BASE – Eric D. Boyd

Thank you to all who attended my “Applications at Scale” session at Cloud Connect!

In the session, I introduced a number of application scalability concepts. Those concepts map really well to cloud computing and scalable public cloud platforms like Windows Azure. The following are links to additional resources on architecting and developing scalable applications. If you know of other great resources, feel free to comment and add them to the discussion on this post.

High Scalability web site
Eric Brewer’s Principles of Distributed Computing Keynote
Julian Browne’s article on Brewer’s CAP Theorem
Werner Vogels article on Eventual Consistentcy

If you need to build applications that can scale up or down on-demand, while serving users globally regardless of device or platform, Windows Azure is worth checking out. Here are some useful links to get you started.

First, you need the Windows Azure SDK and Tools to get started developing applications for Windows Azure. The SDK includes an emulator for Windows Azure compute and storage. This will enable you to develop on your machine without having to deploy to the cloud. This capability reduces your development time and cost associated with deploying to Windows Azure for development.
Azure SDK Download

At some point, you will want to deploy your application to the Windows Azure cloud and there are a couple of ways to get development time and resources for Windows Azure. If you are an MSDN subscriber, you can get up to $3,700 a year in free Windows Azure resources. For more information, check out MSDN Windows Azure Benefits. If you don’t have an MSDN subscription, you can get a free 90-day trial at FREE 90-day Windows Azure Trial.

The Windows Azure Training Kit is loaded with helpful presentations, demos and hands-on labs for working with Windows Azure.
Get the Windows Azure Training Kit

In addition, I’ve got lots of great resources and tips for you on developing for
Windows Azure. Visit my Toolbox page to ﬁnd out more.
More Windows Azure Resources

If you’d like personalized, one-on-one guidance or consulting, Centare helps organizations move to and take advantage of the cloud. To learn more about Centare and how we help customers with software development and cloud computing. Check out Centare’s Cloud Services.

I’ll be packing tonight and heading out early in the morning to St. Louis. I’m originally from Missouri and I am aware of the miserably hot weather in Missouri this time of year. Let me say, it is less than ideal. This morning the actual temp was 87F while the heat index was 99F. If you are in St. Louis and want to escape the extreme heat this weekend, August 5th and 6th, check out St. Louis Day of .NET.

St. Louis Day of .NET is a big 2-day education and networking event for software developers that work with Microsoft technologies. Imagine taking 2 years of user group meetings and wrapping them up into one big 2-day event. That’s St. Louis Day of .NET. Sprinkle in a keynote from Jay Schmelzer, Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio team, food, music, social events and lots of prizes and you have an incredible weekend. I almost forgot to mention that this event is also at the beautiful Ameristar Casino Resort. After the sessions and social events, there’s tons to do without even leaving the building. You’ll get a keynote from Jay Schmelzer, nearly 100 technical sessions, a great Friday evening social event, personal time with industry experts, two days of breakfast and lunch, a nice polo shirt you can proudly wear at work, and great giveaways, all for only $200.

Registration is only open until 8PM today, August 3rd. If you are wanting to go and haven’t yet registered, I have one 50% off discount code. To enter to win this 50% off registration, simply tweet this post. I’ll draw a winner, announce it and Direct Message (DM) them the code at 6PM today. To receive the DM, you must also follow me on twitter.

I will be presenting three emerging technologies and practices that I’m very passionate about and are all in some way related to Cloud Computing, PaaS and Windows Azure.

Consuming Data From Many Platforms: The Benefits of OData
The amount of data stored today is growing at a rapid rate. However, data is only valuable if it is accessible and can be consumed by people and systems. OData is an open protocol for sharing data that is positioned to solve this problem. OData uses the standard HTTP protocol using REST principles to make data accessible and has huge industry momentum with rapid adoption growth. In this session, we will explore what OData is all about and how to expose relational and non-relational data as OData using WCF Data Services. We will then walkthrough developing apps to consume the OData feeds from multiple clients including mobile devices. Finally, we will take a look at how you can benefit from using Azure to publish your data with OData services.

Overview of the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket
Whether it is buying clothing, food, or software, consumers like the simplicity of the one-stop shopping experience. Product producers also benefit greatly by being a part of a community marketplace. These rules of commerce apply to data just as much as physical goods and mobile apps. The Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket is the marketplace for data set distribution in the cloud. In this session we will explore the benefits of the marketplace and the cloud for distributing data. Next, we will review the features and capabilities of Azure DataMarket. We will then walkthrough subscribing to, consuming and paying for data from Azure DataMarket. And finally, we will explore what this means for data publishers and how you can get data into the Azure DataMarket.

Architecting for Massive Scalability
The Cloud now makes seemingly infinite amounts of computing power accessible to everyone. However, to maximize this power, your applications need to scale. In this session, we will explore patterns that enable massive scalability. We will examine Brewer’s CAP Theorem and contrast it to the ACID principles that guide traditional LOB applications. And finally, we will explore how to apply these patterns when building applications for the Cloud using Windows Azure.

I’m excited to be back in Missouri and hang out with the St. Louis tech crowd. If you have questions, success stories or just want to chat about Cloud Computing, I’ll be around and would love to hang out, discuss and dig deep into “The Cloud”. If you want to chat about other things that Centare helps companies with and they’re in my range of expertise, like reducing time to market, increasing throughput, boosting flexibility and enabling mobile scenarios. Those are all ok too.

See you in St. Louis!