The strategies discussed in this article can be applied to any cloud platform that has an ability to dynamically provision compute resources, even though I rely on examples from AzureWatch auto scaling and monitoring service for Windows Azure The topic of auto scaling is an extremely ...

Microsoft Office Access is one of the most popular thick client / client server application development tool that is prevalent in the enterprises today. Its simplicity to use, fitment for quick departmental applications and ability to be home grown by the business users without dep...

Java EE 7 is the next version of the major enterprise platform has been approved by the JCP board recently. We find significant support for Cloud Adoption in the proposed platform. This platform analyzes how Java EE could be a major Cloud Platform much like .net has been positioned i...

Part 1 of the Windows Azure Series, provided an introduction to Windows Azure, and Part 2 provided a look inside the Windows Azure datacenters. Part 3 will continue with a look at the Windows Azure Roles and the Development Environment. The last one is especially important for the next...

This article focuses on the need for inclusive development in India with Accessible -Affordable -Interactive crowdsourcing platform for Agriculturists and consumers. This would enable National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture with convergence and integration of traditional knowledge...

While most enterprises are increasing their IT spending over the year, the business value derived is not propotional. Studies have indicated that resources spent on maintenance takes the bulk of IT spending. One of the core tenants of PaaS platform is to enable the organizations to co...

All in all this is a good book to get introduced to Microsoft SQL Azure. This book starts out with an introduction to cloud computing and the Azure Services Platform. It cover the current state of the Cloud leaders and does a nice summary comparison to show the strengths of each. It c...

Cloud analytics is a service model in which one or more key element of data analytics is provided through a public or private cloud. Cloud analytics applications and services are typically provided through a subscription-based or utility (pay-per-use) model. While this will be a usefu...

Java EE and .net continue to be the major enterprise platforms. With their clones taken up the PaaS space on cloud, it is all the more important for the enterprises to think in terms of interoperability. This article analyzes the interoperability between two major PaaS platforms in ....

With Java EE being a major platform on enterprise, a good PaaS platform like vFabric is very exciting. This gives lot of choices for existing Java EE based applications to move to the Cloud. The comparison with Windows Azure is done only for the new Cloud applications or...

The book is intended to give you enough information to decide whether or not further movement toward the cloud is something you want to do, and it does that perfectly. The book is a nice concise overview of Microsoft Azure. I have not had any clients express interested in the cloud ye...

We saw a recent announcement about ‘Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office' with the following underlying features. Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office brings collaborative multi-person editing to the familiar Microsoft Office experience. You can share, backup, and simultaneo...

To understand Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform, it’s necessary to understand how the Microsoft Datacenters work. In this article I will provide an overview of how Microsoft Designs their Datacenters and what is so revolutionary about the Generation 4 Datacenters. Microsof...

So you deployed your brand-new ASP.NET web application to Azure cloud. All seems to be working perfectly until a user tried to upload large amount of data (approx. over 30MB) through your application UI. Unfortunately the operation failed. Surprisingly small file uploads works just fin...

In this blog David Chou provides an excellent synopsis of the core mechanics and fundamental value of Cloud computing. He focuses on Microsoft Azure naturally, and so does this other recent white paper. Business elasticity – As a service In a nutshell these articles describe that...

Microsoft replaced Bob Muglia, president of its $14.9 billion-a-year Tools and Server Division, who Steve Ballmer fired recently, by moving the engineer-in-chief of its wimpy Online Service Division, Satya Nadella, 43, into the job. That also makes him head of the company’s cloud. ...

I’ve done a Windows Azure Series together with Mario Szpusta, Software Architect Evangelist at Microsoft Austria on Windows Azure. The Series is in German and I decided to bring it to Cloud Computing Journal. I will modify some of the articles to bring them up-to-date. This series will...

The 'Houston' project was one of the incubation projects of the windows Azure cloud services. This project has entered into production and you will find it in the new Windows Azure Portal (https://windows.azure.com). All New services can be accessed from the 'Ribbon' under Common Tasks...

As the trend to access the large result sets of data over the Cloud going to increase in future, it would be idealy utilize the disconnected architecture for the SaaS or applications written for PaaS platform. This article high lights one such implementation on Windows Azure Cloud Pla...

There are plenty of “Top 5 lists” with generic reasons for why businesses should migrate into SaaS and cloud computing. Scalability, cost, mobility – they’re good reasons, sure, but we’ve heard them before: what else does cloud computing offer? If you’re thinking about moving your busi...

