We had an action packed 2 days hammering ‘Azurey’ (Azure) discovering all the concepts and most importantly I was trying to get the Why point across.

Why??

Why should we use Azure? When should we use it? Do I *need* to use it? Where can it help me for little effort… etc.. etc..

The students walked out with a trial Azure account which enabled them to continue working on their environment as and when they could.

We had some great discussions and some good fun was had by all.

I thought I would make my slides available – http://bit.ly/oQ0Zcv UPDATED - (case sensitive) – ENJOY!

What a place…the Gold Coast!!!

Any chance to get back there… and this year is looking to be a fantastic 2 day pre-conference training together.

In the training there’ll be no MS speak!! I promise “We’re all in…” …(washing mouth out with soap).

First things first – everyone you speak to will pronounce ‘Azure’ differently (I once had 3 martial arts instructors all speak their own flavour of ‘Korean’ to me).
You’ll get:
1) ‘Aaaaaazzzzre’
2) ‘Azzzz-cloud’

Now here in Australia we’re standardising (our English-Australian) to Azurey!

Azurey is our official term, which fits alongside ‘Timmy’, ‘Barbie’ and ‘Daveo’… but not Shazza.

What I want to explore with you are all the different options and components that you could utilise. Having been through several cloud based solutions and building a cloud based solution over the last 2 years.

So we can use a combination of the available technologies to alleviate some of the in-house problems (e.g. firewall settings, h/w order and provisioning, server space) while still maintaining *very* good ownership over it.

One thing is clear right now – with this new landscape the focus has returned to the Developer to be mindful of what resources they use and HOW they use them.

The price of your solution starts right now from the ground up with the Developer!
(Previously we’ve had limitless memory, disk, cpu, connections, sockets, select * from customers… – developers rarely care)

So the cost model – What do you get charged for?
(short answer – nearly everything)

If you can design a solution with:
1) no use for SQL Azure –as it currently costs a bomb to host a DB.
You could use – SQLCE locally or Azure Storage (Table, Queue, blob) which is cheap as chips.

2) limit your Service Bus Connections – both client and server count as a connection. The connections are averaged out over a day/month and are sampled every 5 mins, but you certainly don’t want to rack up 100s of connections. A cheaper alternative is to expose a WCF Endpoint (via a worker role) and have a process communicate with the Servicebus endpoint handling the requests. This counts for 2 connections (1 client, 1 server) and is well within the 5 pack.

3) Only data out is charged – not in.

4) Compute VM sizes limit bandwith – across all your compute VMs e.g. small, there is bandwidth limitations that is enforced whether you have 1 or 10 VMs. Be mindful of that.

5) We can ‘monitor’ our cloud machines and even get back perf counters on each – just to give you that feel good feeling.

Well anyway I must go tweak some F# (best thing I’ve seen in a long while…another story)

Here’s the official story @ TechEd – hope to see you there folks!

http://australia.msteched.com/preconferencetraining

Official Blurb!

How “the Cloud” can help you integrate – Microsoft for Developers

With the excitement of technology moving towards “the Cloud” come and learn exactly what this means to your business and how your development projects can leverage the Windows Azure Platform without re-architecting your environment. Should you invest in private cloud, move your application to the public cloud, choose a hybrid approach or keep the application on-premise?

This two-day development workshop led by renowned Integration Experts provides delegates with an early opportunity to gain insight and hands-on experience with the Windows Azure Platform including Windows Azure AppFabric, SQL Azure, Windows Server AppFabric and BizTalk AppFabric Connect.

This developer workshop focuses on maximising your existing integration technology investment for an on-premise solution, including architectural design considerations, real world tips and techniques and hands-on experience with using the integration tools available today.

Delivered through workshop style presentations and hands-on lab exercises, this technology focused pre conference training will assist with designing and developing your company roadmap to the Cloud.