Global Windows Azure boot camp 2013–Ahmedabad

Recently before few days Ahmedabad User Group and Microsoft has organized A windows Azure boot camp event on April 27,2013. As an Ahmedabad User Group member I was there and it was amazing event. This post is about to share my experience with Event.

What is Windows Azure:

Windows azure is a Microsoft Cloud platform. Windows Azure enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any operating system, language or tool. You can fine more information about there from the following links.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/overview/

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Windows Azure Table Storage in detail

Windows Azure table storage provides two kind of storage 1) SQL Azure and other one is 2) Table,queue,blob and other storage like drives etc. In this blog post I am going to explain Table storage in details.

What is Windows Azure Table Storage:

Windows Azure table storage is a service provided by Azure platform to store data in form relational tables in windows azure storage instead of normal RDBMS System. It is a structured storage provided by Azure platform. The table storage which you create with windows azure is Unique. An account of windows azure can have any number of table storage.

Table Storage in details:

There are three important aspects when you deal with windows azure table services. Table,Entities and Properties. Here table is similar to storing data in spread sheet or storing in table with relational databases. Entity represents particular row in the table and property represents a particular column or cell in row. There are three system properties of each entity.

1. Partition Key
2. Row Key
3. Time Stamp

Partition Key:

The partition key is a unique key value that is used to group, or partition, related data on same storage node. As we all know that internally data will stored in hard disks in table storage so whenever your data grows then at that time your data may be partitioned into multiple hard drives. At that time this partition key will keep all the data on the same storage nodes. So partition key is used to organize data in storage.

Row Key:

Row key uniquely identifies a specific entities on a partition. Different partition keys may share the same row key, but the same partition may not have two entities with the same row key.The Row Key property is optional and may also be an empty string if all that is needed for uniqueness is the Partition Key value
The PartitionKey and RowKey properties both have String values (up to 1KB in size) and together they form a unique primary key for an entity in a table.

TimeStamp:

Time stamp property has a DateTime value maintained by the Windows Azure Table System to facilitate optimistic concurrency.

Column Types in Table Storage:

Table storage in windows azure support following types of columns.

1. byte[]
2. bool
3. DateTime
4. double
5. Guid
6. Int32 or Int
7. Int64 or long
8. String.

In next post I will create application for table storage. That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more.. Till then happy programming..

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Introduction to Windows Azure

Recently I have got chance to work with SQL Azure and I loved it. So that’s why Here I am going to start series of post on Windows Azure and SQL Server Azure. In first post of this series I am going to introduce you windows azure platform. I know there are many peoples that may find this post as very beginner level but We all have started from beginner level at some point of time. So It’s better to start at beginner level and then go through step by step overview.

What is Windows Azure:

Well simplest answer in this simple language to above question is “ It’s a operating system which hosts number of services on cloud”. Microsoft has developed this platform to leverage services into the cloud. In azure world you can have application and databases running on cloud. You don’t have to worry about the infrastructure of servers and all other stuff. They will be automatically done by windows azure plate form itself. All you have need to do buy a windows azure services and then developed application with the SDK provided by Microsoft and deploy it. Your application will be ready to serve. You can add multiple instances of server as per your application requirement.

Developing windows azure application is slightly different from normal traditional applications. But developer can still use visual studio 2010 for that. It can also host PHP,Java and other applications also. It does not required to have proprietary software to write application. In fact you can use windows azure with Visual Studio 2010 express edition also.

Roles:

In windows azure everything is based on Roles. There are two kind of roles available for windows azure.

1. Web Role
2. Worker Role

Web Role:

You can think web role as web server where we can host our web application or web site. They provide public computers to connect your application like a simple website url i.e. myapplication.cloudapp.net etc. You can run the application with standard HTTP and HTTPS ports also. Even you can have multiple web roles for your single application as per your requirement.

Worker Role:

You can defined Worker Role as some kind of services that works behind the web application. i.e. A window service to create thumbnail of images to display it in web application or a caching service etc. Worker roles are also available outside the world they can talk to any application.

Storage Resources available in Windows Azure:

Azure provide two kind of storage facility In built storage in Azure where we can store data in blobs,queues,tables, drives which are used for following purposes.

1. Blob- Used to store large amount of data.
2. Queues-Background work processing
3. Table- Storage for fast retrieval
4. Drives-NTFS Formatted page blobs

Windows Azure also provides storage facility with SQL Azure.SQL Azure is a database in cloud where you can almost have all functionalities of SQL Server in cloud. I will cover about above topic in details in forthcoming posts.

All types of roles comes in four verities: Small,Medium, Large and Extra large. All roles are virtual machines. Each represents an increase in pricing and has a different set of specifications that govern how much RAM, local storage space and CPU cores are available to the role as described below:

Size	CPU Cores	Memory	Disk Space for Local Storage Resources
Small	1	1.7 GB	250 GB
Medium	2	3.5 GB	500 GB
Large	4	7 GB	1000 GB
Extra-large	8	14 GB	2000 GB

That’s it. Hope you liked this post. In forthcoming post I am going to explain you can use windows azure in your application with example. Till that stay tuned for more.. Happy programming..

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Windows Azure Camp at Ahmedabad Overview- A Great Event

Recently Microsoft and Ahmedabad .NET User Group has organized a great event and opportunity to learn Microsoft Windows Azure. Each session was great and I quite enjoyed all the session through out the day.

First two session was from Gaurav Mantri-(Owner of Cerebrata Software - a very well-known company in world of Windows Azure Platform ISVs). Both sessions were great in First Session was about Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure in this session he has explained basics of cloud computing and also explained features of Windows Azure. He also explained all the scenario when we need to move our application to cloud. In the second session he has explained the Windows Azure compute and Storages available on windows Azure. He explained All the storage like tables,Blob etc. and also explained the advantages and disadvantages of the various available storage options on window azure.

After that we had a heavy lunch and in post lunch sessions Ahmedabad .NET User Group president Mahesh Dhola take deep dives to various tools available to develop Windows Azure application. He explained features of Windows Azure portal as well desktop tools available for the development Tools. In second session he has given real time demo via creating sample application called “Ahmedabad Khau Ghar “ A sample shopping cart developed in ASP.NET MVC2 and uses various features like Session State provider for Windows Azure etc.

At the end of the day we had Tea/Coffee and we had great discussion about the Windows Azure. Following is some of the pictures of Event.











It was a great event and Thanks Microsoft and Ahmedabad .NET User group for organizing such events. It a great to learn new things and Also great way to networking with other great guys.

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Windows Azure camp in various city of India- Go Register it.

Microsoft is organizing the windows Azure camp in various cities of India. It’s a great chance to learn new things about Microsoft Windows Azure. So If you want to be part of that then you must register in this event. Following are date and cities information.

Ahmedabad- 10th April 2011 now postponed to 30th April( I will be there at 30th April 2011)
Banglore-30th April 2011
Chennai-9th April 2011
Delhi-10th April 2011
Hyderabad-10th April 2011
Kolkata-10th April 2011
Mumbai-9th April 2011
Mysore-10th April 2011
Pune –10th April 2011
Triavndrum –30th April 2011

Here is the link from where you can register for that event
http://www.microsoft.com/india/azurecontest/azurecamp.aspx

See you guys there.. Stay tuned for more..

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