Bellingham Cloud Talk, Coming Right Up

Here’s the basic outline of what I intend to speak on at the upcoming presentation I have for the Bellingham, Washington .NET Users Group.  If you happen to be in the area you should swing by and give it a listen (or heckle, whatever you feel like doing).

On April 5th I have a talk lined up with the Bellingham .NET Users Group. So far here’s a quick one over of the talk:

What Cloud Computing REALLY is to us techies

• Geographically dispersed data centers.
• Node based – AKA grid computing configurations that are…
• Highly Virtualized – thus distributed.
• Primarily compute and storage functionality.
• Auto-scalable based on demand.

What kind of offerings exist out in the wild?

• Amazon Web Services
• Rackspace
• Orcs Web
• GoGrid
• Joyent
• Heroku
• EngineYard

…many others and then the arrival in the last year”ish” of…

• Windows Azure
• AppHarbor

Developing for the cloud, what are the fundamentals in the .NET world?

Well, let’s talk about who has been doing the work so far, pushing ahead this technology.

• Linux is the OS of choice… free, *nix, most widely used on the Internet by a large margin, and extremely capable…
• Java
• Ruby on Rails
• Javascript & jQuery, budding into Node.js via Google’s V8 Engine
• The Heroku + EngineYard + Git + AWESOMESAUCE capabilities of pushing… LIVE to vastly scalable and distributable cloud provisions!

So where does that leave us .NETters?

AWS .NET SDK released a few years ago.
Windows Azure & SDK released about a year ago.

These two have however been lacking compared to Heroku and EngineYard for those that want something FAST,

something transformative, easy to use, without extra APIs or odd tightly coupled SDKs.

Enter…
AppHarbor

In Summary the .NET Platform has primarily:

AWS for the top IaaS and most widely available zones & capabilities at the absolutely lowest prices,

Windows Azure for the general build to PaaS Solution, and for the people lucky enough to be going the Git +

MVC + real Agile route, AppHarbor is the peeminent solution.

Demo Time…

Windows Azure Demo

AWS Demo

AppHarbor Demo