#Azure Action - Weekly Newsletter- 29th April 2011

Local Overview (post Easter)

Cloud Science - Wayne Houlden in ACER Teacher Article May, 2011

Cloud Cast # 3 - The Cloud Value Chain

Readiness & Resources:

Windows Azure

• Source Code: Hosting Silverlight Pivot in Windows Azure
• Geographically distributing Windows Azure applications using Traffic Manager

Watch:

• Cloud Cover Episode 45 - Windows Azure AppFabric Caching with Karandeep Anand | Cloud Cover
• Screencast: "To the cloud!" (In 90 seconds, or less)

Case Study:

• NewsGator Moves 3 Million Blog Posts Per Day on Windows Azure 

Tools:

• CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics tool released
• SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v5.0

Fun:

• Take the Rock, Paper, Azure Challenge and You Could Win a Free Kinect and Xbox 360!

Guidance:

Walkthrough:

• Capturing Diagnostics in your Windows Azure Application
• How to Connect SharePoint 2010, Windows Azure
• Guidelines for Connecting to a SQL Azure Database

In the news:

General news:

• Cloudwashing - Confessions of a Cloud Skeptic

Microsoft

• ITPACs stuffed with half-width stripped-down servers

Windows Azure:

• 10 Things to know about Azure Security
• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit - April, 2011 Update
• Azure Storage Outage
• Azure Blast - Making Bioinformatics Data More Accessible to Researchers Worldwide
• Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service Released!

Events:

Local:

• Readify have an Intro to Azure day in Sydney on 9 May - $165 gets you refreshments, lunch and 8 hours of Azure
• HPC Training Sydney - 3 - 5 May, 2011
• Lifehacker Sydney meetup Sydney 3rd May, 2011 (as part of Lifehacker Meetup Week )

Webinar:

• FREE WEBCAST May 13, 2011: Windows Azure Deep Dive on Windows Azure Data Storage and Compute Services

Community:

Mailing list for OzAzure

Like Azure?

• Become a fan: www.facebook.com/windowsazure (Azure Facebook Toolkit)
• Add yourself to my Azure Australia Twitter list
• Watch CloudCast - episode 3 coming soon
• Coming soon: Azure Meet up (lets go singular) and potential for Windows Azure user group. let me know if interested and where!

Questions:

Q: What are my options for hosting applications in Azure that have a high degree of parallelism required?

A. Here are a few pointers:

1) use traditional languages (.net runtime) and/or write or use a well known design pattern (e.g. mediation pattern)

2) write in F# (including parallel extensions) e.g. Parsing Log Files with F#, MapReduce and Windows Azure

3) High Performance Computing - Which allows jobs and tasks to be aligned to available infrastructure compute nodes, on premise or off. Latest version includes MPI support.

Real World Windows Azure HPC App Architecture & Patterns

4?) possibly in the future we might see Dryad on Windows Azure - Dryad: Program thousands of machines without knowing anything about parallel programming