Host Jonathan Rozenblit is always on the search for stories of Canadian developers who have either built new applications using Windows Azure services or have migrated existing applications to Windows Azure. Canada Does Windows Azure shares their stories.

This is the story of RESAAS.

RESAAS
RESAAS is a technology company that has built a fully-integrated technology platform to service all participants of the real estate industry, including professionals, such as realtors and mortgage specialists, and home buyers and sellers. The Company's mission is to connect real estate professionals, mortgage specialists, home buyers and sellers through our enterprise technology platform and allow them to communicate in "real time", allowing for faster and easier communication between industry participants. RESAAS' enterprise technology platform is built on Microsoft Windows Azure.  

ANDREW THOMPSON
Andrew Thompson is the VP of Engineering at RESAAS and is responsible for all aspects of RESAAS' scalable technology platform built on top of Microsoft Windows Azure. He has prior experience as a software engineer building applications with C# .NET, Java and C/C++ languages using Agile and continuous integration/deployment practices for medical, financial, digital media and social based technology companies. He currently resides in Vancouver, Canada and has a technical blog at http://andrewmatthewthompson.blogspot.ca.

Live Q&A with Jean Lozano.

CLD280 - Lessons Learned From Building a Digital Asset Management System in the Cloud
In this session, Jean Lozano discusses various development strategies that he and his team learned while ramping up development on Windows Azure. You'll learn the lessons they learned from various cloud-related challenges faced during development and from an application support/maintenance perspective. This presentation will focus on insights acquired from architecting, building and maintaining a business application on Windows Azure over the last two years, using examples from MediaValet , a multi-tenant digital asset management system that was designed and developed from the ground up on Windows Azure.

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This Session's Experts

Jean Lozano (Twitter, LinkedIn)

In this session, Jean Lozano discusses various development strategies that he and his team learned while ramping up development on Windows Azure. You'll learn the lessons they learned from various cloud-related challenges faced during development and from an application support/maintenance perspective. This presentation will focus on insights acquired from architecting, building and maintaining a business application on Windows Azure over the last two years, using examples from MediaValet , a multi-tenant digital asset management system that was designed and developed from the ground up on Windows Azure.

Watch the live Q&A with Jean Lozano >>

This Session's Experts

Jean Lozano (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Availability is a critical requirement here as they only have a small window to take a order. When a Domino’s customer is hungry and ready to place the order you had better be ready to take that order. If the site is not available they’ll go elsewhere and that order is lost.

As Jim states, Domino’s is a business of peaks. They have rushes every day (dinner). they have peak days of the week (Fridays) and they have peak days of the year (e.g. Super Bowl). Within about an hour on that one day of the year (i.e. Super Bowl Sunday) Domino’s has a peak that’s about 50% higher than any other day of the year.

If you think that through, you’ll realize that, although Domino’s has to provision capacity to be able to handle the very highest peak in traffic, a huge percentage of the time much of Domino’s computing infrastructure is running idle.

Clearly there is a huge benefit to optimizing computing capacity while being able handle peak demand and innovate on new products and capabilities. Domino’s is looking to Windows Azure to help them with that as they port their ecommerce solution.

Jim walked me through the Domino’s Build your Own Pizza app. It’s interesting to note it was running on Tomcat and written in Java all hosted in Windows Azure. That’s a clear testament that Windows Azure is as interoperable as Windows Server.

Jim’s main concern when building out this solution was that they remain portable. They expect to be able to run the same code in their own data centers or Windows Azure. Windows Azure allowed them to use the Java skills, tooling and infrastructure they were using in their own data center.

Domino’s menus, product availability and pricing of their pizzas is done locally based on the neighborhood of the store you’re ordering from. As a result when you build a pizza online it has to query the local store to provide you with the correct price you’ll pay before you order. They use Service Bus (now known as AppFabric) to get the orders to the stores and pricing back from the store. Eventually that will also provide the information required for their Pizza Tracker app.

Archetype saw the trend around video and media related solutions moving to the cloud and took the initiative to build out their end-to-end solution.  They had a couple of projects where they had to be able to handle large scale very quickly.  In general they had trouble scaling up quickly and then back down once the project was over. Windows Azure gave them that capability in both their services and product businesses.

One of their products is a media content management system called Archetype Media Platform (AMP) that allows enterprises to control all their media assets.  Danny and Luigi spent some time here showing off some of the video content management and editing capabilities of the AMP solution running on Windows Azure.

Towards the end of the video Luigi shares some of his experiences porting to Windows Azure (first cut working in less than a week).  The solution architecture use web roles for the front end and web services as well as worker roles for various activities in the background (e.g. encoding or analyzing media).  SQL Azure is used for content metadata and Windows Azure blob storage for the video files.

For Sitemasher, Azure provides uptime and availability over their previous hosting in dual colo spaces in L.A. and Vancouver.  They’ve now moved to Azure so they don’t have to worry about the infrastructure.

Phil showed a few sites that clearly illustrate the target for their product: a professional design tool for web professionals.  He also shows how their design tools allow web designers and javascript jockeys to visually design pages, forms, databases and manage the related sites and data.

