Azure@Curia

Recently I was present at the Azure@Curia at the "WRC Curia". 
Details of the event can be found at: http://events.linkedin.com/Azure-Curia/pub/179391

This was a special event for me mainly for personal reasons. My grandmother's house is 50 meters away from the place the event was and I was able to spot it through the Window of the facilities. The place were WRC was built was a long time ago a rich man's house and my grandmother's house was one of the two or three separated houses of the caretakers of a farm. By the way, a now closed guesthouse at Curia belonged to my other grandfathers, who lived nearby in their final years.

Regarding the event, I found it really interesting. The cloud is a powerful thing, enabling everyone, even small companies, to create products and sell them without having to bother with complex infra-structure partnerships, and so on. Deployment is immediate. Regarding the cloud I have some security concerns (data privacy) and backup concerns (remember the Sidekick recent loss of data) but things will be clearer as times goes by: privacy statements from M$, backup policies, etc.
Azure seems an interesting thing mainly for anyone who already masters the .Net platform. If you have follow some guidelines while developing, applications can be ported to the Cloud almost effortlessly. Applications can be developed to work online and offline if needed.

Interesting things I have never thought of were:
- Quality is even more important than ever. Now that you pay for bytes transferred to the DB and back, you don't want to have a development team that does not develop unit tests thoroughly and that deploys without running the suite of system tests against the product locally. More than ever, you have to fire that sloppy programmer of yours that made that infinite loop while reading from the Azure DB.
- There is a market for development of auxiliary tools that complement what MS is offering for managing the applications in the cloud. For instance, there is no way or configuration possible to be made to warn you when a certain amount of data was trasnferred to the cloud (eventually to warn you of a bug in the software you have deployed to prevent heavy charges in the end of the month).
- You can have a single application developed to the cloud, and have several customers using it in the very same database. Customization can be made by skinning the application along with the authenticated user. Interesting stuff no? So every time you fix a bug or improve your product and deploy it to the Cloud, you are in fact updating every customer of yours. No need to remote desktop everyone of them to install on their servers or to do the update at several ISPs to cover all of your customers sites. Again, extra care has to be put in the final stages, testing before deploying. But this is not something new. But I liked the mechanism of quickly being able to reverse a deployment in the cloud, just in case.

More about this will be coming, as soon as I remember it.

The agenda of the event was:

14h30 ‐ Cloud Computing: A plataforma Azure
Luís Alves Martins, Architect Advisor ‐ Microsoft
15h45 ‐ Armazenamento na Cloud
José António Silva – R&D Director ‐ Devscope
17h00 ‐ Windows Azure na prática
Luís Alves Martins/Carlos Fernandes