I’ve just about had my fill of Azure demos and presentations. After more than a year in beta it seemed that the only people that could stand up in front of a crowd and talk about Azure were those from Microsoft or their hymn-singing partners. It is not that the presentations and videos are bad, it is just that they are a lot of the same – either a ‘Hello cloud’ introduction to the platform, release of new features that have been asked for or pimping how similar Azure development is to existing .net development.
Most of the presentations that I have seen, although many of them very good and done by really smart people, have the sheen of marketing snake oil. It all seems to perfect and simple - all clinical, clean and fashionable like CSI Miami where everything works, rather than messy and grungy like the development world that we have to live in every day.
It is to be expected. Microsoft has a well-oiled marketing machine that must carefully introduce the cloud to it’s enterprise developers (making it seem familiar and easy) and a platform that has only been live for a couple of months can’t be expected to have many development teams that have real production experience of developing and delivering a solution that is more than a proof of concept.
Last year UKAzureNet, the London based Azure user group, launched with considerable success and had well attended meetings but there was something missing. Since Azure was unreleased (and in many cases the attendees had never seen Azure before) the meetings took on a more introductory tone that was a thin slice of the capabilities and issues – so the tone became that of the presentations done at any number of Microsoft organized events like PDC. Even the conversations in the breaks were filled with conjecture (and hope even) about an as yet unfinished solution to an as yet unidentified problem for an as yet unidentified market (it was in the middle of the recession after all).
What was missing from the meetings last year was some Azure rockstars – people who have delivered something in Azure in a real project that a customer paid valuable money for. We needed to hear from people who had found both the valuable nuggets and the warts and had done some of the initial toiling and fighting with the tools on our behalf.
So it is fortunate (and about time) that the first Azure meeting of the year is going to have presentations – not by some big name to attract the usual sheeple that marketing attracts, but by some people that have worked with Azure and delivered something that is real. I have had some chats with Simon Evans, James Broome and Grace Mollison over the last couple of months as they have developed a solution on top of Azure – a solution that would have no business case if it weren’t for the cloud model. I have heard from James as he wrestled the development fabric to fit in with his BDD style and the support of Grace in providing a build server for the team using a product that doesn’t have a server version. I watched from a distance as Simon got his head down and dealt with the persistence issues and had to ignore him after the n th time that he exclaimed how cool and easy the CDN is.
Next week is a busy week for the Microsoft community. There is all the stuff that Microsoft is putting on around the launch of VS2010, SQL R2 and others. There is a Silverlight user group meeting and I will be presenting at SQLBits on Friday. Thursday night is the turn of UKAzureNet and even though it might be less central, it is being done in a cinema and our new emerging rockstars will be on a stage of sorts. We need your support and attendance to help get it as full as possible – we don’t expect it to be like the opening weekend of Avatar, but hope that we’ll have more than a handful of usual suspects throwing popcorn.
You are guaranteed to hear some interesting stories from the trenches.
You can register here UK AzureNET User Group: Phoenix from the Flames
@simonmunro