Venkatarangan Blog

I am right now in Microsoft Project “Velocity” talk in PDC2008 by Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. Microsoft has been promising a distributed (and in-memory) cache system for a long long time. If I remember right it was first talked about in COM/ASP days. After that in every Microsoft event a version of it was shown (by a different team each time) in pre-release stages, but none of them got released. The story from Microsoft on the need for one, how to solve it and roadmap kept changing all the time. As for me, having got tired of this I have been using SQL Server as the distributed cache for few years now.

Notes from the session:

• “Velocity” is Microsoft’s Distributed Cache .
  
• Usage scenarios are: Reference Data, Vendor Catalogs, Activity Data, Resource Data (Flight Seat Inventory and like)
  
• It is an explicit, in-memory, distributed cache
  
• Any .NET Objects that can be serialized can be cached
  
• Scale very easily, add as much memory and add as much machines as you can
  
• Velocity is going to be free and released in MSDN
  
• Runs on standard Windows PC. If machines go down, the data is preserved and not lost. High Availability (HA) is ensured
  
• Velocity releases: CTP2 now in PDC, CTP3 in Mix ’09 and release at Mid ’09 timeframe
  
• In V1.0 simple Add queries can be done. In later versions LINQ queries will be available.

You can read more on the CTP2 that got released today from the Velocity blog post here .

With what we were shown today of Velocity, especially its high availability, monitoring tools, ease of use and scalability are pretty impressive. I just hope this time they ship this and not go the previous paths.

You can see the photos I took from here.

Ray Ozzie

• For the last few years, the scope of enterprise applications are increasing. IT departments have to manage more of outside users (their customers) than their internal users
• More of IT Pros and Developers have to work together and learn together in this new cloud world
• More than ever the web site of an enterprise is critical to the overall business health
• Hat’s off to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for the phenomenal work they are doing with EC2 and Windows hosting. In ways we collaborate with them and in other ways we compete with them
• Today this cloud is another tier. The first tier is your PC or Mobile, it is all about you. The second tier is the enterprise and its scope is the size of the enterprise. The third tier is this cloud. To do this we had a team headed by David Cutler, Amitabh Srivatsa and others in Microsoft
• Today’s systems whether it is Windows, Java or others are all modelled for scale-up. We need for the next 50 years, we need something that can scale out & parallel computing
• We announce today “Windows Azure“. It is our new Windows (new OS) that supports all the infrastructure to power this cloud design. It is not a software, but a service that is running on Microsoft Datacenters, initially in USA then to be rolled out worldwide
• It will be the most environmentally sensitive, scalable, reliable service for all Microsoft hosting over the years
• Windows Azure works with the same tools – VB.NET 2008, C#, C++, .NET, etc. including both managed and un-managed code. Initially managed will be supported and later support for un-managed will be introduced
• There was a demo of a new services, a Mobile Phone discovery in neighbourhood using Bluetooth – bluehoo.com and client can be downloaded from m.bluehoo.com

Note: For the first time I saw Microsoft keynote speakers (Ray Ozzie and Amitabh Srivatsa) in a developer conference not wearing T-Shirts but are in formal attire with a blazer.  

Ray Ozzie’s closing notes video below:

Bob Muglia

• There was demo of using .NET Services and SQL Services by RedPrairie and also of System Management “Atlanta”. Atlanta uses SQL Services for customers to compare their instrumentation data with others and best practices
• This week we are releasing “Oslo” a new modelling tool and a language “m”

Dave Thomson

• Vice President of Microsoft Online, he has headed the team that developed Active Directory and in Exchange Server
• One of the problems to solve is federated identity. This is done by using Microsoft Services Connector which sites on-premises and then syncs it to the online cloud. This is currently used by Microsoft online services and will be the same used by Windows Azure.