Sam Gentile's Blog

Note: If you went to the PDC, you might get nothing from this post. You probably saw it all but I wasn't there and I am getting real passionate about learning it on my own. These are my notes on learning Azure and trying to keep things straight. Now, that I figured out that the Azure tools will NOT work on my main Dell Windows 7 laptop, and I am up on my Alienware Vista laptop, things are starting to work. BTW, going from Windows 7 back to Vista (even on an Alienware) is like going from a Ferrari to a Hugo in overall speed and startup time both. Its THAT good!

1. Registered account with Live ID
2. Re-downloaded and installed all the SDKs (updated) on the Vista machine
3. Read  David Chappell's excellent "Introducing the Azure Services Platform" and Aaron's excellent "An Introduction to Microsoft .NET Services for Developers"
4. Installed The Azure Services Training Kit Feb 2009 Edition
5. Worked through the lab Building Windows Azure Services and was able to deploy my created Cloud Service to the Production Cloud and run from there

Notes

• There is Windows Azure and then there is Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure is part of the Azure Services Platform
• Azure Services Platform = Live Services + Microsoft .NET Services + SQL Services + Sharepoint Services + Dynamics CRM Services
• Microsoft .NET Services == what I knew and saw as "BizTalk Services" last couple years

What is Windows Azure?

• OS for the Cloud
• Reduce complexity of internet scale apps
• Designed to be scalable and available
• Runs only in MSFT Data Centers

An Operating System for the Cloud

• Hardware Abstraction across multiple servers
• Distributed, Scalable, Available Storage
• Deployment, Monitoring and Maintenance
• Automated Service Management, Load Balancers, DNS
• Programming Environments
• Interop (everything exposed via REST)
• Designed for Utility Computing

Why Windows Azure?

• OS takes care of your service in the cloud
  • Deployment
  • Availability
  • Patching
  • H/W Config
• You worry about writing the service

Windows Azure Features

• Automated Service Management
• Compute
• Storage
• Developer Experience

Compute

• .NET 3.5 SP1 on IIS7
• Server 2008 - 64 Bit
• Medium Trust
• Web Role
  • Web Sites (ASP.NET)
  • Web Services (WCF) - thats WCF y'all not that ASMX crap
• Worker Role
• Stateless Servers
• Http(s)

Storage

• Durable, Scalable, available
• Blobs
• Tables
• Queues
• REST interfaces
  • Can be used w/o Compute

More to come....I'm really digging this stuff!