A profitable cloud app

In order to be able to have your cloud application or service profitable you need to know what your costs are and what your revenues are. Not only now, but also in the future. When the usage of your app grows you also need to generate more revenue. This can be achieved by charging your customers (or consumers of your service) a fixed price per period or by charging them the same way Microsoft charges you (by use) or a combination of both.

The best way to make sure your solution is profitable is to go with the pay-per-use model. The problem right now is that Microsoft does not offer any realtime metrics (yet). I am sure they will do so in the future but for now you could e.g. apply a multi-tenant approach and bill every customer in a separate way and setup different accounts for every customer. This can work out when the number of customers is small but when your facebook-like application is running and very succesfull this approach is not feasible.

To approach the amount of bytes on bandwith, the storage amount and the computing power used, the # messages on the service bus (maybe even with ACS) is to do it all by yourself. To tackle the number of messages and the storage amount you could write your own logic for it. Calculating bandwith isn't easy and calculating computing power is not even possible i guess.

So until Microsoft offers realtime, dashboard-like information on any customer or groups of customers either charge a fixed price or do you own calculations!

Go to Dallas and pinpoint your needs

Dallas is Microsoft's marketplace where data providers and consumers can meet each other through a simple platform. This platform takes care of billing and makes it easy to subscribe and unsubscribe from datasets. Dallas enables developers to easily integrate rich data from others into their own application or service. Dallas offers owners of rich data an easy way to offer it to a broad audience and increase their revenue or exposure.

Microsoft PinPoint is web platform that enables companies or individuals to find SME's, apps, solutions and services. On the other hand, it enables partners from Microsoft to put them self in the spotlights and show what company they are and what they have to offer. PinPoint is a Microsoft Yellow Pages like directory in which you can browse or search and find the company or solution you need.

As per the 4th of January, 7567 apps, 35953 companies and 13448 Professional services are enlisted on PinPoint. Although the number of "datasets" on PinPoint are as per the 4th of January about 10 available but lots more coming soon. You can see several organizations offer their data for free like AP, Nasa and UNData. You can subscribe on these datasets and use their data in your own application or service. Dallas data can be found through the PinPoint portal and search for application on the Windows Azure Platform but also by using the Dallas portal and choose the catalog tab.

Consuming Dallas datasets is very easy (Microsoft really lowered the bar by defining a standard set of API's) and you just need an invitation code for Dallas. Go the the Dallas homepage and get an invite.

Consume some data
Go the Dallas portal and login with your account. Click Catalog and you should see something like this:



Subscribe on the Associated Press Online Trial Offer. After agreeing the AP Online appears on your subscription tab which opens automatically. You can explore the features of this dataset by clicking the "Click here to explore the dataset". A query screen opens and offers the opportunity to query the data and test the data before integrating it into you application. A very nice feature is the "Download C# service classes" which generates a C# class that wraps the AP dataset and simplifies the access to the dataset (or parts of the dataset). Add this C# file to your application (e.g. a console application) and add the following code to your Main.

using Microsoft.Dallas.Services;

static void Main(string[] args)
{
string accountKey = "***** your accountKey *******";
Guid uniqueUserID = new Guid("**** a userID as a GUID, any GUID****");

Microsoft.Dallas.Services.NewsCategoriesService service =
new NewsCategoriesService(accountKey, uniqueUserID);

List results = service.Invoke();

foreach (NewsCategoriesItem item in results)
{
Console.WriteLine(item.Content);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}

Your output should be like this:



As you can see importing and using data from the Dallas marketplace is fairly easy and that's just how Microsoft wanted it to be. Easy to use and easy to adopt.

This AP dataset is free for now but might be a commercial one in the future. On your Dallas portal at the Access Report tab you can see how many times you've accessed a dataset and see if the billing is adequate.



In the Account Keys tab you can manage account keys and create new ones. What's the use of creating multiple account keys? To differentiate costs to different logical users (can also be entities like departments, companies etc.) for adequate billing if you want to have your customers pay for using your application or service.

Besides consuming data into your application or service you can also use PowerPivot to extend Excel and turn it into your own little data warehouse. PowerPivot enables you to easily consume Dallas datasets but also to import your own data and do some data mining on it. A nice example on PDC2009 was to have the weatherreports from Dallas and combine them with the sales results of an ice cream company and conclude, how shocking, that the sales on chocolate ice radically dropped on a freezing winter day.

As you saw Dallas is a marketplace of data where consumers and producers can meet and easily do business. Dallas data can also be found on the PinPoint portal (and that's how they are related) of Microsoft and therefor Dallas exactly fits in the Microsoft strategy. Consuming data takes no more than 2 lines and use PowerPivot to enhance Excel and turn it into your local data warehouse and perform some nice drill downs.

So far for PinPoint and Dallas.