From an architectural point of view the solution is built with shared-everything multi-tenancy in mind whether on-prem, hosted or in the cloud.  Related to that, Phil helped out in a session on multi-tenancy at PDC (have a look at it here).

The Sitemasher architecture before the move to Azure included multiple instances of SQL Server 2008 as well as multiple instances of Windows Server 2008 running IIS 7.   The solution is a C# ASP.NET application running across that infrastructure.  Naturally there were load balancers in front of all that to help with scale.  As a small startup they had to manage all of that infrastructure.

With Azure they don’t have to worry about any of that.  They also no longer have to worry about uptime, backups or any of the individual hardware systems.  Instead they focus on their core intellectual property and core value which is innovation around the software itself.  They’ve built a C# web role for the front end as well a worker role for caching using memcached.  Naturally they are now using SQL Azure for database scale out.

The video is a little dated (sorry got busy with MIX :[  ) so where Phil talks about getting ready to move they are now actually on the Windows Azure platform.

Phil has some very good tips and best practices toward the end of the video where he talks about how he ported over to Windows Azure and some of the lessons he learned.

RiskMetrics specializes in helping to manage risk for financial institutions and government services.  The solution they built on Windows Azure is primarily for calculating financial risk for their clients.  Calculating the risk on portfolios of financial assets is an incredibly compute-intensive problem to solve (Monte Carlo simulations on top of Monte Carlo simulations).  There is an ongoing and increasing demand for this type of computation.  RiskMetrics calculations require enormous computational power but the need for that power tends to come in peaks.  That means the required hardware is idle for much of the time.  Windows Azure solves this problem by allowing RiskMetrics to quickly acquire the very large number of required processors, use them for a short time and then release them.

To give you a sense of the scale RiskMetrics is talking about, the initial target is to use 10,000 worker roles on Windows Azure.  And that’s just a beginning as Rob thinks they could eventually be using as many as 30,000.

While using Windows Azure may help control costs, the real motivation is having the kind of compute power they need to build analytic services for their clients that they just wouldn’t otherwise be able to do easily.

Rob goes in to some depth on the architectural pattern they devised to ensure the efficient flow of work packets from their data center into the cloud for processing and then back again with the results.  The architecture is an interesting hybrid of on-premises and cloud computing.

Rob (along with his colleague Phil Jacob) also presented some of this in a PDC session.

ESRI has been working to extend that functionality to Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  MapIt takes advantage of SQL Azure to consume location-based data.  The MapIt spatial data service can be deployed as a role on Windows Azure and provides spatial data capabilities to applications using SQL Azure.  This provides a valuable service to folks that miss the spatial data types they were used to using in SQL Server.

Rex walked me through building a Silverlight application with their Silverlight Control Toolkit in Expression Blend.  As Rex mentions in the video ESRI has released the source code for their Silverlight toolkit controls.  You can find those on CodePlex here: http://ESRISilverlight.codeplex.com/

It sounds like ESRI has some big plans for where they want to take the MapIt product to provide even better integration with SQL Azure.

You can find out more about the ESRI MapIt product here.

Stephen Forte is their Chief Strategy Officer (love that title ) responsible for thinking about their new technology directions.  In this episode of Lessons Learned, Stephen shows me how they’re now able to go from SQL Azure tables to persistent classes when developing applications using their OpenAccess ORM product.

The process of implementing a SQL Azure provider for OpenAccess was fairly straightforward.  Telerik ran unit tests of their existing SQL Server provider against SQL Azure to find the differences.  They found the few minor issues and were able to get a working version running in three weeks or so.

The biggest difference they found between SQL Server and SQL Azure was the data types.  SQL Azure supports most of the SQL Server data types but some (like spatial, text, etc) are not supported.  Another difference was multiple active result sets (MARS).  This one was a little trickier and with some work they were able to get the same end-result using different t-sql.

The OpenAccess ORM product is available now.  Telerik is also dogfooding it internally using another of their products: Sitefinity CMS.  The next release of Sitefinity will then support SQL Azure as a data store.

A few links mentioned in this episode:

• Telerik team blogs are here
• Stephen’s blog is here
• OpenAccess ORM product page
• Sitefinity CMS product page

Quest is an early adopter of the Windows Azure platform.  They’ve been working on a new offering for their various management business.  They’ve built out an extensive services framework as well as a few service offerings on that framework. 

Quest has hundreds of solutions for the enterprise.  These are your typical on-premises that would normally require hardware and people to install and maintain those solutions.  The Quest OnDemand project Dmitry is working would extend those offerings to the small and medium business by making many of the solutions available as subscription services.  The first 3 offerings are Recovery Manager OnDemand for Active Directory, InTrust OnDemand event log management, and Site Administrator Reports OnDemand for SharePoint.  These are now available in beta.

Dmitry walks us through the experience of setting up Recovery Manager OnDemand to provide backup and recovery of AD.  The solution running in Windows Azure does most of the work in the cloud while sending requests to the local infrastructure via agents that are running locally.  There is no need to set up servers or install anything beyond that simple local agent service.

