I mentioned in my last post that I presented on “What Is Windows Azure?” at the first Reading Geek Night. This presentation was aimed at people who are new to the world of Windows Azure and aimed to be a quick introduction to wet their appetites.
In good presentation style (or was that lack of time) my presentation contained minimal text and relied on my presentation skills and images to convey the message, so here is a quick run down of my presentation:
Cloud Platform – Windows Azure is a cloud based platform for built from commodity machines, that allows you to develop and deploy, scalable, available applications in Microsoft's data centres across the world.
Utility Computing – Much like your gas and electricity you are only charged for what you consume, therefore giving a very small barrier to entry and making it ideal for small to mid-size businesses. When you need more compute power all you have to do is spin up more servers, no more buying servers based on your peak load, just scale and pay for what you use.
Web & Worker Roles - This is possibly my favourite slide, and where I think the whole concept of Windows Azure falls into place for everyone. Azure is build up on virtual machines consisting of worker and web roles I like to think of these much like the Barista and coffee makers in a coffee shop. Your order is taken by the Barista / web role and passed to the back end coffee makers / worker role for your order to be completed. If at any time either of these “fall over” there will be another role to step into its place and continue the order.
Azure Storage – There are three types of Azure storage Blobs, for binary data, Queues for queuing up messages to be processed by the worker roles, and tables which are flat file databases which will easily scale as needed.
Relational Database – although Windows Azure ships with table storage, you can also use a relational database structure using SQL Azure and SQL Management studio.
Developer Experience – Windows Azure offers a familiar developer experience for any .NET developer with plug-in’s for Visual Studio and a local developer fabric to develop on dev machines. Azure also offers SDKs for both Java and php.
Thanks for everyone who attended the talk and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. You can find more information about Windows Azure at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ along with the SDK and developer tools that you will need to get started.
