Above The Cloud

Just a quick post to let you know about CloudCamp Sydney: its on tomorrow! (27th August 2009)

Register here:
http://www.cloudcamp.com/?page_id=1045

Unfortunately I can’t make it.

I recently received an email asking what the migration story is like for moving apps onto the Azure Services Platform, and I wanted to share my answer (which is only my opinion) with you all.

The thing about Azure is that it is an application platform. This means there’s certain interactions that are required in order to get your apps onto Azure.

In my opinion Azure is best suited for SOA, SaaS and S+S type applications; those that are heavily componentised and can exist within their own right. If your architecture is decoupled in this way then the migration to Azure becomes a lot easier. The service definition file that you package with your Azure Cloud Package is just that: a summary of all your various services and how you want them configured in the cloud.

Certainly ASP.NET and WCF applications are the easiest to move. I would see moving to Azure as an opportunity to decouple your applications and focus on SOA. Determining an amount of work for any app will be difficult, but in nearly all reasonably sized applications it won’t be as easy as copy/paste.

The majority of developers in the modern age are not overly experienced at building scalable, parallelisable applications. Most applications are not designed to handle multi-threaded, multi-instance scenarios.  While this isn’t an inhibitor, it does mean it’s difficult to leverage the platform effectively, and it means that a product owner of an existing product is more likely to need to scale by instance (add another server/instance) when in fact they aren’t leveraging their current instances effectively.

I don’t think that moving to the Azure platform by plonking in the files is the best strategy. I’d like  to think that it would fall into a ‘sprint goal’ to make any application able to leverage the Azure platform, and I think that would include a strong services aspect. Any large application will require a migration plan for any kind of move. Sometimes if you are even moving an application around in your own data centre, it can require weeks of planning. Azure is certainly the same, except that the migration may also require some development effort.

One final thing to think about is of course domain name pointers. In on-premise scenarios you already have your network sorted out, but in the cloud you need to think about what will be public facing, and what your naming strategy will be.

I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the Azure feature releases and I’m sure there will be something in the final release that will make the whole migration process easier.