TFS on Windows Azure

Big news if you following Microsoft PDC 2010 is that Mr TFS : Brian Harry did a demo on how they took TFS 2010 and modified it to run on Windows Azure.

This is obviously concerning from a competition point of view if you are hosting TFS, as Microsoft is most likely going to have TFS as an subscription service on Azure.

That aside, it is interesting to see the effort involved in “porting” a large scale application to Windows Azure and the caveats that you have to address to have something running successfully.

On the plus side they made some improvements to TFS itself, which makes more sense for it to run “in the cloud”. One of the major changes in my mind is that fact that they changed the Build Controller to have a client as opposed to a peer relationship.

I always hated the cyclical relationship between TFS and the Build Controllers. Working in distributed teams it was a mission setting up continuous integration and then with limited access to the TFS Build servers, we would either have to commute to the office to fix a build issue or, what tended to happen more often, you live with a broken build for a couple of weeks until someone went in to the office that could fix it.

I really hope that we will see these changes becoming available in the mainstream application.

OK I can work with this..

Got the reply from Grant (see previous post) and he highlights that firstly they used TFS 2008 (this was back in 2007) and it was a huge infrastructure overhead to accommodate the hosting story with TFS 2008 as you could not share instances due to security concerns etc etc - luckily with TFS 2010 that was address in a way making use of collections.


And then the mindset of people and the willingness to have you IP (source code) reside in the cloud. This is one that I'm going to struggle with but hopefully with the huge emphasis on cloud these days that mindset is being chiseled away.