At the kind invitation of Microsoft, we participated in this very interesting three-day Full Immersion course in the classroom at Microsoft’s premises in Segrate, on the Microsoft Window Azure Cloud Computing platform.
The course is part of a new and strong marketing strategy by Microsoft on Azure to introduce Microsoft’s PaaS platform to developers and/or integrators.
The course introduced by Mario Fontana, senior software architect at Microsoft and President of IASA it, and then held for the three days by Roberto Brunetti, Speaker / Instructor / Developer of DevLeap and Owner of ThinkAhead was divided as follows:
Cloud & Windows Azure Intro
- Introduction
- Windows Azure
- Automated Service Management
- Service Deployment
- Service Scaling
- Service Monitoring
- Roles
- Storage
- Account
- Staging and Production
- Project & Package
- Resource abstraction
Windows Azure Platform: Overview
- Windows Azure
- Windows Azure Storage
- Blob, Table, Quue
- .NET Services
- Service Bus
- Access Control
- Live Services
- SQL Azure
Hosted Service & Storage Account
- Local configuration
- SDK
- Windows Azure SDK
- Compute Emulator
- Storage Emulator
- Templates
- Durable storage
- Scalability
- Portal
- Using Blob
- Using Table
- Windows Azure MMC
- Web Role in ASP.NET
- Worker Role
- Web Role in WCF
- Using Queue
- Debugging
- Logging
- Go Live
Windows Azure AppFabric
- Service Bus
- Enterprise Service Bus vs Internet Service Bus
- Service Registry
- Connection Modes
- WCF Integration
- Bindings
- Multicast
- Queue
- Router
- Access Control
- Introduction
- Integration with the .NET Service Bus
- News 2011
SQL Azure
- Portal
- Databsae creation
- Account and Security Intro
- Code-far vs Code-near
- Tools and Connections
- SSIS
Complete and accompanied by several laboratory sessions.
The integration of visual studio 2010 with the Cloud management APIs is remarkable, as well as the release of multiple SDKs for different languages, such as Ruby, Php, Java and others.
One detail that aroused our attention with respect to the whole, were the objectives (targets) that Microsoft imposes itself to maintain as performance of the various infrastructure services, where the other Cloud Providers have not thought of making the limit values public. For example, the throughput of storage services.
The point is fundamental if we consider that Cloud Computing is infrastructure sharing, i.e. Microsoft in this way guarantees to grow its infrastructure as the customer grows.