On July 18, 2013, Mertech continued the Campfire initiative with a session on the Windows Azure platform, led by Mertech representative Oliver Nelson (Senior Technologist). If you missed it, you can watch the video above. We have also listed some helpful resources at the bottom of this page.
Azure is essentially “a cloud platform for building, deploying and managing applications across a network of Microsoft-managed datacenters”. More specifically, Azure is essentially a combination of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), comparable to the storage (S3) and virtual machine (EC2) options offered by Amazon with their Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS), which enables developers to offload their operating system management to Microsoft and enables them to publish their applications.
The presentation went over key differences between Amazon’s and Microsoft’s offerings, which include:
Pricing (Microsoft has global pricing vs Amazon which varies by region)
Load balancing (offered by Microsoft only)
More mature ecosystem of third party tools with Amazon
More thorough documentation with Microsoft
PaaS not offered by Amazon
The main feature that was discussed was that of the SQL server, which has some important limitations in the Azure environment, such as size (only up to 150 GB), lack of ability to customize specifications as it is commodity hardware, and absence of sufficient backup and restore options. Essentially, the SQL performance here is sufficient if you have a small number of users, but for larger applications that require best-in-class performance this is not ideal.
Oliver then showed a sample order entry table built in VDF to demonstrate Mertech’s new support of the Azure platform, and then opened up the floor to questions. Questions included subjects such as outages (there have been a few), location of datacenters, security, and notably, the potential for using Azure with DataFlex. The consensus on this issue is that the PaaS offered by Microsoft is not powerful enough for VDF applications, yet, but using a virtual machine to take advantage of the differences in the IaaS offering is effective for VDF developers. For example, Web App server will function out of the box in a virtual machine, but not in the PaaS environment. Furthermore, due to the limitations of the SQL product offering, it is best to set up SQL in a virtual machine instead of using Microsoft’s commodity hardware solution.
Overall, it was an informative session, and we look forward to the next topic.
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