The Onward March of the Cloud

Today was the official start of the TechEd with a keynote speech in the afternoon.

In 2008 whilst attending the PDC in LA we were present when Microsoft launched Azure and announced nothing less than a complete re-focus of their core business model away from software supplier to a service provider … in the shape of “The Cloud”

Two years on this is now maturing into a concrete set of tools and products and is very much the core of what Microsoft see as the future. This is a huge risk and involves a considerable investment in time and resources, no less than 70% of Microsoft’s development effort is invested in to developing and supplying Cloud technologies. However I have to say that whilst the technologies and frameworks are extremely fascinating I remain to be convinced that they can persuade people to abandon their own infrastructures and port their environments to MS’s hosting services in the Cloud. Time will tell but they certainly seem to be betting the Farm on this one.

Included in the keynote was a very impressive end to end demonstration of Cloud computing from the newly released Windows Phone OS to the newly announced Office 365 (Office in The Cloud)

We also got to see some quite mature management tools for Azure allowing a user to manage the Cloud environment from Windows systems centre on the desktop aswell as remotely. Also allowing the intergration of existing intranet environments and domains with public Cloud servers.

A lot of the TechEd sessions are related to these new Cloud developments in the Microsoft world and I will be attending a couple to keep an eye on these emerging technologies.

I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into the varied sessions over the next few days from .NET4, WCF, WF, AppFabric, Cloud Technologies, Architecture Best Practices,MVC, SQL Server 2008 … the list goes on … yeah bring it on! 😀

We finished up the day by going out for a most enjoyable (& very hot) curry much to the delight of Tuck!

All in all a good day!