Event announcement: Leveraging Azure with non-Microsoft Technologies

On Friday March 5th 2010, Josh Holmes will be presenting a session at the Microsoft offices in Zaventem: ‘Leveraging Azure with non-Microsoft Technologies’. The event is a joint organization between the PHPBenelux user group and Microsoft. The event is part of Josh’s PHP/Ruby on Azure Word Tour.

If you are looking for information on Windows Azure Platform and how it supports non-Microsoft technologies like PHP, Ruby and Java this is a perfect moment to learn more about it.

It’s a free event but registration is required.

Agenda:
13h30 - Welcome and coffee
14h00 - Leveraging Azure with non-Microsoft Technologies
17h30 - Closing drink, chance to network with your peers and chat with everyone

Full session description:
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing offering. It is more than a simple scalable hosting option as it is truly a platform as a service offering. This allows you to focus on your application rather than the configuring and managing your infrastructure whether you are writing C# or VB.NET or even languages such as PHP or Ruby which are first class citizens in Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Platform includes Windows Azure, which is the OS and hosting environment for web and background services, as well as non-relational storage, queues, and a blob storage for everything from videos to mountable virtual drives. Additionally, the Windows Azure Platform includes SQL Azure, a fully relational database as a service, and Windows Azure AppFabric for industry standards compliant identity management and a service bus for message passing.
Next to PHP and Ruby, Java is also addressed as a supported platform.

But there remain the questions around why, when and how you should move to the cloud, especially if you are using PHP or Ruby. Should I put everything in Windows Azure? Do you have to convert everything you have to ASP.NET? Do you have to write code specifically for Windows Azure? What if my current applications depend on MySQL and/or memcached?

There’s a lot of good news here as it is relatively straight forward to get running in Windows Azure. Once your application is running, however, now you need to look at how to fully leverage the platform offerings architecting for the best usage of the different roles and the various aspects of the Windows Azure offerings such as the AppFabric and SQL Azure. This will help your application make the most efficient usage of CPU, bandwidth, storage and all of the things that cost in a cloud hosting scenario.

In this three-hour session, we will begin with the why of Windows Azure talking about when it makes sense to make a move and what the prudent migration paths are for your organization.  During this time we will tour the various aspects of Windows Azure. Then we’ll delve into the technical aspects of how to run your PHP/Ruby code on Windows Azure. Once we have that mastered, we will move onto leveraging the Windows Azure platform to its fullest.

A special thanks to the guys from the PHPBenelux group to get into this together with us.