Intro to Azure and ACS Talk to NE ASP.NET User Group

Tonight I spoke to an enthusiastic and engaged group at the New England ASP.NET Professionals User Group about the cloud, the Windows Azure Platform, and how ASP.NET professionals can take advantage of it. Thanks for all the great questions and discussion! Some points brought up or discussed:

• Development tools for Azure are available for free
• Azure provides an excellent cloud simulation environment on your desktop
• Not every application is a good fit for the cloud – for example, a small app that doesn’t need to scale and need not be highly available might fit better with a less costly hosted solution
• When comparing costs of Azure with other approaches, keep in mind that Azure is a robust, highly available, scable, flexible platform – what you get for your dollar is often of much greater value than the dollar you spend for some other types of solution
• Azure affords fantastic cost-saving opportunities through the flexible scale down model – don’t need a data or compute resource anymore? stop using it, and you’ll stop paying for it. Try that kind of “on-a-dime” manuever with a hosted solution, with hardware you purchase, or rack space you lease
• Azure services are available a la carte – though of course they are also a fantastic approach when used all together
• There are a number of ways to auto-scale, though don’t underestimate the boundary conditions and there are also some nuances

Since I did only give a taste of the Access Control Service, the plan discussed was for me to come back after the summer for a deeper dive into that fascinating topic.

Although I did not proceed linearly through it, here is the deck I used: [neasp.net-bill_wilder-intro-cloud-azure-acs-for-asp.net-devs-15-june-2011]. The Access Control Service (ACS) content did not include any slides – all talk and demo – though I gave a similar talk at Boston Azure back in February that used the following deck: [Solving the Identity Crisis-using-azure-cloud-access-control-service-(ACS)-talk-24-Feb-2011-Boston-Azure-User-Group] (Since then, the final ACS v2 has been release and changed a few things.)