Windows Azure Internals - Webinar Notes

Excellent webinar with in-depth discussion on Azure design, application deployment, underlying data centre and application management architecture.

Webinar notes on Windows Azure Internals

• Currently Data Centre running in 8 locations 
• New Data Centres coming up to meet growing demands
• Data Centre Operating System - Fabric Controller (Equivalent of OS for Single Machine)
• Run on Blade Servers
• Fabric controller manages hardware, provisioning it, deploying and managing Applications
• 1000 machines constitute to one cluster. Cluster is managed by Fabric controller
• Primary and Multiple Secondary Fabric controllers for Highavailability purpose
• 5 Fabric Controllers running on a cluster was demoed in this webinar
• Primary Fabric Controller maintains the current state of the System and Syncs with other Fcs
• DLA Architecture (Old Network Topology), Quantum10 Architecture  - bisected graph - (New Network Topology)
• Quantum10 Architecture adopted from bing architecture
• Software Load balancer instead of Hardware Load balancer. Software Load balancer also performs port mapping
• Fabric Controller has OS Images + Host OS (Azure OS) + Maintenance OS (Used for first time boot) + Role   

Sequence of How app is Deployed on individual Node

• Maintance OS runs on first time boot
• Windows Azure runs next step
• Fabric Control agent starts and Connects to Fabric Controller
• Machine Ready to Deploy App

RDFE Concepts (Red Dog Front End” (RDFE))

• Manages Subscription management, Billing, User Access & Service Management
• Responsible for picking clusters and deploying services (Apps)

Fabric Controller Service Deployment Steps

• Process Service model files
• Allocate compute and node resources
• Prepare nodes
• Configure Network attributes (Load balancer, Virtual IP addresses mapped to Dynamic IP of blades)

Based on DeploymentId Identify Servers running the applications to troubleshoot issues

Fabric Controller Primary connects to FC Agent, Fabric Controller agent executes commands on the VM (Node)

• Best Practice use latest version of windows OS for best performance

On PaaS role instance 3 Disks

• Resource Disk (Size of Disk = Size of VM)
• Differencing Disk (Ensure other systems not affected, Reset option is available)
• Role Image
• New VMs created for every new version of application
• Old Role is removed and New Role Image Created

Iaas Operation

• No Cached Image
• Blob Storage offered
• Only one Disk OS Disk by default
• IaaS offers different disk types
• OS Disk, Data Disk (Random Reads), Striped Data Disk and Temp Disk (Local disk spindles can be shared)

Health Maintenance

• Overview of crash management, timeouts, server issues
• Restart, Automatic Recovery logic before finally requesting for human interference for failed recovery

Looking forward for more Windows Azure Sessions...

Happy Learning!!!