Joel's SharePoint Architecture Blog

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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/

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

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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).