responsibility. Your organization must have the skills and expertise to operate and manage the environment and software. You must take on the responsibility of patching the environment, replacing hardware, etc.These days, very few people want to be in this business. However, on-premises servers are not going away anytime soon. In some cases organizations have to maintain solutions running in an on-premises environment due to regulatory, data, or privacy requirements.Hosted ServersAn established alternative to the on-premises model is with a hosted environment.With hosted servers, you are effectively renting capacity – including machines, connectivity, and in some cases software.With this model, you have less control then when you’re managing your own servers. For instance, you can’t walk up to a machine, and plug in an external drive to load data. Or easily make hardware or software adjustments to optimize for performance. However, you also have fewer responsibilities when it comes to operating, updating, patching, and managing the environment. What is generally much more attractive about a hosted model is the cost model.The upfront capital costs can be much lower then building out your own infrastructure. However, one of the downsides is that you generally pay for the fixed capacity on a monthly basis – even if your application is idle. CloudWhat we are starting to see in the industry is the emergency of the cloud as a platform for building and running applications. So what is the cloud and how does it relate to these established options for running your apps?A cloud platform is designed as a shared, multi-tenant infrastructure.Cloud platforms utilize virtualization to: share hardware resources, provide isolation of applications or tenants, and also to provide a more dynamic infrastructure.Ability to scale out your application over multiple server instances.Because it is a shared infrastructure, there is even less control compared to a hosted environment. As this is an emerging space, there is a wide range of different types of cloud solutions. Some of the solutions focus purely on providing virtualized infrastructure. Servers you can remote into. However, many cloud platforms are starting to focus on raising the level of abstraction – so you can focus on building and deploying applications rather than remoting into machines and maintaining or patching servers. Services – services provided by the infrastructure and services you would consume programmaticallyFinally, one of the primary reasons why organizations ranging from startups, independent software vendors, and large enterprises are starting to investigate the cloud is the pricing model. With a cloud platform, you can expect a pay as you go pricing model – where you pay for what you use. [build arrow] I believe it’s important to understand that the cloud is part of a continuum. It is one ofpotential approaches that you can begin to use to deploy and run your applications. However, it’s important to understand that the cloud is not the silver bullet. It is not the perfect solution for every application.
• #6: Slide objectives: Frame the problems with applications today and the reasons for Cloud Computing / Services.Speaking Points: Some of you maybe asking why? Why do we need a new type of platform? So what makes the cloud attractive to organizations?Problems today:Many of the challenges with building applications today have very little to do with development tools, programming languages, or frameworks. Rather, many of the challenges that organizations face are related to the infrastructure required to deploy, run, and manage applications. Startups - For example, imagine you were a startup building the next social networking site or online game You have to worry about numerous issues that are unrelated to the functionality of the application.[Capacity]You have to think about the capacity requirements for the application.Will it be used by a few thousand users or hundreds of thousands or millions?How do users translate to bandwidth, storage, and server requirements?Will the usage be consistent during all times of the year? Will it be consistent over the lifetime of the application?Can you handle spikes in demand if there were sudden demands for the app? (Digg Effect)Ultimately, most organizations end up paying for more capacity then they need.[Deployment, operations, and versioning]Then you have to worry about deploying and operating your applicationHow do you deploy your application over multiple servers?How do you role out updates to the app without taking it offline?How do you manage patches? Enterprise - For established organizations, some of these decisions and problems may have already been addressed through a shared data center or an established staff and processes. However, in enterprise organizations we often find that apps are silos of their own servers. Established organizations also still have to spend a significant amount of capital and operations funding. IT resources are applied to maintaining applications rather than delivering new value and functionality. ISV - Finally, if you’re an ISV who builds applications for use by other businesses you have to worry about a number of additional problems. You have to think about your customer’s capacity, which gets factored into the cost of ownership. Often, your ability to sell your application is dependent on your customers ability to consume it.Your customers often have existing assets such as order fulfillment systems, ERP systems, multi-terabyte databases, etc. that are running on-premise. You must be able to easily integrate with these assets. So many things get in the way for building new appsInfrastructure - Operations, Patching, OS ManagementBuilding and maintaining costly infrastructureSo why is there so much hype around the cloud?When we talk with partners and customers, there are a few general reasons why they’re starting to find the cloud attractive. 1 - First, they view it as a way to reduce their capital and operations costs. A Cloud Platform provides a utility-like model to compute and storage resources – where organizations can only pay for what they use. This is often referred to as a “Pay as you go” model. 2 - Second, the cloud can potentially simplify the deployment and management of applicationsBy relieving organizations from worrying about infrastructure and capacity.3 - Cloud Services can improve time to market for new applications. Instead of spending weeks or months deploying servers and infrastructure to support new applications – organizations can quickly deploy applications to the cloud or use storage in the cloud where vendors provide pre-provisioned data centers.4 - Finally, Cloud Services can make it much easier to scale up or down as needed. Instead of building out capacity for peak usage or not having enough capacity to deal with usage spikes, with the cloud the platform vendor manages the capacity and you only use (and pay for) what you need. Think of this as “Pay as you grow”Notes:
• #7: Slide objectives: Ensure that the audience understands our experience and investments in running and operating services.Speaking Points: IntroMicrosoft hasn’t been running services quite as long as we’ve been making software – but we have been in the business for a while and at huge scale. Just a few numbers from our consumer businessLive Search: 2.16B queries per month, 41 languagesMSN: 550M unique users, 10B+ page views per monthLive ID: 1B+ Authentications/dayMessenger: 8.2B messages/dayMicrosoft has rapidly expanded its data center operations since embarking on the Software + Services strategy in 2005, and willcontinue to do so for the foreseeable future. Initially the company focused on leased facilities. Now we design and build our own data centers. These will soon be the largest and most advanced such facilities in the world—the Northlake facility near Chicago, for instance, will cover more than 500,000 square feet and deliver significant gains in energy efficiency and environmental performance. Data CentersThis is a listing of just the new Microsoft-owned data centers. Designing and building these facilities ourselves allows Microsoft greater control over power efficiency and related environmental impacts. The list below is partial:Quincy, WA: Complete, approx 500K sq ft, 27MW, uses entirely hydro-electric powerSan Antonio, TX: Opening Fall 08, approx 475K sq ft, 27MW, uses recycled water for coolingChicago, IL: Opening Spring/Summer 09, approx 550K sq ft, up to 60MW when full, 1st floor up to 220 double-stacked containers, 2nd floor standard raised-floor data center space, will use outside air for coolingDublin, Ireland: Opening Summer 09, approx 570K sq ft, up to 27MW, will use outside air for coolingInnovation:With the Chicago data center, the entire first floor will house containerstrucks will haul up to 200 containers into the building and back them into their slotsFacilities personnel will hook up Internet connections and power and cooling equipment; then each of the containers will be up and runningContainers provide: Energy efficiency, Cost, Deployment speedNotes:
• #40: Slide objectives: Summarize the top 7 takeaways for the Azure Services Platform. These are the key value propositions for developers.Speaking points: Comprehensive cloud services platformCloud computing, general purpose, & user-centricAbstraction, flexibility, and choiceAbstracts infrastructure, machines, and connectivityMix & match services as neededConnectivity to on-premises products Familiar programming model & tools Apply your .NET & Visual Studio skills to the cloudRich client experiences with Live ServicesStandard protocols & formats (HTTP, REST, ATOM, ...)Community-based libraries & samplesInterop with multiple platformsNotes: