Above The Cloud

Welcome to my new blog, ‘Above The Cloud’ where I will be exploring “the cloud” as it relates to the development community, with a particular focus (but not limited to) the new Azure Services offering by Microsoft.

At PDC08 Microsoft announced www.azure.com and in their own words:

The Azure Services platform provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the internet.

Currently the Azure Services Platform is available on an invitation basis only, however you can apply for an invitation token via the Microsoft Connect program which is their community connection point and a place where you can register for all sorts of trials, alphas, etc. I suggest you sign up to Connect today, have a browse of any previews you might be interested in and apply.

What happens next is that eventually (could be a day, could be a month) Microsoft would widen their invitation base on a particular product, and you will receive an email with an invitation token. Once you receive your Azure token, you can connect to the Azure Services Platform.

Please note that there are a number of different services you can apply for in the Azure space. The 3 primary ones are:

• Azure Services Platform
• Microsoft .Net Services
• Microsoft Sql Services

The first focuses on high availability of web sites and services through load balancing and dynamic allocation of resources. At the click of a button you can take your website from a 3 node cluster to 4. The second is the platform for developing .Net applications in the Azure space. There is an SDK available from here that lets you simulate “the cloud” on your desktop. Finally, Microsoft Sql Services is the cloud-based database offering that will let you store data in the cloud.

All 3 services are available for you to play with now! And this blog will be dedicated to helping you explore all these services, the SDK’s and much more. So go check out www.azure.com now and signup so you can join me as we uncover the mysteries of the cloud.