1st Pune Azure meetup

Editor's Notes

• #2 Good Morning Everyone. My name is Ratnesh and I am a .net developer in talentica for last 5 years. Today I am going to give a presentation on windows azure . This presentation consists of my conclusions of readings and experiments with Azure , so feel free to disagree . My name is Ratnesh and I am a .Net Technologies in Talentica for last 5 years. Today I am going to talk about Windows azure. The talk is going to revolve around my conclusions based on readings and experiments with Azure . So feel free to raise questions during the discussion.
• #3 I will discuss following four topics in the next 30 minutes How azure helped the Halo 4 team to become successful using cloud technologies. The technologies and concepts which are becoming more relevant and of more concern given cloud technologies and their cost in place. How the cloud technology is changing the eco system around the IT engineering. Last , we will compare different models (Paas , Saas and Iaas) .
• #5 The Halo franchise is an award-winning collection of properties that has grown into a global entertainment phenomenon. To date, more than 50 million copies of Halo video games have been sold worldwide. As developers prepared to launch Halo 4, they were tasked with analysing data to gain insights into player preferences and support an online tournament. To handle those requests, the team used a powerful Microsoft technology called Windows Azure HDInsight Service, based on the Apache Hadoop big data framework. Using HDInsight Service to process and analyse raw data from Windows Azure, the team was able to feed game statistics to the tournament’s operator, which used the data to rank players based on game play. The team also used HDInsight Service to update Halo 4 every week and support a daily email campaign designed to increase player retention. Organizations can also take advantage of data to quickly make business decisions.
• #6 the game achieved more than $220 million in global sales in its first 24 hours and attracted more than 4 million players in its first five days after launch.   For the Halo Services Team, a development team at 343 Industries that manages the game, one of the biggest challenges is scaling to meet player demands. That’s one reason the team uses the Windows Azure cloud development platform to power the game’s back-end supporting services. These services run the game’s key multiplayer features, including leaderboards and avatar rendering. Hosting the multiplayer parts of the game in Windows Azure ensures that the team has a way to quickly and inexpensively add and remove server capacity as needed.
• #7 As the game was prepared for release, however, 343 Industries was faced with an entirely new kind of challenge: to gain insight into player behavior and user preferences. To achieve this goal, Microsoft leadership asked 343 Industries to find a way to effectively mine user data.
• #8 At the same time, the team was faced with another need: analyzing data during the five-week Halo 4 “Infinity Challenge” tournament. The Halo 4 Infinity Challenge, the largest free-to-enter online Halo tournament in the world,,
• #9 giving players a chance to win more than 2,800 prizes. Virgin Gaming needed to use business intelligence (BI) data gathered during the event to update leaderboards on the tournament website.
• #10 providing results each day to their tournament partner, Virgin Gaming tracked a player’s personal score in the game’s multiplayer modes across a global leaderboard
• #37 Reliability - MTTR instead of MTBFTraditionally, the reliability of an architecture is related to the concept of the MTBF, the mean time between a failure and another, in other words, how much wider the period the more reliable the system. By using commodity servers, this can no longer be considered an achievable goal. Hence, it is necessary to review the concept of reliability by connecting it to the resiliency. A cloud architecture is much more reliable when lower is the MTTR i.e. mean time to recovery. MTTR equal or close to zero would give a highly reliable architecture and resilient to any failure.
• #38 Capacity Planning - scale unit planning instead of  worst case planningThe capacity planning in traditional architecture is designed to estimate the sizing required to support the maximum load so that the system is able to respond well enough even in the worst situations. This inevitably leads to waste a lot of resources for the most part of the life cycle of systems. In contrast, the capacity planning in the cloud architecture is oriented to determine the scale unit, i.e. the load enough to scale up or down, possibility automatically.
• #39 We have seen how cloud architectures diverge from everything done in the past because it is necessarily respond to different scenarios. Many of the approaches used in the past are no longer usable and the fundamental concepts underlying architectures such as scalability, performance, reliability, and capacity planning are deeply reviewed. To summarize the golden rules for a correct design of a cloud architecture, we can definitely identify:Enable Scaling - be able to adapt to environmental conditionsExpect Failure - be able to adopt a resilient attitudeAlways keep in mind the above rules during the design and the implementation of real cloud architecture.
• #42 I think we should also include the HYBRID option which many of the enterprises are taking up under “Design”