Will LabVIEW run in Windows Azure ?

[ernestm]

Licensing is definitely going to be the bugbear there.  Let me ask around internally.  It's always good to hear use cases from someone that wants to do it.

Question - how interesting would you find it to be able to buy a LabVIEW instance "by the hour" instead of "bring your own license", like you can do with AMIs and DevPay on Amazon? 

Oh and on the compilation - do you mean normal VI compilation or FPGA compilation?  We have a FPGA Compile Cloud product in beta where you can offload FPGA compiles to the cloud. It's interesting to hear customer use cases about other kinds of compiles that it might make sense to offload since we've already opened up that path.

[Sean_W]

By-the-hour licensing would be very interesting.  However, my projects nearly always connect to some piece of hardware, PXI chassis, etc... so I would still need to have a normal desktop license as well.  I think the cloud option is a "nice to have" feature for cases where you are not in front of your lab hardware, but you still want to get some work done.

The Build that I referenced earlier is a fairly large but otherwise standard LV2010 project for Win32, compiling to a Packed Library.  The build seems to get hung up on searching for certain RF Modules and Complex Number libraries.  The "searching" dialog appears for about 45 minutes.  I suppose it could actually be a bug in LV2010. However, if it's not a bug, and big projects really are going to take much, much longer to compile in the future, then a "Build In Cloud" option would be awesome, if not a "Must Have".

-Sean

[LV_Pro]

If it is searching for 45 minutes on your local machine that sounds like a problem with your install. 45 minutes on a computer is an is an eternity these days, even with a really big drive. Is it working entirely on a local drive or are you accessing "stuff" on a networked drive?

[Sean_W]

The whole proejct and install is on a local drive, and it's a Quad Core Xeon CPU!  If I remove the RF Modulation Toolkit code, then the build time is cut by about 60%.  Believe me, you're preaching to the choir about the insanity of the whole process!

Regarding cloud stuff....

I think the more interesting Use Case for cloud computing would be "Demo Latest LabVIEW Version in Cloud".

I think it's awesome that it is now possible to download an Evaluation copy of the latest LabVIEW.  I think we all appreciate that. However, it is still a very time consuming process to evaluate new LV releases.  By the time you download the software, install it, update all of your other NI drivers for the new LabVIEW (some of the drivers can be >2GB) - you have easily burned through 4 hours of your afternoon.  And now you have all kinds of new junk on your machine.  Some folks, including myself, maintain Virtual Machines or Multi-Boot systems for "software tryout", etc... to mitigate the "unneeded junk" syndrome.  But the reality is that the whole thing is still a pain in the neck (at least in my view).

If there was an option called "Demo Latest Version of LabVIEW in Cloud" or "Demo FPGA Module In Cloud" I would be all over that.

[ernestm]

In terms of the LV demo in the cloud, I've shopped the idea around, but have had some resistance because there's a perception that such an eval won't be useful because you can't hook it up to local hardware. Would people find a software-only eval like that useful?

[Sean_W]

I suppose NEW users of LV may want to hook the evaluation copy up to hardware.

But for myself, and I would imagine most other version upgraders, I have absolutely no need to connect an evaluation version to real hardware. Instead I'm more focused on checking out the latest goodies in event handling, user interfaces, new atomic functions, new project features, etc...  I can't really imagine or recall any scenario where I needed to determine if the latest version of LabVIEW could still control my hardware!

The only reason that I would typically upgrade my NI hardware drivers while evaluating the latest LV version would be to allow code I have previously written to load into the version of LabVIEW under evaluation.

-Sean

[ernestm]

OK, so I've heard three different ideas, I'd love feedback from more folks on whether they'd be interested in such a thing.

1. "Bring your own license" cloud LabVIEW install, possibly on an Amazon AMI or a HyperV VM for Azure. LabVIEW is preinstalled for you, you put in your license key (ideally once, you could stop and start and burn your own image and reuse it) and run it there.  Maybe as a bonus the installation could be optimized by NI somehow.
2. "Utility billed" cloud LabVIEW install, possibly as an Amazon AMI or HyperV VM for Azure. You don't need a license, you pay by the hour you run it in traditional cloud fashion. 
3. "Online demo" where we are the ones running LabVIEW in the cloud, you don't need an Amazon or Azure account, and we let you spin up and play with a new version of LV for a limited time on our dime (or at least at the cost of a sales rep immediately driving out and peering in your window :-). We do have a way to do that right now, albeit in a more guided fashion, off http://www.ni.com/trylabview/.

Chime in with how much you would lvoe each of these, where 1 is it makes you want to kill a kitten and 10 is you would pay hard cash money for it and think it was awesome.  No, I'm not in product marketing, can you tell?