Windows Azure… One Year After
We have been using Windows Azure for almost a year, hosting our portal (Hoteles.com.co), and the results have been quite good in general. Compared to the rest of PaaS offerings in the market, this is a great solution if your expertise is around the Microsoft stack – specially .NET and SQL Server.
For v2 we are planning to leverage more of the Azure platform, specially the Azure Storage. We will be servicing Hotel images directly from here. This could enhance the already good response times we have right now. Activating the CDN for this would bring some additional benefits as well.
The other good experience (should I say, the most important for us?? 
) have been around the costs. After some changes, like moving out the Content Admin application from Azure to my regular Hosting provider, we are now paying an average of 60 USD per month. Not bad for a reliable and fast platform like this with access to data in SQL Server.
However, Azure is a new platform, and although it provides a good set of basic services, the portal still lacks of some important services, some available in some other PaaS offers (like AWS), such as:
- It stills lacks an out-of-the-box UI in the Azure portal that enable Admins to monitor the load of the instances (in term of CPU, RAM, Disk Access, etc) – pretty much the functionality offered by really good tools like Azure Diagnostic Manager by Cerebrata. Why is this important? Well, because either you or the platform need to make decisions base on the load. Should we allocate another instance to accommodate an increase in traffic? — this is the base of the elasticity paradigm. The Azure portal should bring some support to define such rules. The capability to define the number of instances per day of the week (i.e. what if the solution expects more traffic during the weekend..)
- In addition, there is a lack of traffic statistics reporting in the Azure Portal. We are currently handling this through Google Analytics – but it would be great to have this integrated in the Azure portal.
- It would be valuable to have access to some “Event Log” window from the Azure Portal with diagnostic information. Sometimes your application has problem and does not start but you cannot get the error info – it is like flying blind.
The good thing is that Azure is really strategic for Microsoft, and I expect to see this functionality shortly as part of the service.
The Heat is On
I am suffering with the overheating issues of my new DELL Latitude E6400 (some Inspiron models included too). I love this machine, but this problem is getting me crazy. At least I am not the only one with the issue, and hopefully DELL will release a BIOS soon update to handle it, which looks more like a hardware design flaw. Many people with different OSs are experiencing it (XP, Vista, 7, Linux, you name it).
Some other references:
http://pchardwareblips.dailyradar.com/story/dell-facing-massive-e6400-and-e6500-overheating-and/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?s=b57bed765e7e7630314c81c21f70b573&t=348221&page=2
This is really embarrassing for DELL and a kick in the nuts for their loyal customers.
One guy wrote an extensive study to reproduce and analyze the cause of the slowdown, then he published it in the DELL forums and was censored by the DELL guys!!
During my research I found this amazing tool to analyze and identify the cause of slow response in your machine. If you do it right you could pinpoint the misbehave driver, disable it or just get an update. The name of this tool is DPC Latency Checker . Check it out.
Off topic: finally after many weeks I got my Windows Azure/SQL Azure invitations. Look like the H Initiative is going to have a new home in the clouds..
Amazing: No “Generate SQL scripts” from ERD model in Visio 2007
After spending a couple of hours designing an ERD model for the H initiative I realized that there is no Generate SQL Script in Visio 2007.. later I confirmed it here… lovely, but in some way I am used to this “incomplete functionality” in MS products.. So using MS Visio for DB modeling is pretty much useless…unless you need a cute diagram to be included in your design docs….also useless.
