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Is Microsoft into cloud computing? It may be considered as a relatively late comer in the cloud computing market but it’s doing big steps! The recent long-term deal with The State of Minnesota is a big win for Microsoft (over Google Apps), it’s not just a business deal but a proof that Microsoft’s infrastructure can compete seriously with its competitors.
Microsoft presents two platforms as cloud services. Microsoft’s Windows Azure is the PaaS cloud package that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. This platform provides developers with the ability to create applications on a scalable infrastructure hosted in Microsoft data centers.
Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite is the SaaS cloud package that provides a set of messaging and collaboration tools. The service includes Microsoft Exchange Online for email and calendaring, Microsoft SharePoint Online for portals and document sharing, Microsoft Office Communications Online for presence availability, instant messaging, and peer to peer audio calls and Office Live Meeting for web and video conferencing. For a quick introduction to cloud computing read the article – What is Cloud Computing?
The main components of the Windows Azure Platform
The Windows Azure Portal
The portal is the interface to your virtual application servers or virtual server room and therefore, it is essential that it provides all the necessary tools and features that you would expect from an internal solution. Basically, the portal is where you manage your account and deploy, manage, and monitor your Windows Azure services. Securing the portal means additional security measures must be employed with respect to internal solutions. Azure’s portal provides a strong encryption mechanism based on a public/private key authentication and a means to create an encrypted SQL connection between the front and back ends.
One key requirement when managing cloud assets is a stable and fast Internet connection between your premises and the provider. Quite a number of uploading incidents were reported by existing customers of Windows Azure, however, the rate of problems encountered with azure compares fairly with other providers. Some competitors such as Amazon’s EC2 enjoy the added benefits of having third-parties providing management tools and services for Amazon’s cloud which at times perform better than Amazon’s provided default tools.
Windows Azure Storage Services
Microsoft basis its storage infrastructure on three service elements namely, Blob, Queue and Table services. The Blob service is used for storing text or binary data, The Queue service is used for reliable and persistent messaging between services while, the Table service is for structured storage that can be queried. As we find with other providers, to access the storage services you must have a storage account, which is provided through the portal. Microsoft claims that its storage services are persistent and durable which make us believe that there is an underlying high availability setup; however, no uptime levels are advertised in their web sites. It is quite normal that large organizations can negotiate a favorable SLA similar to the recent agreement between The State of Minnesota and Microsoft.
The Windows Azure storage is not a straight-forward copy & paste process but it requires a programmer to use a software development kit (SDK) and manage an application programming interface (API). The SDK offers the required APIs that enable you to access the storage services from within a service running in Windows Azure or directly over the Internet from any application that can send and receive data over HTTP/HTTPS.
Windows Azure Compute Service
The resource allocation or time slice your application gets from the Azure platform is done through the Compute service component. It’s the actual runtime execution environment for the applications. It is based on roles that define components that may run in the execution environment. Furthermore, one or more roles make up a compute service which in turn can run one or many instances of that role/s. There are two types of roles; a web role for web applications and a worker role which is used for non-web applications such as, a background processing application that supports a web service. Compute services can include both types of roles and multiple roles of each type.
Developers building applications for Windows Azure cannot do without the tools found in Microsoft Visual Studio when building, packaging and running services. Visual Studio allows programmers to run services from within Visual Studio, it also includes a number of project templates for designing roles and configuring services. These tools are not included with Windows Azure SDK!
One of the great advantages of Cloud computing is that web resources are not dependent on a specific location or bound with a single data centre. Microsoft Windows Azure offers an Internet-scale hosting environment built on geographically distributed data centers. This implies that an instance of your application can be initiated logically closer to the location with the highest number of application requests or highest volume of Internet traffic.
The Windows Azure SDK
The Windows Azure SDK development environment has great benefits. Developers can develop and test services on their own computers which can simulate a production environment. The simulation tools available in the SDK package include the management of compute services and role instances, logging and storage services plus additional command-line tools.
Pricing
Microsoft has learnt its lessons very well as Windows Azure pricing is very competitive. There are two basic types of pricing. One is based on consumption, that is, you pay for what you use while the other is based on a six month agreement where in turn you get a discounted service charge up to certain thresholds. You can benefit from further discounts if you are an MSDN Premium subscriber or enrolled in the Microsoft Partner program. With the subscription offer there are additional levels of discounts that are meant for specific application requirements such a, companies that are including SQL Azure in their solutions and want to purchase both Windows Azure compute and SQL Azure databases in fixed ratios. Prices such as $0.12 per compute hour and $0.15 for 1 GB of data transferred are at par or even cheaper than the competitors’!
Compute service charge, data transfer charge and the so many measurement terms but in actual fact, how are we charged for cloud services?
Compute hours are measured in service hours as long as your application is up and running. If there are applications that are idle but still running as a compute instance then you are still charged, so developers need to remove any instances that are not being utilized as part of the production environment or need to set a mechanism that turns on and off the instances that their usage is limited to specific times or functions. Storage is measured in GB and metered on a daily average basis but billed on a monthly basis, that is, if you upload 1GB of data for temporary use and delete it the following day, then at the end of the month you are charged for 34 MB of storage space used (1GB / 30 days). Additionally, you are charged for transaction requests to and from the storage repository, however, these charges are minimal! Data transfers are charged on the bandwidth used, that is, the total amount of data going in and out of the platform via the Internet. All bills are issued on a monthly basis while the main contributors to the total expenditure are the compute service and data transfer costs!
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