Iguanas, Azure and a Good Night’s Sleep

In May 2008 an iguana wandered into a Tamarac, FL power substation, shorted out some equipment, and turned the lights out on 20,000 South Florida residents. It was a good reminder that even one small mistake, whether a person’s or an iguana’s, can cause problems of great magnitude. I bring this up because the story applies to, no – especially applies to IT infrastructure and the administration of it.

Enter Azure, which not only eliminates the need for new infrastructure when building apps, but also removes system administration and the accompanying change management hazards. You write your app, deploy it, and you don’t have to worry about any iguanas turning the lights out. This solves a big problem for us IT folks, and allows us to sleep better at night.

Your app powered by Azure might now be bullet or iguana resistant, but what about the apps and systems you want to integrate with it? Enter Linxter, which allows you to easily connect your Azure cloud app with distributed apps and systems. But you can use Azure AppFabric for that, right? Well, not yet. A community technology preview (CTP) version of AppFabric is promised sometime in 2010, with a commercial release maybe in 2011. However, Linxter not only provides secure, reliable, firewall friendly data transfer as an easy-to-use service; it also provides you with a whole host of additional functionality, which you would otherwise have to code yourself.

For example, storage queues are available to you on Azure, but what about your distributed endpoints (outside of Azure)? Linxter takes care of this for you by providing transparent, self-managed local transactional queues, ensuring that data transfer is truly reliable among all endpoints. Linxter also takes care of Internet connection retires. If a connection is not detected, Linxter automatically enters into a retry mode. The ability to dynamically change message polling cycles is also built-in. All of this is provided with no coding required.

Another strength of Linxter is the ability to manage distributed endpoints. Through a web-based interface, Linxter allows you to dynamically change the access control of endpoints, as well as remotely reset and permanently disable them. You can also control the number of allowed endpoints, increasing or decreasing them on demand. In fact, every configuration setting of Linxter can be changed at any time. As engineers, we know that change is inevitable, and have thus architected Linxter to be a truly dynamic cloud messaging platform, allowing you to change every aspect of the platform when and as needed.

When you decide to move an app to Azure, you make the decision for a number for reasons, ranging from security to reliability to availability. But in order to truly sleep well at night, aside from getting a Tempur-Pedic® mattress (they are awesome), you will want the distributed endpoints you connect to your Azure cloud app integrated with Linxter, because it’s just as important to keep the lights on for integration points as it is for your cloud app.

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