I am returning from the Windows Azure Platform & Cloud Computing Technical Briefing held at Microsoft in Reading. The ‘softies in action were David Gristwood, Neil Kidd and Simon Davies – giving an overview of the Azure platform. There weren’t any titbits of information that are not readily available on the web, but it is interesting to see the perspective of some people in the UK who have been giving it a try – Neil seems to have worked on POC’s and Simon seems to have played with the more esoteric parts. The UK DPE group seem to be trying quite hard to rustle up some POC’s that will allow them to storm the next PDC using Azure as they did with Tesco/Conchango.
The crowd was fairly diverse – from those who have some idea of cloud computing implications to those who have never thought about it before. The interesting point of discussion from the audience came in the form of when and how much – answered in a non-marketing speak of ‘I don’t know’, followed by opinions that more detail about pricing should be out by the end of the quarter. With a large ISV audience there was more of an interest in terms of cost from a ‘how can I make money out of this’ point of view, rather than the enterprise ‘no way, not with my data’ predictable response.
In a way it is fortunate that the roadmap for Azure means an end of CTP towards next year as there is a lot of selling and training needed by Microsoft on their existing market. The concepts will, for the traditional ASP.NET/SQL developer or ISV take a long time to sink in – the ideas of using queues, endpoints, workflow and other techniques and technologies are quite foreign to most people (never mind SQL Data Services which is not really SQL at all). An architectural mindshift needs to take place and I imagine that it will be a fairly tough and long process.
It was overall a worthwhile session but still the thirty or so people at the briefing are not nearly enough to spread the word on Azure. Nevertheless if you happen to be attending one of the upcoming sessions you should get something out of it, like Simon’s cool ‘lightbulb moment’ demo of using the service bus, and maybe start getting your head in the clouds. If you are interested in attending, there are still some briefings to be run in the next few days and weeks.
Simon Munro