So it's the last few hours of PDC for this year. Which means that pretty much all of the information that can be shoved into my brain has been. It also means that it's a pretty decent moment to be summarizing what I've learned.
Obviously (from its presence in the initial keynote and the number of sessions) cloud computing was the big news. This was also one of the more talked about parts of the conference, and not necessary for a good reason. Many people that I have talked to walked out of the keynote wondering exactly what Azure was. Was it web host? If so, what's the point? It's not like there aren't other companies doing the same thing. Could it be more than web hosting? If so, that wasn't made very clear from the keynote. In other words, I was not exactly chomping at the bit to try out Azure.
But it's here at the end of the week. And I've had a chance to see some additional sessions and talk to a number of people about what Azure is capable of and represents for Microsoft. That has tempered my original skepticism a little. But not completely.
In the vision of Azure was presented, the cloud was intended to be a deployment destination in the sky. Within that cloud, there was some unknown infrastructure that you did not need to be aware of. You could configure the number of servers to go up or down depending on the expected traffic to your site. As you change the configured value, your application becomes provisioned accordingly. This is nice for companies that need to deal with spikes in application usage. Or who don't have (or don't want to have) the support personnel for their infrastructure.
However, there are some limitations to the type of applications which can fit into this model. For example, you need to be able to deploy the application. This implies that you have created the application to the point where you can publish it to the Azure service. The published application might include third party components (a purchase ASP.NET control, for example), but can't use a separate third-party application (such as Community Server).
As well, you need to be able to access the application through the web. You could use a Silverlight front end to create the requests. You could use a client-based application to create the requests. But, ultimately, there is a Web request that need to be sent to the service. I fully expect that Silverlight will be the most common interface.
So if you have applications that fit into that particular model, then Azure is something you should look at. There are some 'best practices' that you need to consider as part of your development, but they are not onerous. In fact, they are really the kind of best practices that you should already be using. As well, you should remember that the version of Azure introduced this past week is really just V1.0. You have to know that Microsoft has other ideas for pushing applications to the cloud. So even if the profile doesn't fit you right now, keep your ears open. I expect that future enhancements will only work to envelope more and more people in the cloud.