Non-trivial matters of interest to software architects and other like minded geeks.
As the name implies, what we’re talking about here is the explosion of electronic data that comes from huge volumes of transactions, devices, and sensors being captured by businesses today. This data often comes in unstructured formats and/or too fast for us to effectively process in real time. Collectively, we call these the 4 big data V’s: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Variability. These qualities make this type of data best managed by NoSQL systems like Hadoop, rather than by conventional Relational ......
Today I’m excited to share that the Windows Azure Mobile Services public preview is now available. This preview provides a turnkey backend cloud solution designed to accelerate connected client app development. These services streamline the development process by enabling you to leverage the cloud for common mobile application scenarios such as structured storage, user authentication and push notifications. If you’re building a Windows 8 app and want a fast and easy path to creating backend cloud ......
One of the most attractive ways to use a cloud platform is for parallel processing. Commonly known as high-performance computing (HPC), this approach relies on executing code on many machines at the same time. On Windows Azure, this means running many role instances simultaneously, all working in parallel to solve some problem. Doing this requires some way to schedule applications, which means distributing their work across these instances. To allow this, Windows Azure provides the HPC Scheduler. ......
With the rise of social media there’s been an explosion of special interest media web sites on the web. From athletics to board games to funny animal behaviors, you can bet there’s a group of people somewhere on the web talking about it. Social media sites allow us to interact, share experiences, and bond with like minded enthusiasts around the globe. And through the power of software, we can follow trends in these unique domains in real time. Drivers Reach Scalability Media hosting Global distribution ......
A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications. Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet ......
Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive ......
The cloud was tailor built for aspiring companies to create innovative internet based applications and solutions. Whether you’re a garage startup with very little capital or a Fortune 1000 company, the ability to quickly setup, deliver, and iterate on new products is key to capturing market and mind share. And if you can capture that share and go viral, having resiliency and infinite scale at your finger tips is great peace of mind. Drivers Cost avoidance Time to market Scalability Solution Here’s ......
Nearly every company on the internet has a web presence. Many are merely using theirs for informational purposes. More sophisticated portals allow customers to register their contact information and provide some level of interaction or customer support. But as our understanding of how consumers use the web increases, the more progressive companies are taking advantage of social web and rich media delivery to connect at a deeper level with the consumers of their goods and services. Drivers Cost reduction ......
In this release of the training kit we have delivered 41 HOLs covering a wide variety of bug fixes and screen shot updates for Visual Studio 2012. We now have 35 Presentations with new content surrounding Windows Azure SQL Database, SQL Federation, Reporting and Data Sync (4) as well as Security & Identity (1); and Building Scalable, Global, and Highly Available Web Apps (1). Head over to http://aka.ms/WATK and download it now ......
What do you get when you cross a college basketball coach, a lawyer, and a software architect? In the case of local St. Louis startup Six0Run Software, you get a dynamic software development team focused on revolutionizing talent management in college athletics. I sat down with the team to learn more about the new software solution they launched on Windows Azure earlier this year. The Opportunity College athletics are big business in the United States. Specifically, the business of winning games ......
We’ve been running our Azure Hands On Experience labs throughout the US Central Region for the last month or so and the SQL Azure exercises require the user to connect a newly created SQL Azure database from their development workstation. Inevitably, at least one machine is configured with one or more settings that prevent a connection from succeeding, either from SQL Server Management Studio or Visual Studio’s Data Connections tree in Server Explorer (my preferred method btw). Here are the troubleshooting ......