Leverage Cloud Computing with Windows Azure and Windows Phone 7 – Step 1 to Infinity
I am about to discuss a series of technologies that will be around for the next 5 to 10 years. I am talking about Cloud and Mobile Computing.
You will see detailed code about how to build applications
I want to discuss how to create and expose data through service oriented approaches, hosted in Windows Azure. I want to show you how to consume SQL Azure.
The Writing is on the wall
At the risk of appearing like a ‘know it all’ and in my humble opinion, you’d be somewhat naive to think that mobile and cloud technologies are NOT the future. Clearly, it is transforming the role of IT within businesses. Nobody enjoys messing around with infrastructure. Many would like to leave those decisions to someone else so as to avoid solving painful problems like server capacity, storage and bandwidth.
Hosting your services makes sense when you consider average utilization of a normal server is around fifteen to twenty percent. Failure to exploit processing power is due to the fact that many businesses need excess capacity for those occasions where more power is needed unexpectedly. Moreover, often companies are rife with overlapping and duplicate systems and applications. Time constraints limit most businesses accept these redundancies.
Service Oriented Architectures – Why they are good
SOA allows you to put the logic into a separate layer That allows the layer to exist well beyond the lifetime of any system it is composed into. The lookup and dynamic binding to a service means that the client does not care where the service is located. Therefore, an organization has the flexibility to move services to different machines, or to move a service to an external provider. This becomes more important as mobile computing grows in significance.
Read more about the advantages here
Cloud Computing allows you to host Service Oriented Architectures
Read about it yourself with Gartner Research here:
Gartner’s top predictions are intended to compel readers to action
Developers should position themselves to take advantage of coming changes, not to be damaged by them.
By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets
Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.
The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.
IT staff will either be reduced or re-skilled
For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.
Mobile Computing
And by the way, I am also bullish on mobile computing. You can clearly see the significance of mobile devices today.
Cloud Computing has a simple definition
Cloud Computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.
The Value Proposition of Windows Azure
Businesses can rent access to applications and IT infrastructure that reside on the Internet, pay for them on a subscription or per-use basis and provide employees with access to information from anywhere at any time with nothing more than a connected device.
The World of Private Clouds
Private cloud services run in datacenters on company property managed by corporate IT staffs. Private clouds address the security concerns of large enterprises. They're scalable, growing and shrinking as needed. They're also managed centrally in a virtualized environment.
Private or Public: We all need to learn how to code for the cloud
The techniques I illustrate will require you to learn new technologies. Why take the risk of not knowing something about the future of computing.
What are we going to cover?
I am going to begin a series of posts that illustrate how to leverage power of cloud computing on Windows Phone 7. My posts will show you how to make use of many technologies:
- SQL Azure
- Windows Azure
- WCF Services
- Silverlight LINQ
- and various framework and language technologies
I’d like to hear from you
Shoot me an email at bterkaly@microsoft.com and let me know your thoughts.
