Mario Meir-Huber

SQL seems to be somewhat old fashioned when it comes to scalable databases in the cloud. Non-relational databases (also called NoSQL) seem to take over in most data storage fields. But why do those databases seem to be more popular than the "classic" relational databases? Is it due to the fact that professors at universities "tortured" us with relational databases and therefore reduced our interest - the interest of the "new" generation for relational databases? Or are there some hard facts that tell us why relational databases are somewhat out of date? I was at a user group meeting in Austria, Vienna, one month ago where I talked about NoSQL databases. The topic seemed to be of interest to a lot of people. However, we sat together for about four hours (my talk was planned for one hour only) discussing NoSQL versus SQL. I decided to summarize some of the ideas in a... (more)

New Features and Updates to Windows Azure

Windows Azure, a Platform as a Service offer, is Microsoft's cloud computing platform. It was announced at PDC 2008 where Microsoft announced some interesting improvements and additional features to its Windows Azure Platform. Microsoft is serious about its strategy on Windows Azure, as was demonstrated in the PDC keynote, which dedicated over one hour to Azure. But what exactly is Microsoft's cloud computing strategy? This article describes the new features that will be available soon on Windows Azure. Windows Azure VM Role A very interesting announcement was the VM Role for Wind... (more)

My Top Five Cloud Predictions for 2011: Mario Meir-Huber

1. We will face the challenge to new Software Architectures Cloud Computing Platforms such as Windows Azure, Amazon EC2 and Google AppEngine give us a lot of options to built great software on top of these plattforms. The main challenge we face is that current Software Architectures might not be ready for these challenges. We need to rethink how we built our software in terms of elasticity and scalability. 2. Microsoft will present Windows 8 with huge Cloud Support Microsoft will soon present Windows 8. Cloud Computing will be integrated in the system and the new OS will focus on th... (more)

Windows Azure Series – Introduction to Windows Azure

I've done a Windows Azure Series together with Mario Szpusta, Software Architect Evangelist at Microsoft Austria on Windows Azure. The Series is in German and I decided to bring it to Cloud Computing Journal. I will modify some of the articles to bring them up-to-date. This series will cover about 15 articles that will be published once a week. What Is Windows Azure? Windows Azure is Microsoft's Platform as a Service offering for Cloud Computing. There are three major fields in Windows Azure. Figure 1 provides an overview of the platform. Figure 1 The three fields are Windows A... (more)

Design Guidelines for Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service offer us easy scaling of services. However, scaling is not as easy as it seems to be in the Cloud. If your software architecture isn't done right, your services and applications might not scale as expected, even if you add new instances. As for most distributed systems, there are a couple of guidelines you should consider. I have summed up the ones I use most often for designing distributed systems. Design for Failure As Moore stated, everything that can fail, will fail. So it is very clear that a distributed system will fail... (more)