A "crazy" learning curve? CDN? Table? Drive? OK, if you say so, but still, point taken, there's maybe some terms in there that may not be immediately obvious. Here's a few things you should remember when developing for the cloud as well as a small glossary that I hope helps this "confused .net dev" and his or her mixed case Twitter account.
Cloud Concepts
IAAS
Infrastructure as a Service. This means I want the computers in my closet to go away. All that infrastructure, the boxes, network switches, even software licenses are a maintenance headache. I want to put them somewhere where I can't see them (we'll call it, The Cloud) and I'll pay pennies per hour. Worst case, it costs me about the same but it's less trouble. Best case, it can scale (get bigger) if my company gets popular and the whole thing will cost less than it does now.IAAS is Infrastructure like Virtual Machines, Networking and Storage in the cloud. Software you wrote that runs locally now will run the same up there. If you want to scale it, you'll usually scale up.
PAAS
Platform as a Service. This means Web Servers and Web Frameworks in the cloud, SQL Servers in the cloud, and more. If you like Ruby on Rails, for example, you might write software against Engine Yard's platform and run it on Azure. Or you might write iOS apps and have them talk to back end Mobile Services. Those services are your platform and will scale as you grow. Platform as a service usually hides the underlying OS from you. Lower level infrastructure and networking, load balancing and some aspects of security is abstracted away.SAAS
Software as a Service. Like Office 365, SharePoint, Google Docs or Adobe Creative Cloud, you pay a subscription and you always get the latest and greatest.Scale Up
Get more CPUs, more memory, more power. Same computer, but bigger. Like, one 8-processor machine with 128 gigs of RAM, big. Gulliver.Scale Out
More computers, perhaps lots of them. Maybe eight 1-processor machine with 2 gigs of RAM. No, maybe 32. More little machines, like Lilliputians working as a team to move Gulliver.Compute
If a computer is working for you, its CPU is working and that's compute. If it's a Virtual Machine or a Web Server it doesn't matter. You get charged pennies per hour, more for larger CPUs.IOPs
Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced "eye-ops." This is unit of measurement used to describe the maximum number of reads and writes to a disk or storage area.Queue
Just like a Queue in computer science, it's a holding place that lets you store messages and read them back asynchronously.Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Taking binary blobs within storage and caching them nearest where the content is request. If your customers are in Asia, serve the file from a data center in Asia.Azure Specific Glossary
Web Sites
Web Sites are "PAAS," that's platform as a service. It's the IIS Web Server in the sky. This is the "Easy Button" as Jon Galloway says. You can take virtually any website and move them up to Azure using Azure Web Sites. You can run ASP.NET, PHP, node.js and lots more.Azure Table vs SQL Azure
Azure Tables are similar to a document database or NoSQL store. Then there's SQL Azure, which is SQL Server in the sky. Great for SQL-like data with relationships and indexes, etc. There's Azure Storage Tables which is nice when you have a huge pile of records that maybe doesn't have a lot of interrelationships, but there's a LOT of it.Access Control
Controls Access. Just kidding. No, actually I'm not. Also know as ACS, it's a hosted service that integrates with Microsoft ID, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other identity providers as well as Active Directory. It supports .NET, PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, etc and you can use it as a centralized authorization store. You can call it with web services from any app and manage users and identities from the portal.Notification Hubs
Push notification services for any mobile platform. Windows Store, Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Broadcast messages to a user across apps or send single notifications to a user, a platform or any combination.AppFabric Caching
In memory caching for apps that run on Azure. You can use existing memory on web roles or dedicate all of a worker roles memory to in-memory caching.Mobile Services
This is a complete Backend in a Box for apps. This isn’t a great name because it’s not just for mobile devices. It’s a complete backend-as-a-service including authentication and CRUD data access with a dynamic schema in the backend. The services are server-side JavaScript and totally managed for you. Supports iOS, HTML, Windows Phone, Win8, Android, and more.Media Service
Media squishing and delivery in the cloud. Production and transcoding workflow, secure delivery to any device, scale up and down elastically.Service Bus
Secure messaging across firewalls and NAT gateways. It also offers relayed messaging services. Most large hosted and reliable systems need messaging services, sometimes request/response, sometimes peer-to-peer, and sometimes one-way.X-Plat CLI
An open source JavaScript-written command line tool for Azure management. With node.js and npm installed go "npm install azure-cli --g" and get a complete management console for Azure that runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.Big Data and HDInsight
Apache Hadoop in the Sky, running on Azure. Hadoop is a giant Java-based MapReduce system for creating data-intensive distributed apps. Azure adds lots to augment with .NET support, LINQ, reporting and more.Blob
Binary Large Object...it's any binary blob you've put in Azure storage. Throw them in, get them back.VHD
Virtual Hard Drive. Just like a VHD in Hyper-V or Virtual PC, this binary file represents a complete virtual disk.Adding more than one disk to a Virtual Machine is a quick and easy way to get more speed for free. For example, if you've got a Virtual Machine running Windows AND a Database like MySQL, you'll have the database application and the Operating System competing for the maximum number of IOPs supported by the disk. Instead, make a new disk and mount it, putting the database on its own drive. This way you've doubled your IOPs with the OS on one drive and the database gets the maximum from its down drive.
Drive
You can mount an single Azure VHD as a disk drive within a Virtual Machine or you can mount Blob Storage as a virtual drive of its own.Source:
http://www.hanselman.com
Published By
S.G.Godwin Dinesh.MCA
Sr.System Administrator
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