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Providing Single Sign-On to Amazon EC2 Applications from an On-Premises Windows Domain
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Monday, January 11, 2010
Cloud platforms bring new challenges for handling identity. One important example of this is the need to give users in an on-premises Windows domain single sign-on to applications running in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). If we want to make cloud platforms a natural extension of our on-premises world--and we absolutely do--solving this problem is important.
Fortunately, there are a few different ways to do this. I've written a short
white paper, jointly sponsored by Amazon and Microsoft, that gives an architectural overview of today's options. The paper won't walk you through the details of how to implement a solution, but it will give you a sense of what the options are.
Cloud platforms are quickly becoming part of our world. Anybody thinking about identity issues today who's not considering the cloud is missing something big.
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Virtualization for Windows: An Update
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Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Even though the technology has been with us for some time, virtualization remains a big deal. And while hardware virtualization still gets most of the attention, other aspects also matter, including desktop virtualization and application virtualization.
I wrote an overview of Windows virtualization technology a couple of years ago. An updated version of the paper, once again sponsored by Microsoft, is now available
here.
Virtualization is fundamental to how data centers--both on-premises and in the cloud--are structured today, and so it's also fundamental to modern computing. Everybody needs to know at least the basics.
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Interviews from Berlin
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
I spoke at TechEd Europe in Berlin last month, which was really a pleasure. While I was there, I sat down for two short interviews with Dutch IT students. Rather than asking me about technology, as people usually do, they wanted to talk mostly about the work I do: speaking and writing.
As a result, the interview isn't at all technical, but they certainly asked some original questions. I enjoyed the conversation, and if you're interested, the two segments are
here and
here.
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An Interview on Cloud Platforms
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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
In London on my recent Azure speaking tour, I sat down with my friend David Gristwood from Microsoft for a conversation. We talked about a range of things, focusing mostly on what companies other than Microsoft offer in this space.
It's hard to compare cloud platforms. They're all different in significant ways, and they all focus on their own set of problems. Despite this, I tried in this interview to give short summaries of my perspective on some of today's most visible options, including Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine, and Force.com. If this sounds interesting, you can watch the interview
here.
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The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The popularity of SharePoint continues to amaze me. It's a useful technology, so I'm not surprised that people like it. What I marvel at is how rapidly it's spread. Are there any Windows customers left who aren't using it in some way?
SharePoint is a platform for building applications as well as an application itself, but its platform aspect hasn't gotten as much attention. At least in part, this is because the SharePoint development environment hasn't been as easy for .NET developers to use as it might have been.
Yet a SharePoint app is fundamentally an ASP.NET app, so the two worlds have a good deal in common. With the 2010 release, Microsoft has put a significant amount of effort into making SharePoint a better development platform for creating what might otherwise be straight ASP.NET applications.
If you're interested in this area, I've written a Microsoft-sponsored white paper titled
The SharePoint 2010 Developer Platform: An Introduction for ASP.NET Solution Architects. The paper's goal is to provide a big-picture view of SharePoint as a platform for creating applications. It's clear to me that with the advent of SharePoint 2010, a significant number of applications that might have been built using plain ASP.NET will instead be built on SharePoint. If you're interested in why, you might find the paper useful.
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Azure Speaking Tour: Asia Dates
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Thursday, October 01, 2009
It's taken a while to come together, but the Asian cities and dates for this tour are now firm. They are:
- Tokyo: October 13-14
- Singapore: October 19
- Bangalore: October 21
- Mumbai: October 23
I'm really looking forward to returning to all of these cities.
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