Applied Microsoft Azure

Applied Windows Azure Introduction
Hello welcome to this Applied Windows Azure. As the name suggests, this course is about utilizing various Azure building blocks to develop practical applications. When I talk to folks who are just getting started in Windows Azure they are often times overwhelmed by the wide array of building blocks. So in this course my goal is to show you 10 distinct practical uses or applications built using these various building blocks. Hopefully you'll be able to walk away with a use-case that applies to your specific domain. And note that the focus of this course is breadth learning as opposed to a deep dive into any given building block. I do assume that you have a basic understanding of Windows Azure concepts, such as Azure websites, Web rules, worker rules, et cetera. If you have not had a chance to review these, some of these basic concepts I encouraged you to go visit WindowsAzure. com and review these key concepts. And oh yes my twitter handle is on the screen. I hope you will reach out while you're watching this course. The value of a course of this type is greatly enhanced by a two-way conversation. Thank you for watching. Let us get started.

Monte Carlo Simulation with Worker Roles
So welcome to this module 2 of this course. In this module we are going to talk about Compute Intensive Apps with Windows Azure worker roles. So if you've not had a chance to look at Windows Azure worker roles yet let me give you a very simple Definition. So think of Windows Azure worker roles as a managed execution environment. So why managed execution environment? Well you don't have to worry about the software, or hardware, or load balancing, fault tolerance, etcetera. So you essentially get a virtual machine on which you can run a long-running or a perpetual task. At a high level, building compute intensive apps are simple. So you basically, the idea behind them is, you take a large compute-intensive task and you break it down into smaller chunks, and then you have a variable set of worker roles to process these chunks. Okay the idea is simple, but there're lots of details about this. So why would you want to run a compute- intensive task? What are the common scenarios? Well let me show you a couple of common scenarios. One would be that you want to run some kind of a simulation, perhaps you want to run a Monte Carlo simulation for doing option evaluation, or you are trying to build a system that requires a lot of computation for doing image processing. With this basic understanding of what is a Windows Azure worker role, and what are the common scenarios, let's take a quick look at the design behind such applications.