Cloudy with a chance of Development
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I got some nice tours of Azure a while back, and developed a few simple apps to try the platform. I still have my account, but I haven't been back. Here's the thing...Azure serves a very specific purpose, and it serves that purpose very well, but the hype surrounding it makes it sound like it serves lots of other purposes, which just isn't true. If you are building an app that will have reasonably consistant traffic all year round, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a standard hosted app, stick it on a dedicated server if it's important enough, do a bit of load balancing of needed. That hosting technology works just fine and will probably be more cost effective than hosting in "the cloud". The only benefit I could see from Azure was for apps that experience massive spikes in demand. E.g. If John and George rose from the dead and the Beatles announced a world Tour, TicketMaster would see some serious action on their booking systems. But once the tickets had sold out TicketMaster would be back to their average load. It doesn't make sense for Ticket Master to keep massive amounts of excess capacity spun up ready for the next big spike, and it may not be cost effective to try to ramp up traditional hosting at short notice (who knows how long undead John and George will be around, gotta get this tour on fast). This is where Azure is great, and hats off to them, what I saw was very impressive. But 99% of people who talk to me about the Cloud are talking crap, they think cloud is just another name for web hosting...only better. If you're going to get into Azure, do your customers a favour and make sure it's a correct fit for them. -Richard
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I got some nice tours of Azure a while back, and developed a few simple apps to try the platform. I still have my account, but I haven't been back. Here's the thing...Azure serves a very specific purpose, and it serves that purpose very well, but the hype surrounding it makes it sound like it serves lots of other purposes, which just isn't true. If you are building an app that will have reasonably consistant traffic all year round, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a standard hosted app, stick it on a dedicated server if it's important enough, do a bit of load balancing of needed. That hosting technology works just fine and will probably be more cost effective than hosting in "the cloud". The only benefit I could see from Azure was for apps that experience massive spikes in demand. E.g. If John and George rose from the dead and the Beatles announced a world Tour, TicketMaster would see some serious action on their booking systems. But once the tickets had sold out TicketMaster would be back to their average load. It doesn't make sense for Ticket Master to keep massive amounts of excess capacity spun up ready for the next big spike, and it may not be cost effective to try to ramp up traditional hosting at short notice (who knows how long undead John and George will be around, gotta get this tour on fast). This is where Azure is great, and hats off to them, what I saw was very impressive. But 99% of people who talk to me about the Cloud are talking crap, they think cloud is just another name for web hosting...only better. If you're going to get into Azure, do your customers a favour and make sure it's a correct fit for them. -Richard
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Richard thanks for that, just the information I was looking for, which answers the question. I'll probably look at Azure so I'm familiar with the technology/terminalogy and let it at that until I have a real world case use for it. Thanks.
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I've seen a few real world cases for Amazon, don't know about Azure. Mattel sent out millions of Barbie doll catalog that referenced a web application and forgot to notify their development team, so they had a company port it to amazon services over a few days. Another example is Zynga. They ramped up from 0 to millions of users in a few months. A financial news site provisions their load hourly so they pay for more servers at the open and close of the markets, less during the middle of the day and even less over night. Someone's blog or standard commerce site, not so much.
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
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Richard thanks for that, just the information I was looking for, which answers the question. I'll probably look at Azure so I'm familiar with the technology/terminalogy and let it at that until I have a real world case use for it. Thanks.
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
The most shocking example of cloud bullshit was during the recent election in Ireland. I don't know if word has gotten out, but Ireland is broke. Very very broke. As in... "our constitution is currently sitting in a pawn shop in vegas, while we stick the proceeds on Red and cross our fingers" broke. The Green Party in their ahem...wisdom... proposed moving all public services into cloud computing. Apparently doing so "makes it easier for the public to access data". Now, whatever the advantages or disadvantages of cloud computing, in the specific areas where it's suitable, I think we can all agree that it isn't something that you just move all your apps to en masse ....WHEN YOU ARE A COUNTRY!!!! The Green Party received no seats in the election. They'll tell you it's because they happened to be in power when tough decision had to be made. In truth it's because they were a bunch of really really really stupid people. This Clown Computing scheme wasn't even their most dumb effort. -Rd
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I attended a Microsft boot camp training a few weeks ago. Everything can be done through Visual Studio 2010. You'll need to create an account with the cloud service. Visual Studio provides a Azure project template. With the template, the development is very similar to ASP.NET. Your application can be deployed directly to the cloud from Visual Studio. The Sql Azure provides much less functionalites than the regular sql database. If you have been working with sql database, you'll need to lower your expectation a lot.
TOMZ_KV
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I attended a Microsft boot camp training a few weeks ago. Everything can be done through Visual Studio 2010. You'll need to create an account with the cloud service. Visual Studio provides a Azure project template. With the template, the development is very similar to ASP.NET. Your application can be deployed directly to the cloud from Visual Studio. The Sql Azure provides much less functionalites than the regular sql database. If you have been working with sql database, you'll need to lower your expectation a lot.
TOMZ_KV
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Tomz_KV wrote:
f you have been working with sql database, you'll need to lower your expectation a lot.
