Above The Cloud

Last Monday 19th April 2010 the Philippines launched Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Azure Platform all in one go, and I was invited to speak on the developer track about Windows Azure, twice!

The theme for the event was “First Flight” and all the presenters were ‘Captains’. The community event was organised through a Facebook group and attracted a lot of interest. It was held in the Shangri La in Manila, which is also where I stayed for the weekend.

I flew in on the Saturday night (late) and spent Sunday practising my talk and took a brief walk out into the nearby shopping centre to sample the local cuisine. And although I didn’t get to see much of the Philippines, I have to say that the food is reason enough to visit!

The event was fantastic. Looking at the profiles of some of the attendees on Facebook, I could see people were travelling from all around to attend the event. And why not? It had some great speakers.

There were separate business and developer tracks and of course I spent all my time hanging around with the developers! First up, Tanuj Vohra, Partner Director PM for the testing tools in VS2010 did a keynote about the Visual Studio release. Tanuj just came off a road trip through Australia as well and is working very hard to promote the Visual Studio release all around the Asia Pacific region.

Then David Chappell gave a keynote about the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform. I had seen David present before (at the Australian launch of Azure) so was not surprised by how great a speaker he is.

David gave an overview of the Azure platform and touched on the types of scenarios where cloud computing was and was not relevant. He also did a comparison of competitor platforms showing their strengths and weaknesses and how their services relate to the Azure platform.

Lunch kicked in after that and while we were all gorging ourselves on the sumptuous local cuisine, the event workers sprung into action and transferred the main hall into 2 separate presentation rooms. I had the honour of kicking off one of the tracks with an introduction to Windows Azure for developers. Following me was a Sharepoint talk, and then I presented my second topic which was about building highly scalable applications with Windows Azure.

One of the things that surprised me about the Filipino developer community was how much they loved to take photos. Every presenter, every sign, was a photographic opportunity. I wanted to get into the spirit as well, so as I took the stage for my first talk, I turned the tables and took some photographs of the beautiful audience. They were too big to get into one shot, so I had to take two, left and right respectively:

I didn’t notice this until just now when I sat down to start writing this post: every single person is smiling! But from my short experience in the Philippines, this is what the people are like. Everyone smiles at you and says hello. Oh, and did I mention how good the food is?

All in all I had a great time and wish I could have spent more time to investigate the country and the city of Manila. It seems like there is a great developer community there and next time I return I’d love to get along to a user group or similar event. Oh, and to eat the food too.

Below are my slide decks and example solution from the event. Please let me know if you need any further assistance with Azure, I’d be more than happy to help.

Slide decks and Demo Code

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? =)