Architecting Cloud Services for the Big Enterprise

For the last couple of months, we’ve been working on scenarios that involve consuming cloud services and applications from "Big Enterprise" . The focus being the technical obstacles for adopting cloud services.

Big Enterprise is the moniker we use to describe an organization with rather heavy investments on on-premises software. 

Not surprisingly then, the aspects we have explored are integration in these three areas: security, management and application integration.

No important application in Big Enterprise lives in isolation so integration of cloud service on these three levels is key.

The good news is that there's new exciting tools, frameworks and services ISV can leverage today to address these requirements.

My session at PDC was the first time we presented this work. In general there’s agreement that these are recurring, common and important challenges; which is good validation.

Unfortunately not all demos @ PDC worked as I had expected (and endlessly practiced before), for various reasons. In retrospective, I’m glad we went through that pain, because there were lots of lessons learnt. Failure is a great teacher.

Since PDC, we’ve been working on improving the reference implementations our demos were based on, by incorporating all this experience: obscure pitfalls, wrong assumptions, unexpected limitations, lack of complete symmetry between production and pre-production, pure randomness, etc.

I'm certain many of you our there in the real world will face many of these same challenges, so I hope our pain will help you be more successful with the Azure Platform.

Since PDC, we presented the same (updated) content on various events: Teched EMEA, TechDays in Milano a few days ago and RAF in Madrid. In general we've got great feedback and good validation of our assumptions.

My plan is to drill down on each of these aspects in the next (several) couple of blog posts, so stay tuned!

Last but not least, most of the sample code demonstrated will be available for you to download and explore in the upcoming weeks.