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

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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/

Microsoft and the Private Cloud

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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).