Above The Cloud

It has been a hectic week in Australia around the Windows Azure Platform space. The official Windows Azure launch happened in Sydney and Melbourne. I was lucky enough to pop down on Tuesday for the Sydney event and see David Chappell and Dianne O’Brien present along side Australia’s own Gianpaolo Carraro on the current face of the Windows Azure Platform.

You might recognise David (David Chappell and Associates) as the author of the various Azure whitepapers found on the Azure site. I’ve also seen his slide deck before but after much hunting around this afternoon was unable to find them. David spoke about the basics of the platform, covering off Windows Azure roles, SQL Azure, and AppFabric (formerly .Net Services). David has obviously presented this topic many times before as it shows through in his presentation style. I learnt some tips I will reuse in future when presenting Azure topics. I was also lucky enough to have lunch with David after the event and gain some insight into his thoughts about the near future of Azure and other cloud platforms.

The other presenter was Dianne O’Brien, Senior Director for Business Strategy and Operations in the Windows Azure product team. Dianne was also over in Australia from the mother ship to talk about the Azure offering in Australia. She indicated that we will likely see Azure release in Australia in April 2010, quite a long way given this launch event was held in February. Dianne had an awesome slide deck I would love to get my hands on, and she talked about the Azure pricing strategy, data centre locations, and more.

Not sure how this escaped my notice, but it would seem that service bus pricing will now be based on connection. Exactly what defines a connection and how disconnects and retries are affected is beyond my limited knowledge. I’ll endeavour to find out a little bit more about this as soon as I have bandwidth.

Something else Dianne mentioned that really caught my attention was a statement about how she expects people to architect their applications around the Azure pricing model. I think she is probably right about this to a certain degree (people will seek to minimise cost), but I dearly hope she is wrong. The cloud as an industry already suffers terribly from a lack of anything closely resembling portability. Vendors are all vying for business and platform lock-in. The manifesto debacle last year indicated portability as one of its tenants, yet none of its major sponsors can advertise portability of their products while maintaining a straight face.

Architecting solutions around a pricing model is fraught with danger and is the antithesis of portability in general. No other platform is the same as Azure but that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope for application portability. Ok so you won’t be able to take your C# code over to Google Apps but at least your app should still be hostable on a VM instance in Amazon EC2 or GoGrid. In my opinion we should all be thinking about the cloud-portability problem since we can all make a difference in how this will play out (developers, team leads, middle/senior management, Microsoft, Amazon, etc).

The other event of interest this week was a road trip by Mr David Lemphers, Senior Program Manager on the Windows Azure team. It was great to finally meet David after conversations exchanged over twitter. David was presenting a more developer focused view of the Windows Azure platform and hit most of Australia’s capital cities.

While I didn’t learn a lot personally about the technology or business model of Azure this week, I did come to the realisation that despite having my head deep in Azure for so long, the rest of the community is still quite clueless to Azure and what it can do for them. Which means I better pick up some blogging velocity again hey? =)