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Category : SaaS

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The Cloud Hack: Microsoft Azure Hack Day, London, Saturday 11 June 2011.

Filed Under : Development,SaaS by Joel Jeffery
May.23,2011

I’m presenting at this year’s Microsoft Hack Day. This year’s theme is Microsoft Azure and using cool APIs to write innovative applications for the cloud.

Hooking Stuff Together

The Cloud Hack event is a celebration of all that is good about Web 2.0 development on the Microsoft stack. To paraphrase great all-round architecture dude and high priest of SOA, Microsoft’s Pat Helland, it’s really all about Hooking Stuff Together.

Microsoft Windows Azure gives us a great fabric upon which to deploy services and applications that make the best of Hooking web services Stuff Together. When you sign up for The Cloud Hack, you’ll get a 30-day free subscription to Azure.

The three APIs we’ll be working with on the day include National Rail, Bing Maps and Fantastic Tavern. At the very least, there should be enough API goodness there to plan an impromptu pub crawl. And if that’s not good use of Web 2.0, then feel free to leave comments at the end of this blog post and tell me what is. Smile

Getting There

If you’re reading this before the event, you can get free tickets here: http://www.thecloudhack.com/pages/get-a-ticket/

The location for the day is the Vibe Bar at the THE BREWERY, 52 CHISWELL STREET, EC1Y 4SD.


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The schedule for the has been published too:http://www.thecloudhack.com/pages/schedule/

Technorati Tags: Azure, Cloud, Development, Microsoft Architecture, Microsoft Azure

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Microsoft and the Private Cloud

Filed Under : SaaS by Joel Jeffery
Feb.7,2011

Azure, Office 365, Dynamics On-Demand CRM – all of these are cloud services from Microsoft. We know the benefits – cloud services take the concept of hosting an application – or running your applications – and erecting a huge Somebody Else’s Problem field around it. Maintenance, scaling, feeding and watering all become problems that are Somebody Else’s. In that case, Microsoft’s, running in their Public Cloud.

But what if you can’t countenance the thought of your data being in Somebody Else’s hands? If your applications and data are sufficiently secret and confidential that you just have to keep them inside the firewall, then you can still take advantage of the cloud philosophy, and go for a Private Cloud.

One really cool example of application fabric for the Private Cloud is Microsoft’s on-premise Azure appliances.

This video from Microsoft discusses the ethos behind the Private Cloud, and how the virtualisation tools that we already use can make the Private Cloud a reality.

For more details check out the Microsoft Private Cloud portal (http://bit.ly/ff1w3C), System Center Virtual Machine Manager self service portal (http://bit.ly/e3vgyG) and Hyper-V (http://bit.ly/ikrKGw).

Technorati Tags: Azure, S plus S, SaaS, Virtualisation

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Overview of Cloud Computing (SaaS, S+S and Microsoft Azure)

Filed Under : SaaS by Joel Jeffery
Nov.19,2010

Whether we’re talking about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the cloud is really just another place to run your applications.

Microsoft’s vision of Software plus Services takes the basic offering of SaaS and augments it with on-premise productivity software such as Office.

In this TechNet video Brian Prince talks about cloud computing terminology, the role of the IT professional in cloud computing and Microsoft’s approach to the topic.

Brian also discusses the spectrum from on-premise, through hosted, cloud services and SaaS hosted applications.

  • In an on-premise scenario, I would be in charge of managing, feeding and watering my servers, with all the IT people that required.
  • In a hosted scenario, I would out-source some of that basal responsibility to my hosting provider, but I would probably be tasked with looking after the operating system and above.
  • In a cloud scenario, such as Azure, I delegate all the running and maintaining, patching and potentially even scaling of my solution to Microsoft or other third parties. If you’re interested in automatically scaling your Azure applications have a look at the Windows Azure Dynamic Scaling sample application (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/azurescale) and also at one service provider that’s offering this funcitonality as a service for Azure (AzureWatch from http://www.paraleap.com).
  • Traditional SaaS solutions are geared towards one-size-fits-all approaches, such as shared CRM, email or productivity solutions (for instance Office 365 and SharePoint Online).

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Microsoft Architecture, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, S plus S, S+S, SaaS

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Microsoft Azure Cloud Services and Mobile Applications

Filed Under : Development,SaaS by Joel Jeffery
Jul.22,2010

I’ve just come across another great video from Jason Zander at the UK Tech Days event in Reading. This time it’s about mobile applications and the Azure platform.

I’ve been following the Microsoft cloud service offerings for a couple of years since the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008. What started as SQL Server Data Services and the nascent BizTalk Services, has now grown into an offering that in my opinion does not just complete with Amazon and Google cloud services, but far exceeds the capabilities of their model.

Here’s a screenshot of a really simple ASP.NET page that I’m going to run in the local Azure test harness. You need to make sure it’s running as Administrator, or you can’t launch the Azure Simulation Environment.

Visual Studio 2010 with Cloud Service in Administrator Mode

If I’ve done all that, I can hit F5 and get this:

Windows Azure Simulation Environment System Tray Icon

Shortly followed by the web application as if it were running in the cloud:

The Simple ASP.NET Application Running

In the video, Jason builds a quick application connecting some .NET entity classes to a SQL Azure instance and shows how quickly a simple web service can be deployed to the cloud.

You also get to see the developer tools for Visual Studio 2010 and Azure, including local simulations of the App Fabric and Dev Fabric infrastructure of Azure. In other words, you can test your Azure apps by running them on your local machine without needing to actually deploy them.

Instead of deploying an ASP.NET Web Application like I did above, Jason shows you the newly released Visual Studio Express and he walks through the steps to build a Silverlight mobile application to consume the service he just deployed on Azure.

The key takeaway here is just how easy it is to build and consume cloud services and applications across a broad spectrum of platforms. Follow this link for more information about Microsoft Azure, or give us a call a JFDI Phoenix in the UK.

Technorati Tags: Cloud, Mirosoft Azure, Mobile, Videos, Visual Studio 2010

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The benefits of hosted VoIP

Filed Under : SaaS by Joel Jeffery
Oct.10,2008

My long time friend and client Peter Jenkins presents on the business benefits of host VoIP and the VoIP Advantage offering.

VoIP Advantage on YouTube

Technorati Tags: SIP, Telephony, VoIP

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