There are all sorts of questions yet to be answered appropriately by the cloud providers around the areas of SLA's, confidentiality , flexibility of the various cloud models and security around data being uploaded into the cloud . The recent problems with the azure services ( to be fair its still in preview mode) and Google mail are a timely reminder that the issues need to be addressed but they are not going to be resolved today or even tomorrow but that isn't a reason not to explore the practicalities of using the cloud so I'm here still exploring .
The first thing I needed was some data and ways to manage the data once in the cloud. Locating the data I wanted wasn't too onerous a task but ( Yes there's always a but isn't there?) it wasn't in a state I could utilise . It was only available as a PDF . So a bit of data conversion was required from PDF -> XML.
Going from this :
Which may be easy to read but pretty useless for my purposes
To:
Which is infinitely more useful. Despite having to spend some time tidying the data .
I knew though that once I had some data that I understood inside out writing my application(s) would be a lot easier so the time spent on this slight side track was going to be well worth it!
Finally I had an xml file of data I was somehow going to force into cloud storage fighting every urge to drop it into the familiar relational database formats I've been using for far too many years.
I am going to have to undergo a similar exercise with the 2nd lot of data I want to upload for my application but I was impatient to get playing in the cloud again so that's a task for another day.
So next steps getting the data into the two Azure storage facilities I have access to. I wanted to compare how easy it is to get data into SDS and into Azure storage. Prior to this I had looked at the two in isolation going through the labs playing with SDS more than Azure storage and basically just getting a feel for things. As I haven't really got as much spare time on my hands as I'd like I felt a bit more structure around my approach would be a more effective use of any time I did have.
SDS is definitely the easier one to get data into. There are a few tools available and I've tried all the ones I've found so far.
At this stage I was thinking With the SDS Shell and the SDS command tool I should have enough at my disposal to keep track of the state of my storage but then Jamie posted another cool SDS related blog and now I'm a fan of the Omega.SDSClient . Of the tools available the SDSS explorer is bottom of my list it appears to add no value being graphical .
Just to show you how intuitive the Omega.SDSClient is I'll walk you through the upload of the data via a few screenshots. I've posted before about the ACE model so won't repeat that here.
This is the first page you see after authenticating and from here you can see a tree view of the authorities and containers you've got. The UI changed a bit from when I first looked at this. I'm not too convinced about its overtly friendly interface but its so useful I'm not going to complain too much.
Creating one of the ace components is easy . Make sure you're in the right place in the tree and then just click on the appropriate icon to create it.
I created a container called CyberSecurityAuth in one of my authorities ( yes I know badly named!!). I then created a blob entity
and its at this point I was able to upload the XML file I created earlier.
The auto generated ID is a bit unfriendly so I deleted the entity by clicking on the big x and recreated it with a more friendly name. ( its that easy)
You can view the entity by clicking the view BLOB entity icon . You get a pop up and clicking the download button from there activates the view button
The view BLOB icon is circled in this screen grab.
Clicking view then shows the XML data in a separate browser window ...
All works then J
The SDS Shell is very easy to use but to date it only has the following cmdlets
Get-SdsAuthorities ,Get-SdsContainers ,Get-SdsEntities ,Add-SdsAuthority ,Add-SdsAuthority ,Remove-SdsContainer
So needs to add the ability to at least delete entities ( hint hint Jamie) as its quick to use . Graphics are nice but sometimes a command line can't be beaten..
Now getting data into the Azure storage service has a completely different approach and requires a lot more effort so I'll tackle that another time.