From the Editor
Volume 13, Number 2: January 19, 2009
When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people:
those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who
wonder what happened. My job is to make sure that as few developers
as possible wonder what happened. Moreover, due to difficult
economic times, many companies have shut their doors. It is
important for developers, testers, architects and managers to
be well informed. Naturally, that raises the questions about
what to keep your eye on in 2009.
The Big Wave in the Sky
In my humble opinion, 2009 will be the year of the cloud.
But many of my readers will say things like, "My company is
controlling costs and is not funding new projects." Yes, that
makes perfect sense. My response is, "The cloud is a game-changing
technology that will save companies lots of time and resources."
In addition, Microsoft will need to continue innovating
aggressively in the cloud because there are some big competitors,
such as Amazon, Google, SalesForce, and Sun.
The cloud offers file storage, identity services, access
control, workflow, and a distributed database. Companies will
create their own services or run an entire application in the
Azure cloud, paying for only the services and capacity they need.
But let's be clear - this technology is in its very early stages.
Azure is in CTP mode, which means "community technology preview."
Data and Services in the Cloud
Microsoft doesn't expect customers to re-write applications from
scratch. Key financial data and other highly secure information will
continue to be maintained on premises. But there will be specific
development patterns that adapt well into the cloud. Perhaps a company
will use the Microsoft .NET Service Bus to build composite applications,
which are collections of smaller applications connected securely with a
standards-based messaging infrastructure. The .NET Service Bus will
allow applications to communicate across organizational boundaries,
behind network address translation (NAT) boundaries or when bound to
frequently changing, dynamically assigned IP addresses.
Workflow might be the bait a company needs to jump to the cloud.
Maybe your company is part of a supply chain, which is the system of
organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources
involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. Even
though companies can create their own Web sites to do this, they still
have to manage user identities across multiple enterprises. Every single
supply-chain user needs to be managed by an IT staff, which is
expensive and time-consuming.
SQL Server Data Services (SDS) Is Being Built From the Ground Up
For you DBAs out there, it is a different world in the
cloud. Thousands of man-years went into SQL Server. Some pieces
were added and some removed to make it service ready. SDS must
be self-healing and extremely scalable. Failures must not affect
consistency. Automatic provisioning and monitoring is crucial.
Data will need to be replicated across machines, switches, and
geography. Record-locking in the cloud is difficult. The
challenge is being correct and scalable and nimble for atomic
sequences.
In today's world, companies can buy a service, skin it to
look like their own, and glue various services together to
create a cohesive app. Companies must reduce care and feeding
of their applications to lower costs. Using external services
will reduce the need to worry about infrastructure. Databases
as services are a huge part of this.
To learn more about the future of databases, see the brilliant
interview of Dave Campbell (Technical Fellow at Microsoft).
Saving Money Today
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 is clearly a way
to improve efficiency and save time and resources. Decide
for yourself with free live training at Microsoft at the
following two events:
•
Mountain View, CA - February 11
•
San Francisco, CA - February 12
These half-day training luncheons will provide a deep dive
into maximizing your investment in Visual Studio Team System.
Please join Microsoft and Steven Borg of
Northwest Cadence, a Microsoft VSTS MVP, for this
demo-driven event. Learn how to be agile and illuminate key
metrics that help make development improvements possible.
Register via e-mail - Sue.Ferguson@nwcadence.com,
or by phone at 425-605-3580.
Thanks for reading,
Bruno
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