You mean like MySql ;)
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I've been working almost full-time on Azure for the past 18 months or so. One of the tools linked in my signature runs on Azure, and other is being ported right now. I really like Azure. Sure, it's a bit hard to grasp its particular flavor of NoSQL, but in the end it's something that I enjoy and recommend.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] ScrewTurn Wiki, Software Localization Tools & Services and My Blog
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I've been working almost full-time on Azure for the past 18 months or so. One of the tools linked in my signature runs on Azure, and other is being ported right now. I really like Azure. Sure, it's a bit hard to grasp its particular flavor of NoSQL, but in the end it's something that I enjoy and recommend.
If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe, but not a personality. [Charlie Brooker] ScrewTurn Wiki, Software Localization Tools & Services and My Blog
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I work part time on Azure, and in my opinion (and I think Gartner/Forrester too) the AppFabric is the best part of the Azure platform. Callbacks in the ACS cache are pretty great as well. ACS is consuming much of my recent time with federating OAuth/OData services, but other then that it's pretty straightfoward. (The OAuth spec is constantly changing and the reason for the extra time.)
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
The intent of Azure is to provide a development environment that is accessable to everyone, any where, at any time. So, as a consequence, the market value of software developer skill sets will be driven down to those prevalent in the 3rd world. As such, if you live in the 1st world and have to make a living, don't bother to enter into the Azure world. Instead, transition into another field of work that will pay you enough to support yourself and your family.
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I briefly looked into Azure, since I have a bunch of Websites, but discovered that it just wasn't worth it. My costs would have tripled compared to what I get from my reseller hosting account. Granted, Azure scales automatically, but until I write the new Facebook, it's just not something I need right now.
Thou shalt starteth a new pot when thy coffee runeth dry.
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Tomz_KV wrote:
f you have been working with sql database, you'll need to lower your expectation a lot.
You mean like MySql ;)
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
Microsoft came to our company to do a dog and pony show on azure. The long and short of it is that much of the promised functionality isn't done yet. I'd wait about 18 months before starting. In the meantime you can learn something that works now. If azure goes away, you won't have wasted your time.
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I'm working on a project that to get off the ground requires a significant investment in a data center. The system is complex with transactions and content delivery. While all the market studies are positive other companies have been unable to be successful in the space. We are using Azure because it will scale should it take off and we don't have to commit to building the data center until we prove the market. I think Azure will have value in providing a means of building complex enterprise applications without requiring the up front capital investment allowing more unsure products to be developed and tried in the marketplace.
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I'm doing some MPI work on Azure as a experiment for the company I work for. We have it working and the EXTRA-LARGE nodes are pretty good for CPU bound work, 14 Gigabytes of memory, 8 cores, and a Terabyte of disk space. But the network isn't much to talk about, it is GigE and MPI runs pretty slow on it. Deployment is good and fast, I can put Ansys Fluent 13 on it and run some benchmarks and get usable results. However, the license server is in our corpnet and we had to setup a secure VPN connection from the Azure nodes to access the license server for lmgrd to work. So, there's a lot of moving parts for it now, but it suppose to get better hearing Microsoft talk about it...:) Rep was even saying something about Infiniband QDR, dedicated hardware and GPU support in the future.
Lyle
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
I attend the Boston Azure Users Group meetings. They have been meeting once a month for over a year now. Attendance grows monthly. Great presentations, great networking every month. I've decided to take one of my side projects to Azure. Microsoft has been helpful in providing resources. User group attendees have been great about pointing me in the right direction and answer questions. I'm still an Azure noob, but I'm "getting it". Jeff
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Dont worry in the next 15 years or so cloud will be gone and we'll be back to desktop again ;)
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
Norm .net wrote:
Dont worry in the next 15 years or so cloud will be gone and we'll be back to desktop again ;)
We seem to go through a cycle every 8 or 10 years where they try to swing things back to the dumb terminal/mainframe model again. Last time it was the Web PC. This time it's the "cloud". It'll pass and the sun will come out again! I don't "get" the idea of "online" compilers, DB's etc... I've seen it demonstrated, too. Yawn. -Max :D
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I'm considering deveoting some time to getting my head stuck into Azure. I've a few questions: 1. Is there anybody learning Azure at the moment? 2. Is there anybody doing fulltime Azure development? [Dont vote just answer]
Software Kinetics - The home of good software
Good morning Just to divert the conversation in a more positive direction we are using Azure for a couple of large clients websites which have the potential of growing quite large. I know another local company which also using Azure wholly for their client for mission critical solutions as well (if they did not work people would die). One of the reasons we used Azure for one of our sites is the capacity / room to grow. We have our own server farm however this site is a video sharing / social site and potentially could have thousands of videos (if not more) being uploaded by servers. Storage/bandwidth etc is not a worry with Azure and cheaper than us hosting / streaming also. Azure is a great platform, but does not suit all companies/applications. Concerns with data security which have been raised are normally more the normal scaremongering which always get raised in the cloud. Additional security can always be put in yourself if you are really that concerned so even MS would not have access to the actual data. Shane
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That's the problem with it for me: it is and it isn't rehashed-stuff-for-the-past. It is in essence a return to the bad old Mainframe Computer model, but this time with added insecurity. Do they really back up properly? How many people have access to our data? Can our data be intercepted?
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."
