It’s a zoo.

Once again wifi sucks, sitting in the keynote room, unable to join the wireless network and get a connection. Likely this will be posted later in the day once I find a stable connection.

Opening this morning was (Syncopation?) a jazz band from New Orleans, playing live on stage before the keynote as we waited for the Microsoft talk. It’s nice to have something going on since TechNet is truly a zoo.

I didn’t need to read signs to find breakfast, I could just follow the hundreds of people flowing through the convention center. After a muffin and some coffee I headed to the main auditorium, filling up my water bottle on the way. One great thing about TechEd is that there is always a stand nearby with coffee, water, or some type of beverage to enjoy.

This place really is a zoo. If you want a really large conference experience, nothing like the PASS Summit, come to TechEd. The keynote auditorium has 5 large screens flanking the stage, each one has to be at least 20ft high and 30ft wide. Then in the rear of the room are 4 more large screens, each one at least 15ft across since there are likely 8,000-10,000 people in here. And in the New Orleans heat, I’m sure AC is working overtime.

Cloud Computing

That’s the focus of Bob Muglia’s keynote. Dynamic IT, a 10 year vision MS presented in 2003 at TechEd then. Seven years in, they feel they’re delivering. Do you? It’s hard to look back to 2003 and think about how things have changed. In some sense I know things have changed in seven years, but is it a lot better?

I saw a demo with System Center and VS2010. A bug filed from Test Manager, showing lots of information, including video, about the bug that occurred. An error popped in the video, but they switched windows quickly. So was it a VS bug or an app bug the demo is showing. These demos are cool, but they sometimes seem a little contrived. I somehow doubt that all of this will be created, even automated, by testers  working through a large test suite that they are trying to get through.

The very cool thing I did see was walking backwards through VS from the point of the bug. Going forward backward would be cool for developers. ?Not sure in T-SQL, especially as we’re moving lots of data around, but walking back to see what happened right before the bug, the environment as it’s getting set up, that’s cool.

“look ma, no hands”

The demo girl raised her hands during the automated test, which was something I was wondering about. It’s hard to tell sometimes what’s real and what isn’t. Hopefully it’s not someone in the background that’s actually managing the demo. This is a case where I’d rather see video of this edited so that it works smoothly.

Dynamic IT, showed live, automating our environments. That’s cool, but what about some real failure scenarios. Errors in deploying to an environment, seeing changes partially deployed, connectivity issues, bugs found immediately and rollbacks. Those are the demos and scenarios I’d like to see. Maybe they’ll put some of those out on TechNet.

“The cloud is a major transformation.”

Is it? I wonder

Bob says it’s about delivering IT as a standardized service. I think they’d like that, especially the standardized (on Windows) part.

JIT provisioning and scaling of services

That is a big thing about Virtualization and cloud computing. This is, in many ways, better than hot-add/hot-subtract that I’ve seen in IBM/AIX servers. I do like this part of cloud computing, but I think that we ought to be thinking more private clouds initially, rather than public clouds for these services.

One true fact that Bob mentioned is that when you are dealing with thousands of servers, you cannot deploy/manage/or even build them in the way you used to. I am sure of that. Having a few guys unpacking and imaging servers does not work well. Just trying to get them to understand where the storage is, the names are, etc., is complex. You need a way to actually have the junior architect handle stuff like that and automatically have names, IPs, etc. pushed to images in an automated fashion.

But how many people, even here at TechEd, would have to manage and deploy thousands of servers? Even with VMs, in smaller companies, I’d think it would be rare that you would need to deploy 100 servers at a time. You might have that many servers, but not likely that you are dramatically renaming/ reconfiguring them at the same time. This is more larger scale stuff for a service provider, like Microsoft or Rackspace. So are we seeing technology here designed to make us more comfortable with MS as a provider?

It is cool to see System Center allowing you to provision a new application and set min/max limits for the number of servers that are being used. Useful for the web, or middle tier, not not necessarily for the db.

Yet.

Once we get some more scale out features, this will be very cool. And it will be cool for those running parallel data warehouse. All 4 of you.

Hearing Bob say they patch offline and deploy/reimage reminds me of a discussion from SQL Saturday #22. Someone asked why can’t we patch without any downtime. I wasn’t sure I wanted it, seeing the pressure to deliver patches, and the lack of testing, and the potential for errors. I think this helps, but in some sense, patching is one of the issues I have with Cloud Computing. I don’t have control over patching at all, which can be an issue when I have applications that aren’t standard.

The applications they’re doing in the  demos do look much better. It appears that they are getting more designers and UI/UX people to help build them.

This demo seems to show AD information, name, login, address, etc. flowing up to the cloud through App Fabric. That is both cool and scary. Will more liability be handled in the cloud? Security becomes more important. Are we then going to see less information stored in AD?

EF 4.0 is a “premier ORM framework”.

Seeing the VS designer be able to designate VM sizes is an issue. As smart as many developers are, should they be architecting at that level? I’m not sure.

Using local SSMS to talk to SQL Azure clients. Not surprised, but I wonder how many things inside of SSMS don’t work, or are limited based on SQL Azure limitations.

Lots of focus on System Center. I wonder how many people use it, and drill through diagrams, how many people just have the images on their desktop to look busy, and how much margin there is in that product. It feels like a push to sell this particular product.

Lots of companies building clouds. Makes me wonder is they are really building, reselling from someone like MS, and how reliable, and liable, they’ll be. That is a major concern on the cloud platform.

However if you can use the cloud as a CDN, replicating or transferring some database data to have them run more powerfully, that is interesting. That works well if the web servers, or front ends, can easily switch dbs, or they can scale a single cloud db behind the primary one.

But how many people need that. I’m sure hundreds, lots of content providers, but SQLServerCentral, StackOverflow, some very, very busy sites don’t need that. We run on 1-2 servers. I do have some friends that do a lot of virtualization work and they said after the session that they would really like better tools, and System Manager seems like it would work well for them.

Bandwidth in the demo, which you would think would be dedicated, didn’t work. There were delays, issues, and app sharing of PPT didn’t work well.

The cloud wants smarter devices. I agree, but they can’t all be WinMo phones. Or BBs. They need to be all types of devices, which means standards, and collaboration.

Sharepoint collaboration on Windows Mobile 7. I think this is useful for business people, especially since people will forget to finish things or make mistakes in the office. They can make corrections and see documents away from the desk. That’s good, but I’d like to see that on Android, BB, and iPHone as well.

The cloud can bring with it sources of information you don’t have on your desktop.

With Azure you can build applications in a fraction of a time? I call BS on that. Good development just takes time and it’s not the platform. Unless you infrastructure sucks.

40M people paying for Exchange and Sharepoint. I can believe that. But it’s a licensing issue, especially if I can buy small numbers of mailboxes/accounts for people to use.

Communications Server 14, the next version. New features that show communication and collaboration. How can they say that when they’ve probably say that over and over in the past.

74000 soft-phones in MS. That is pretty impressive. And about time. I think hardlines are dying faster than I had expected.

An ecosystem of cheap, HD cameras. Good for porn, and for grandparents. I can see big bandwidth issues coming with all the video work being done. And with people getting stuck in more meetings, even when they work remotely, or are out of the office. How much more task switching will come from video calls?

It wasn’t a great keynote, nothing major shown, nothing incredible or wow’ing, but a good demonstration of how much Microsoft wants to push the cloud.