Above The Cloud

Last night I delivered another Windows Azure Platform talk, this time at the my local user group. I think this is one of the best sessions I’ve done so far. I think I had a good vibe going on with the audience. And I appreciate that so many of you stuck around for the second talk; I think we went for a good 2 hours at least! Plus another 2 hours at the pub afterwards…

Anyway, here’s the slide deck.

• An Evening In The Clouds (3mb zipped)

Earlier last week I had the privilege of presenting at Remix10, a two day web conference held in Melbourne Australia. I presented in front of a packed crowd, and the topic seemed so popular that I had to deliver it again a second time the next day.

I really enjoyed the “love fest” and while I didn’t get to see much of the other presentations, the keynote was awesome, demonstrating some great integration points with Microsoft Surface, Slate, and Windows Phone 7.

My presentation topic was “Architecting for the Cloud” with a focus on how to build highly scalable applications, leveraging aspects of the Windows Azure Platform.

The presentation began with a quick overview of the platform, then followed by identifying some key aspects to highly scalable applications such as minimising state, caching mechanisms and messaging patterns.

As with my talk at the Windows Azure launch in the Philippines, I decided to take some photos of the crowd at the start. I got to speak to a lot of these individuals during the mixer drinks that evening and it sounds like the Azure platform is starting to gain momentum in Australia.

I really enjoyed the event and hope to be back next year!

Remix10 Slide Deck – Architecting For The Cloud – 1.75Mb

Remix10 in Australia will be on June 1st and 2nd in Melbourne. This “love fest”, as it is being advertised, will see the best of the web and of course that means Azure will play a prominent part.

The sessions have been announced and yours truly will be presenting in the first session of the conference on: Architecting For The Cloud. Here’s the outline:

All you hear nowadays is ‘cloud this’, ‘cloud that’. But what does it really take to write applications for the cloud? Are all applications even suited for the cloud? How are applications best architected for the cloud?

In this session we’ll explore these concepts as we take a scenario based focus on architectures that need to be scalable and durable, focusing on real world examples of companies already using Azure.

There will also be introductory Azure labs over both days; at this stage 4 sessions in total, so get in quick before all the seats dry up! To signup for a lab, email Kyle Price your name, job title, company, and contact phone number. Kyle’s email is: 

Hope to see you there!

CodeCampOz is a once-a-year event over the course of a weekend where code freaks gather from all around Australia descend on the small town of Wagga Wagga in central NSW.

The next one will be held on November 20th and 21st, according to this announcement. The call for speakers has also gone out. I’ve submitted five presentations, I’m hoping at least one will get accepted. I thought I would just quickly post the five submissions here for your review:

Title: Windows Azure Compute For Developers
Level: 300
Outline:
The barrier to entry of a new technology can often seem daunting at first. However the Microsoft hype is true: .Net developers ARE cloud developers! This session will demonstrate how cloud apps are just like apps you’ve already been writing. We’ll also go through some of the API functionality that you can use if you like to add more ‘cloudness’ to your applications and we’ll focus on some key abstractions to help make your applications hot-swappable between on-premise and Azure servers.

Title: Architecting For Azure
Level: 300
Outline:
Organisations are looking to Azure for two primary reasons: cost-reduction and elasticity. While it is easy to port your applications to Azure, it does not mean you will automatically reap the benefits of ‘running in the cloud’. This session will take a look at some key philosophies to keep in mind when architecting your applications to run on Azure.

(this session is a rework of my Azure launch Philippines presentation and my upcoming Remix10 presentation)

Title: Hybrid Azure
Level: 300
Outline:
Don’t want to store your data in the cloud? Still looking to leverage from elasticity? Azure isn’t just about moving your whole world into a Microsoft data centre. There are many scenarios in which you will want to utilise specific features of the Azure platform without swallowing the whole pill, and this session will explore just a few.

Title: Building the Windows Azure Platform
Level: 200
Outline:
Windows Azure provides millions of compute and storage instances across multiple data centres around the world and manages all the applications that run on top if them, configuring load balances, VLans and DNS entries dynamically to meet the scalable needs of millions. And it does all this automatically! In this high level discussion we will peel back the layers of abstraction to reveal how Windows Azure really works under the hood to automatically provision virtual machines and applications in a highly fault tolerant manner.

Title: Azure By Example
Level: 400
Outline:
This no-slides presentation will walk through a sample application with high scalability and redundancy needs that utilises all the parts of the Windows Azure platform. Focusing on reusability and key points of abstraction, we’ll demonstrate how Windows Azure Compute, Storage, Sql Azure, Service Bus and Access Control Services all come together to form the architecture of a highly scalable application.

If you think of anything else you’d like to see around Azure at CodeCampOz, let me know and I’ll make another submission.

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

Last Thursday evening (18th Feb 2010) I did a presentation to the Gold Coast .Net SIG about developing applications for the Windows Azure Platform. The talk went for almost 2 hours (for that I apologise!) and seemed well received.

I started with an overview of the platform, and then dived into Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .Net Services. I used a demo application that performed searches for images based on colour content, using Azure to do the grunt work of analysing images.

You can find the files from that presentation here:

• Slide Deck PPTX (1.9Mb)
• ImageSearch Demo Application (2.9Mb)

The night seemed to go well, except for the fact that my SQL Azure account expired on that very day, mere hours before my presentation. I received no warning email and was pleasantly surprised by the little ‘disabled’ flag against my SQL Azure account.

I will now spend the next few days trying to work out what I have done to anger the demo gods. In the meantime, stay tuned, as future blog posts will break down that demo application to talk about some of the techniques used to share code, use configuration settings, and utilise database access, all in a fashion that is agnostic to whether we are using the developer fabric, or the production Azure fabric.

If you attended on the night, I’m more than happy to hear any feedback about the presentation you may have. I am trying to continuously improve as a presenter and appreciate any constructive criticism you can provide.

Earlier this week I did a presentation to the Brisbane Infrastructure Group (BIG) (twitter: #bigau) about the Windows Azure Platform. I want to say a ‘big’ thankyou to all those who attended and also to Avenade for supporting the event.

I’ve uploaded the slide deck as a zip file for you to peruse. I’ve also added annotations in the ‘notes’ section on most pages where necessary including extra links to articles of relevance.

Please note that this slide deck is a combination of slides from the Azure Training Kit, the PDC08 talk delivered by Erick Smith and Chuck Lenzmeier, and my own content. Please feel free to reuse anything you find within, except my humour. I only request a link back to this site in return.

I’ve done a couple behind closed doors for my Readify work mates and for various clients, but this will be my first presentation to the open public. I’ll be presenting on the Windows Azure Platform at the Brisbane Infrastructure Group in Brisbane Queensland (Australia for my international readers).

Those who know me know that, amongst other things, I am a developer. My work with Readify in a consulting manner is all development related to some degree. I love to code! For me to present to an Infrastructure group about Azure has many potential hazards. I might be lynched, have fruit thrown at me, or just simply no one will show up to the presentation. But still, I must spread the message!

Besides, I am confident that the prospect of hearing about an operating system for the cloud will be too much for these infra nerds to resist! So log off those domain admin accounts, tuck your shirts into your undies, and come along to hear all about the next generation of computing in the cloud!

Please RSVP as soon as possible via this link or by emailing the BIG group at: bigau@live.com.au

Also, I will be awarding a prize based on the best developer or sys admin joke on the night!

Disclaimer: Prize may have no real value