I'm back at Seattle after a mind-blowing trip to PDC. My talk went really, really well. I'll blog about it in detail soon but here's the video

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES03/

Labels: windowsazure

[Update: The video of my talk is now up at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES03/ ]

Wondering what the image represents? I'll get to that in just a bit :-). Since we're officially out in the open now, I can a talk bit more about my talk on Wednesday. I also realized that my talk is in the exact same slot as Raymond Chen's and Anders Hejlsberg's and Chris Sells' so I thought I should do some plugging (since even I would be tempted to watch one of those three speak :-) ).

The title of my talk has changed a few times over the last few weeks. At some points in time we had called it 'A day in the life of a cloud services developer' and finally settled on 'Best practices for cloud service development'. Unfortunately, the PDC session list doesn't seem to have the latest title though it does have the latest abstract.

In essence, this is a talk about best practices, principles and lessons learned. Over the last several years, we as a company and as a industry have built together a great deal of 'tribal knowledge' on how to build scalable services. Nowhere is this more apparent than in sites like highscalability.com. In my talk, I try to distill down that tribal knowledge and tips on how to implement some of that on top of Windows Azure into something that fits into one hour. Now, since I'm not exactly a traditional speaker (I don't have a single bullet), expect this talk to be different. That picture at the top of this post is one of my slides :-).

I showed a friend at work my talk and after a long pause, his response was "This talk will either be the greatest ever or complete sh*t". To find out which of the two it is going to be, come on over to Petree Hall CD at 3:00 PM on Wednesday . My talk is ES03. The title currently says Windows Azure: A day in the life of a cloud services developer but that might change. For folks not at PDC, I'll link to the video as soon as it is up.

Labels: windowsazure

 

I've always been a scale nerd. A few months ago, as a result of a weird set of incidents, I find myself having a conversation with the 'Red Dog' team. Seeing the kind of technology they were building and the kind of people they had (Dave Cutler to start with), it seemed a perfect fit for me. Little did I realize how life on the team was going to be like. After a roller-coaster two months, I'm happy to be able to finally talk about what I work on.

I work on Windows Azure. It is a great feeling to be part of such a big launch (Techmeme has been on fire all day).

What is Windows Azure? Well, the authoritative answer for that can be found here or on this first post on the team blog which I just pushed out. Here's the Cliff's notes version as I see it.

Windows Azure is about three things

• A virtualized hosting environment. In essence, your code running on our hypervisor in our datacenters.
• A highly scalable, available storage service. We do blobs, queues and tables right now for the CTP
• Third and one of the most interesting pieces - a fabric controller which 'knows' all of the data center's resources. Instead of dealing with individual machines, you can declaratively model your service and hand it off to the fabric controller to manage. Want more hardware? Tell the fabric controller and it'll assign more hardware to you.

 

I plan on spending a lot of time on this blog talking about Windows Azure. Here are some links to get people started

• The main Azure site
• The Windows Azure blog
• Windows Azure forum
• Channel 9 videos from Steve Marx (my manager) and Manuvir Das (my manager's manager's manager :-) )
• SDK download
• Registration link to get on the waiting list

Labels: windowsazure