The Cloud and Microsoft Windows Azure - A Walk through the clouds

Editor's Notes

1. Mark Rodseth, Tech Director @ POSSIBLE, formerly Fortune Cookie, some of you may have worked for, POSSIBLE wpp’s largest digital agenciesOver last year been doing pretty much the same thing: design and build of web and mobile applications on cms platformsBut also been working with ‘the cloud’, specifically Microsoft's version of the cloud, Windows AzureTalk about Cloud in general and then move onto windows azureWarning Many cloud based metaphors ahead, starting with this one with Keanu Reeves
2. Cloud been around in various guises since the birth of the Internet. Concepts like Mainframes and Thin Clients are all at the heart of the cloud i.e. being able to access scalable resources over the internet The real pioneers behind the cloud were Amazon with AWS Followed by others.
3. SkillsMatter talk with Werner Vogels about the history of AWS and 21st Century ArchitectureCapacity Management – 40 % capacity wasn’t used normally, and over peak e.g. November, almost 80% wasn’t usedThe formation of AWS with realisation that they were using about 10% of their infrastructure to deal with the occasional spikeBuild services which allow fine grain control of resourcesSomeone presented paper that we should be offering this out to the worldBirth of 21st century principles described in development termsOther interesting aspects: Continuous Deployment, Chaos Monkey Secure, High Performance, Fault Tolerant, Scalable, Cost-Effective
4. - Term that is miss used and miss understood.
5. Pooled Resources: Rather than assigning fixed compute, storage, and networking resources to particular users, a cloud provides a resource pool that all users share. Which physical machine a VM runs on doesn’t matter to a user—all she cares about is that the cloud meet the service level agreement (SLA) it promises. And because the physical resources are opaque to the cloud’s users, those resources can be freely reconfigured as needed to optimize the cloud’s service.Self-Service Access: Getting access to computing resources—VMs and more—without needing human approval for each request is a fundamental aspect of cloud computing. Elasticity: The set of resources a particular user has can grow and shrink over time. For example, a three-tier application might increase the number of Web server VMs it’s running when an application’s load increases, then decrease them when the load shrinks. From the point of view of a cloud’s user, computing resources are elastic.Metered Use of Resources: Because resources can be allocated in a fine-grained way, such as per-VM perhour, clouds can offer metered use. A user might be able to monitor the details of her resource use, for example, perhaps being charged only for what she uses.
6. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish. Benioff shows how salesforce.com pioneered a simple idea (delivering business applications as a service over the Internet) to change the way all businesses use software applications and, ultimately, change the way the software industry works.