Author Archives: Neil Mackenzie

About Neil Mackenzie

Azure Architect at Satory Global.

Cassandra with a Hint of Azure

Posted on March 5, 2013

Apache Cassandra is a highly-scalable, NoSQL, distributed database system. It achieves high scale by distributing data symmetrically among all the compute nodes in a cluster. In performance testing a 288 node Cassandra cluster, Netflix achieved more than one million writes … Continue reading →

Posted in Cassandra, Windows Azure | Tagged , | 3 Comments

In-Person Event: Windows Azure HDInsight Service

Posted on January 14, 2013

I’m presenting at a Windows Azure, Big Data and Windows Azure HDInsight Service event. The invitation is (mostly) as follows: Microsoft would like to extend an invitation to attend the Microsoft Cloud and Big Data at Microsoft Silicon Valley Moffett … Continue reading →

Posted in Hadoop, HDInsight Service, Windows Azure | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

my tale of npm woe – when all else fails, fix your path!

Posted on December 31, 2012

To end the year I decided to look at Node.js and, in particular, the restify module. Things went south pretty quickly when npm install failed for restify with the following error (fragment): npm ERR! git clone git://github.com/pvorb/node-clone.git CreateProcessW: The system … Continue reading →

Posted in Node.js | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Windows Azure Cloud Services and Virtual Networks

Posted on August 26, 2012

Windows Azure has historically been a pure PaaS solution with the deployment unit for compute being a hosted service comprising an optional web role and zero or more worker roles. Each role is deployed as one or more virtual machine … Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Service, Virtual Machines, Virtual Network, Windows Azure | Tagged , , , , | 12 Comments

Overview of the Windows Azure Platform

Posted on July 8, 2012

In my day job at Satory Global I spend a lot of time educating people about the Windows Azure Platform and helping them develop applications on the platform. In my book, the Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook, I provided instructions … Continue reading →

Posted in Caching, Cloud Service, Storage Service, Virtual Machines, Virtual Network, Windows Azure | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Affinity Groups in Windows Azure

Posted on June 10, 2012

Windows Azure Datacenters Microsoft has built out 8 Windows Azure datacenters in 3 geographical regions across the World. They are located in: North America North Central US South Central US East US West US Europe North Europe West Europe Asia … Continue reading →

Posted in Azure, Cloud Service, Storage Service, Virtual Network | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

Posted on May 28, 2012

Late last year I was looking for information on Silverlight and Windows Azure and came across a RAW (preview) eBook named Microsoft Silverlight 4 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration written by David Burela (@DavidBurela) . The eBook looked to be … Continue reading →

Posted in Azure, Silverlight, SQL Azure, Storage Service, Windows Azure | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Life before IntelliSense

Posted on March 20, 2012

Someone needed IntelliSense. Now we don’t have punch card machines and MVS, we have Visual Studio 11 Beta and the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The future is looking good for developers.

Posted in Visual Studio 1, Windows 8 | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Patterns & Practices Books on Windows Azure

Posted on March 14, 2012

Getting Started with Windows Azure The Windows Azure Platform is Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service. The best way to start Windows Azure development is to: Sign up for a free trial of Windows Azure. Download the Windows Azure SDK. And … Continue reading →

Posted in Azure, Windows Azure | Tagged | 1 Comment

Introduction to SQL Azure Federations

Posted on March 5, 2012

SQL Azure Federations is the managed sharding technology that provides scale-out data and scale-out performance to SQL Azure. A single SQL Azure database can contain up to 150GB of data and is hosted as one of many tenants in a … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Azure, SQL Azure Federations | Tagged , | 1 Comment