Dmitry was very open about the process they went through to adapt their existing solutions to this new subscription model.  He mentions that they were able to re-use about 50% of the code for one of their solutions (Recovery Manager).

Since Quest OnDemand is meant to be on solution with many different component offerings it was important that there be a consistent framework across all those offerings (including login authentication/access control, portal, subscription/payment/billing).  Even within Quest I think they were a little surprised as to how fast they could port applications over once that framework was in place and available to re-use.

Dmitry also goes into detail about the architecture they have built out for this set of services including the portal, Windows Identity Foundation (formerly Geneva) Security Token Service (STS), and the individual services.  He also is very open about what they learned along the way of this development.  It’s interesting to note that the bulk of the Quest products are on-premises so although they had many large installations there had never been a call for super-scalable super-secure multi-customer/multi-tenant deployments like the one required by Quest OnDemand.

I love that Windows Azure played such a big role in helping Quest to adapt the way that they do business.

Have a look at the Quest OnDemand Service here:

• http://www.quest.com/ondemand/

The good folks at CCH (a Wolters Kluwer company) have built an interesting service on Windows Azure.  The solution we discuss here is a sales tax calculation service which they offer to other accounting firms.  This is an existing on-premises product that they are now moving to the cloud.

The existing product was a stateless web service that was designed to live behind the firewall.  The service is meant to be called directly via a plug-in in an accounting firms ERP system (for example, Dynamics AX).  To move that to the cloud CCH wrapped the web services in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

They had been using another third party RAD development tool called CA Plex.  The Plex runtime was added to the project and copied out to the cloud.  One of the things they quickly learned is that the nature of the cloud app is to be stateless and that required special consideration when moving on-premises apps (for example the Plex tool was caching db connections behind the scenes).

Anther important consideration was security.  They were not ready to move to ACS so for the initial release they used X.509 certs, ADFS and message-based security to establish trust relationships with the server.

BTW, the Windows Azure marketing folks have already published a case study on the CCH solution (available here).

Electronics on the fishing vessels communicate directly via satellite to the Windows Azure solution.  Those messages are processed via Windows Azure worker roles and routed using the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus to various on-premises systems for review and action.  The desktop client overlay marine charts onto Bing maps so that the coast guard gets a visual representation of the exact location of boats that have raised alarms.

The good folks at Active Web Solutions have published some of the source code that they developed to “automatically bridge arbitrary TCP endpoints, handling any intermediate firewall traversal.”  The code is available on CodePlex as the SocketShifter project:

http://socketshifter.codeplex.com/

If this is interesting, you should also have a look at Port Bridge published by Clemens Vasters on his blog.  Clemens describes it as “Socketshifter’s older brother”

http://blogs.msdn.com/clemensv/archive/2009/11/18/port-bridge.aspx

For more information on the GoGrid solution for Windows Azure have a look here: http://www.gogrid.com/azure/

Scott walks us through the DBArtisan product to show how SQL Azure integrates seamlessly into this cross-DBMS product.  It was interesting to hear how quickly the effort to add SQL Azure went.  I think that bodes well for other tooling in general for SQL Azure.  Since SQL Azure is so very close to SQL Server it should be relatively simple for ISVs to add SQL Azure support to products that support SQL Server today.

Scott mentions a trial of DBArtisan for SQL Azure.  You can grab that here.

As always let me know your comments below.

Thuzi specializes in building social media applications for large organizations to connect with their customers on sites like Facebook.  The concern with these types of applications is the possibility that the offer will go viral as it gets passed from customer to customer and potentially swamp the servers to the point that they are not responsive and ultimately disappoint customers.  Thuzi chose to use Windows Azure since the Windows Azure platform has ample capacity and they could scale up or down the solution based on the current demand of the market.  The Outback Steakhouse offer in this case was a free Bloomin’ Onion at any of the thousands of Outback Steakhouse restaurants.

Facebook apps don’t actually run on Facebook.  They are embedded using an iframe into a Facebook page.  The app that is running in that iframe must be hosted somewhere else.  In this case, Thuzi hosts that in Windows Azure. They actively monitor the campaign and turn on or off web and worker role instances as required.  In order to scale they used Windows Azure table storage and queues.  They also use SQL Azure to perform reporting and analytics on the results of the campaign.

In and of itself this is an interesting Software + Services solution built with a compelling WPF design client and a high performance ASP.NET server.  Quark chose to deploy this solution using Windows Azure.  In that way they could build out their business to handle the numerous relationships they’ve setup neighborhood printers.  The architecture is service-based specifically so they could handle these type of relationships and host the solution on the partner’s site and in fact host on multiple sites from that same single multi-tenant solution running on the Windows Azure platform.

Kelley Blue Book stands out as they were featured on the main stage during Bob Muglia’s keynote on day 1 of PDC (Andy comes on at about 1:27).  In this video with Andy Lapin, Director of Enterprise Architecture spent a few minutes showing off the site and then discussing some of the lessons the KBB team learned as they ported their site from a hosted facility to the Windows Azure Platform.