Cloud Computing

Nowadays most of Business applications are moving to the cloud. Traditional applications have always been very complicated, most of time its so much expensive, maintenance cost is high and as well as need a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them when patches available.

With cloud computing, you eliminate those headaches because you’re not managing hardware and software. Its the responsibility of an experienced vendor who needs to take care of everything 🙂 and in other words it will be fully managed by the vendor. The shared infrastructure which was provided by the vendor means it works like a utility: just we have to pay for the rent or only pay for what you need, upgrades are automatic, and scaling up or down is easy. In other words its just borrowing online software instead purchasing and installing it on their own machines.

With a cloud app, you just need top open the browser, log in and start using it.

we can divide the hosted services in cloud into following categories:

1.Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure it self provided as a service. It means the a vendor provides the hardware, computing power, computing space and networking spaces.

2.Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

In the cloud itself the vendor has provided some software and product development tools. So the developers can create applications on the providers platform over the internet. Most of Google Applications belongs to this category.

3.Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

In this case the vendor provides the hardware, the software product. User interacts with the system through a front end portal. In this scenario user is free to use the service from anywhere in the world.

Cloud can be private or public. When the cloud is public, it sells services to anyone on the internet (ex: Amazon web service and its the largest public cloud provider). A private cloud is proprietary network that supplies services to a limited number of people.

Windows Server AppFabric

AppFabric gives us a single unified view of the cache for distributed applications. Just read about this in MSDN.

Key Features of AppFabric (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/cc645013.aspx)

• Caches any serializable CLR object and provides access through simple cache APIs.
• Supports enterprise scale: tens to hundreds of computers.
• Configurable to run as a service accessed over the network
• Supports dynamic scaling-out by adding new nodes.
• Backup copy provides high availability.
• Automatic load balancing.
• Integration with administration and monitoring tools such as PowerShell, Event Tracing for Windows, System Center, etc.
• Provides seamless integration with ASP.NET to be able to cache session data in without having to write it to source databases. It can also be used as a cache for application data to be able to cache application data across the entire Web farm.
• Follows the cache-aside architecture (also known as Explicit Caching) for V1. That is, you must decide explicitly which objects to put/remove in your applications and the cache does not synchronize with any source database automatically.

how to install and configure AppFabric : http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=AppFabric

you can read more details on this from my colleagues blog : http://abdulrafaysbiztalk.wordpress.com/