posted by Interframe

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posted by Charles

posted by exoteric

posted by Warren S.

This interview was taken by Microsoft Student Partners at TechEd 2010. Myself, I was behind the camera

posted by CKurt

8 hours ago, CKurt wrote

For anybody who want a nice background of Mark and what he's doing watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1DskPD-Ngc&feature=player_embedded

This interview was taken by Microsoft Student Partners at TechEd 2010. Myself, I was behind the camera

 

Nice job! I like the human focus. Very Channel 9 Keep it up.

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posted by Charles

20 hours ago, exoteric wrote

You know how to throw an oddball at an interviewee Charles. It can bring up interesting answers and lead to interesting tangents at times. Kind of funny to see too

Real time unrehearsed and unscripted conversation (basic Channel 9) can lead to interesting topical tangents.Mark's a great sport and can easily navigate my oddball or nonsequitor questions. Makes conversing fun.

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posted by Charles

posted by CKurt

posted by piersh

It seems to me as if Azure is being regarded more of an actual OS instead of the server stack and services for its distributed and scalable nature. 
Mark, I expect that once you decipher the memcahed functionality of the fabric controller, you'll miss the real fun kernel stuff in due time.
On a different note, I was saddened that I was busy for most of PDC's live viewability to force me to miss out on the more in-depth questions I would have asked live instead of far past it's date.

The only real thing I could ever see myself paying for Azure as an end-user, would be if Microsoft had some sort of way to PXE/network boot a VM of Windows 7 running up on the "cloud" in which I could do all my computing needs via remote-desktop through an XBox360 client-to-AzureVM connection or a specialized Microsoft thin-client hardware monitor & input device package instead of a whole physical rig at my feet.

I always enjoy hearing Mark speak, and I hope this all/some of this comment made sense to all/some of you

Bye for now!

posted by HeavensRevenge

posted by SteveRichter

That's your misunderstanding, not Mark's... Listen to what he said again.
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posted by Charles

13 hours ago, Charles wrote

@SteveRichter: "As in, it is in the interest of Microsoft to keep Windows Server complex because that enables the subscription based Azure to grow its revenue base."

That's your misunderstanding, not Mark's... Listen to what he said again.
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Charles, listen from the 26:00 minute point forward. He says it takes from 3 to 6 months to setup, config and  deploy an app on windows server. With Azure that deployment takes minutes.  What I like about Microsoft is the focus on programming and customization. From way back, using com to automate office.  The .NET framework, all the great work that Anders is doing. I don't get that from Mark's work. There is no source code in his internals books. Process explorer, etc are not open source, there are no automation interfaces to those tools.  I am not complaining. Not even asserting that what I am writing is correct. Just my POV and what I understand to be true based on incomplete knowledge. Microsoft is the one that elevated Mark to such a high rank. Azure must be very important to them to take the premier expert away from his area of expertise. Esp, since that area needs a lot of improvement in order for apps to be able to be deployed on windows server in a shorter amount of time.

posted by SteveRichter

sure getting the appliance might be useful in some cases, but far more useful would be to leverage the hardware that we already have.

posted by aL_

"Charles, listen from the 26:00 minute point forward. He says it takes from 3 to 6 months to setup, config and  deploy an app on windows server. With Azure that deployment takes minutes."

No, that's not what he said... He wasn't talking about deploying applications (like a web site...). He was talking about setting up, configuring, managing, clustering a group of machines running Windows Server and SQL, IIS, etc, etc... Your POV is stretching his words a bit too far

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posted by Charles

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posted by Charles

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posted by Charles

posted by CoreySanders

Thanks for the comment, HeavensRevenge.

When we think of the Windows Azure platform as an “OS of the cloud,” we think of both the services available for applications to use and the type of workloads that can be exercised.

The services that are offered are quite similar to typical operating system services, simply applied at scale to a multi-machine, multi-tenant, and distributed system. This includes:

• Deployment services, allowing efficient and rapid allocation of both large and small applications throughout the available and shared resource pool;
• Update services, allowing application components and the platform itself to be updated without interruption to the overall execution of the application;
• Managed health, allowing automatic recovery from application and hardware failure, without interruption to the overall execution of the application;
• Security services, giving certificate management and endpoint control;
• Debugging services, allowing remote access to individual machines and remote reimage and reboot capabilities;
• Intra-application communication, allowing secure and managed communication across different parts of the application.

In addition to these services offered, we also think about the diverse workloads that can be executed, similar to a general purpose operating system. As you indicate, the Windows Azure platform has capabilities to support web-based applications, notably in the “Web Role,” allowing support comparable to the LAMP stack (with PHP, Java, and .NET support).

However, when you include the capabilities of the “Worker Role” and the “VM Role,” the possible workloads extend beyond just a web-based application. With these additional role types, the workload support includes scale-out high performance computing applications, data processing services, shared file servers, complicated stateful service applications, and all the combinations therein.

Given the services supplied to applications and the diversity of application types that can be executed, we think “Operating System of the Cloud” is a very exciting and very real description for the Windows Azure platform.

-Corey Sanders, Windows Azure Fabric Controller

posted by CoreySanders

i know that.. what i want to do is leverage the hardware that we already have to turn it into an abstacted azure cloud. i'd basically like to build my own appliance with my own hardware. (or even better, run some sort of azure node software on computers running a another client/server os)

i know thats not possible with azure today, but that is something they should enable as it would make azure far more useful imo

posted by aL_

posted by cyberhawk

@aL_: I think Azure COULD probably be retro-fitted to a general hardware configuration if and only if they restore the origional kernel of Server 2008 R2 + Azure extensions instead of using their extremely stripped down kernel which they have engineered specifically for the hardware in their datacenters for apparent optimisation. If the kernel wasnt so specialized, and they didnt design pieces of the intergral components as being so specialised to their specific server configs with assumptions in hardware ability offering the same functionality, they shouldn't be limited by their datacenter configs. But maybe by vendor lock-in decision, they will never actually offer a more maleable Azure for corperate installation, which is sad but not impossible.

posted by HeavensRevenge

@aL_:  If you happened to have a bunch of extra blade servers, redundant network addressable power supplies, hardware load balancers, top of rack switches, etc., you probably could install and use Windows Azure.  However, you can't throw a bunch of random hardware together and achieve the reliability, scalability, and availability that is a core tenet of Windows Azure.  It is not the same thing.  The reason we have the Windows Azure Appliance is because that is the only hardware configuration that we can have that will achieve the same goals that are so important in the public cloud (or hosted/private as the case may be).

posted by dunnry

6 hours ago, cyberhawk wrote

No offense, but that interviewer needed to do some homework before asking questions. The questions were lame but some how Mark tries to make the answers interesting. 

No offense taken, though I have to disagree with you I thought the conversation was quite good (random, sure, but that was by design). If you want the details inside of Fabric Controller than watch Mark's PDC10 session on the topic (as specified in the post description...). The purpose of the conversation was to explore the OS analogy and PaaS. I believe we accomplished that, but I respect and appreciate your candor. Thanks.

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posted by Charles

Though, I'm curious... Why is the medium-quality WMV version is 55 MB bigger than the high-quality WMV version? I thought the only motivation to download a lower quality video of our beloved celebrity's interview is the size...

posted by Fleet Command

posted by Damon

13 hours ago, Fleet Command wrote

Awsome! I can't wait to watch!

Though, I'm curious... Why is the medium-quality WMV version is 55 MB bigger than the high-quality WMV version? I thought the only motivation to download a lower quality video of our beloved celebrity's interview is the size...

Don't know what happened. You can always just download the lower quality MP4...

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posted by Charles