Link to a one-slide Powerpoint to show the latest services in Azure

Use below link to download a very usefull slide which shows you all IAAS and PAAS services within Azure:

Overall services in Azure

Have fun,

Harry

Platform as a Service (PAAS) moving a rocket speed!

As an Enterprise Architect in an organization life has always been dynamic to say the least! It is your responsibility to keep up with the latest developments in ICT both in technique as in architecture. In the old days of on-premise only that was a big challenge. But with the Cloud as a integral part of your information systems it became even more complex.

But still… The Cloud was moving vm’s to Amazon or Microsoft. So architecturally not that complex. Identity & access off course, but that’s about it. Then came Platform as a service (PAAS). That was something completely different! Not moving vm’s to the Cloud, but move complete technical workloads to the Cloud like an ESB in the Cloud, Media Services, Federated identity, Storage, etc, etc..

This does impact your architecture!

A blazing 78 new PAAS services were introduced in 2014 within Azure. So it’s moving rocket fast! And to be fair: not only at Microsoft, also are other Cloud vendors moving into the PAAS area with new services.

What is the impact for you as Enterprise Architect?

In your normal day to day work you make choices based on software you can purchase and implement at your data center. But now you should at least ask yourself for every choice you have to make: Do I want to do this myself or shall I take this as a service from one of the Cloud vendors.

An example: Your organization wants to use Cloud services from multiple Cloud vendors but you want a single sign on experience for your users. Now you can buy a federated identity server, do research on all Cloud vendors on how to connect and then build the connections. But you can also use The Windows Azure Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) from Microsoft with over 2600 Cloud vendors already pre-installed.

Second example: You have a new web application that you need to deploy. Again you can buy a few servers, install IIS, SQL Server, the application and install everything and schedule things like backup, patch management, storage, etc., etc. But you can also take a web-role to host the web-application, Azure SQL database to host you data and let Microsoft worry about backup’s, 3 replica’s for DR, patching the server, etc.., etc.

So my message to all you Enterprise Architects out there: Examine carefully the PAAS offerings from the Cloud vendors before making expensive buy decisions. My recommendations to checkout:

Azure Service Bus, Azure Machine Learning, WAAS, BizTalk Services and Azure SQL Database. Next blog-post I will dig deeper on Azure SQL Database.

Power BI Public Preview now available worldwide

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that the Power BI Public Preview is now available worldwide. Until now only US based users could access the preview. Not anymore, so you can checked out all the great new stuff right now on http://www.powerbi.com.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2015/03/16/power-bi-preview-now-available-worldwide.aspx

Happy Power BI-ing!

New Power Query update

Recently a Power Query update was released (see http://blogs.office.com/2015/03/05/3-updates-excel-power-query/). Mayor updates: performance on load, Dynamics CRM Online connector and new transformations, most notably advanced date/time calculations. Personally I enjoy the CRM Online connector, but I am most fond of the ‘Age’ transformation; it makes it very easy to do the typical ‘number of days since this order was entered’ type of calculations, since it compares the date in the column with today.

The update to Power Query is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39379&WT.mc_id=Blog_PBI_Announce_DI

Enjoy!

In memory technology in SQL Server

Everybody noticed the increase in technology using in memory techniques. At SAP they fully go for Hana, Oracle just started last year with in-memory database. At Microsoft we started in 2012 with in memory analytics and added OLPT in memory April 2014. The buzz is high with big marketing events, lots of whitepapers and broad press coverage.

So, but what about the real life practice?

When I visit my customers (top-50 in The Netherlands) I rarely see in memory databases used. So I always ask why they don’t make use of it. This resulted in the following reasons:

1. I didn’t know I could run in memory with my databases. The marketing engine could be hitting the wrong people. Lots of database administrators are not up to speed.
2. We don’t do it because it must be very difficult. True – if you use SAP then it’s common knowledge that implementing SAP Hana is not very easy. And you have to rewrite some of your programs. False – if you use Microsoft SQL Server. To start using in memory you can switch it on for certain tables (or part of tables) and without any change to the application it will work.
3. The power of our servers is high enough. We don’t need the power. This is of course a compliment that our SQL Servers run so smoothly (-:

But still I think that by using in memory technology you can achieve the following:

• Prevent hardware refresh. If servers run out of performance, moving to in memory the speeds increases again by 5x – 10x. Thus the servers can remain the same.
• Run more VM’s on a host. By using in memory technology the number of cores can be less because of the more economic processing in memory. Thus more core’s for new VM’s on the same host.
• Increase processing to reduce wait time for your users

So my advice: Start experimenting with the technology and look for those business cases.

My ask: anyone who has experience with the practical implementation: please reply with your live experience!