Microsoft Cloud Offering

the_Grinch

I've been doing a lot of cloud research and I live in a Microsoft dominated area. Any suggestions on reading material for the general strategy and cloud related products offered by Microsoft? Office 365, Azure, etc.

eserfeliz

Out of curiousity, have you signed up for Microsoft's Azure trial yet? I signed up for Azure from my MSDN account, and a MS rep called up, offered me a free "Getting Started" guide and a contact at Microsoft if I had any questions.

RobertKaucher

Channel 9 - Cloud Cover Show

RunAsRadio
Mark Russinovich Updates Us On Azure!
Dmitry Sotnikov Virtualizes in the Cloud!
Brent Ozar puts SQL in the Cloud!


Book - Focused on Developers: Programming Microsoft's Clouds: Windows Azure and Office 365
and Cloud Architecture Patterns: Using Microsoft Azure


That should keep you busy for a long while. The cloud cover show and the books probably have more of an architectural bent than any of the other links. I'm currently studying for the MCSD: Web Applications cert and those two books are on my list when I hit the Azure/web services exam.

RobertKaucher

One more thing and I know I am constantly dropping this site's name: PluralSight.com (I swear I am not a shill for them!) has a 200 minute free trial and they have a very good introduction to Azure.

Windows Azure: The Big Picture - Online Training Course for .NET Developers

There are a few other beginning courses, although with a developer focus, that you might like.

Go to the bottom of this page and click Windows Azure.
Pluralsight Course Library

the_Grinch

Thanks for all the info guys! Definitely going to check out some of those resources and see what's what. Robert, do you feel putting time and effort into the Azure platform will payoff? I'm not talking immediately, but within the next five years or so? Also, would the best course be to get a good foundation in 2012 Server and then break off into Azure?

RobertKaucher

I really do think it will pay off. It's not going away and is only going to gather momentum. Once we get a handle on the security side of things with Infrastructure as a Service we are going to see that take off, I think the Platform as a Service side of Azure is going to explode soon. We'll see more and more developers moving to that, so knowing what it is and how it works is going to be important as well.

From an Ops perspective I would agree that you need to start with Server 2012 as the foundation. That's probably where most people are going to really see the benefit in expanding their skills as we see integrating between on-premises cloud technologies (virtualization in your data center) and off-site cloud technologies (virtualization in Azure or similar).

Image that you work for a company that has a web site that is generally pretty calm. Maybe you only have a single box running it most of the year. But then the company hosts a trade show that lasts a week and in the 3 month build up to it you need to have as close to 100% uptime as possible AND you can expect your load to quadruple. Being able to auto scale out is just an amazing prospect for a lot of companies since you only pay for what you use and knowing how to automate that will make you the hero.

the_Grinch

Excellent, will definitely start looking into all of those resources. Also, thanks for the example!!