Reporting continues to be one of the major portfolio allocation spending needs in the enterprise. The enterprises have been struggling with Upgrades to Report Versions especially when Vendors change their Architectural models. Reporting As PaaS on Azure platform provides a good choice....

Cloud-computing providers in general and Windows Azure in particular offer nearly infinite scalability, virtually unlimited capacity, blazing performance and extremely quick provision times. However, to properly take advantage of these great benefits, teams need to plan ahead and unde...

I hope my latest book "Microsoft SQL Azure Enterprise Application Development" which should be available in a couple of days appeals to the readers as much as my two other books on Microsoft BI. This book covers most of the changes that took place between the CTP and the updates in Oct...

Java Enterprise Edition is the most dominating platform for the enterprise applications. Hence stronger presence of Java EE as PaaS will support Cloud Adoption. Some of the players are discussed in this article. Ever since the beginning of this century a comparison between the platfor...

Windows Azure, a Platform as a Service offer, is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. It was announced at PDC 2008 where Microsoft announced some interesting improvements and additional features to its Windows Azure Platform. Microsoft is serious about its strategy on Windows Azure, a...

Design patterns are proven solutions to the recurring design problems. Design Patterns identify the minimal set of known problems that an application architecture should solve. The advantages of applying a design pattern are: proven solutions to the problems, reusability, improved per...

A key attribute of cloud platform is the ability to handle dynamic load and expand based on the load. This property is known as elasticity. Major XaaS platforms like Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure have implemented this feature, and this article gives an highlight of them. A key bene...

In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1-4, 2010) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem.

The lack of rich interoperability between cloud infrastructures based on Java and .Net is a growing problem that Gartner Group and others believe will threaten the very viability of utility computing. JNBridge, a veteran provider of tools and technologies for bridging the gap between ...

According to the Nikkei July 10 morning edition, Fujitsu and Microsoft are planning to share data centers worldwide in a bid to catch up to the world's Cloud computing pioneers in the business of providing software and computing services online. The two companies are considering joint ...

"For customers, cloud computing creates tremendous value, which translates to massive opportunity for Microsoft and its partners," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today, in his keynote address at day one of the company's Worldwide Partners Conference (WPC). Ballmer highlighted the cri...

Microsoft's Vince Menzione, General Manager for Microsoft's partner strategy in the US public sector, has been underlining his company's "end-to-end commitment to cloud computing." In a magazine interview this week Menzione declared: "All of our salespeople will be leading with cloud.....

Microsoft has updated its Windows Azure SDK with support for the new and improved .NET Framework 4, Visual Studio 2010 tools and IntelliTrace bug tracking while its cloud database SQL Azure got spatial data support and 50GB worth of storage. There’s a the public preview out of SQL ...

The book by Sriram Krishnan “Programming Windows Azure” is now available on Amazon. Sriram Krishnan is a Program Manager on the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. At Windows Azure, he ran the feature teams which built the service management APIs, geo-capabilities and several ...

Got back Friday after a week in the East coast attending the Cloud Expo and meeting with customers/partners. I roamed around the exhibits and found one vendor area that was always packed - Microsoft. Folks were attracted to the huge honking collection of hardware placed right in mid...

I have been using Gladinet Cloud Desktop to manage files on the Azure Blob Storage for a while now. It has a drive letter, accessible from Windows Explorer and it works just like another network drive on my PC. However, just like when you are driving a car on a daily basis but sometime...

Microsoft delivered on its promise and XDrive is now a virtual reality called Windows Azure Drive. This allows you to backup Windows applications automatically to the Micrsoft Azure. Read details here. Windows Azure drive is implemented as a NTFS formatted Virtual Hard Drive for pe...

Window Azure platform AppFabric has now been deployed to more data centers around the world. Previously, when you provisioned a service namespace, you were asked to select a region from a list that contained only United States (South/Central). Now, when you provision a service namespac...

Microsoft and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Thursday announced an agreement that will offer individual researchers and research groups selected through NSF's merit review process free access to advanced cloud computing resources. By extending the capabilities of powerful, ea...

If I have documents sitting in a cloud storage such as Google Docs, why do I need to back it up to a different cloud storage such as Azure Storage? Maybe because I need the peace of mind that I can access it the moment I need to. Or in some countries, access to one may be blocked such ...