Herding Code 184: Scott Guthrie on Windows Azure

Episode 184

At NDC Jon and K. Scott talk to Scott Guthrie about his talk Building Real World Apps with Windows Azure, what's new in Windows Azure, the advantage of provisioning and scaling up and down instantly, and more.

Download / Listen: Herding Code 184: Scott Guthrie on Windows Azure

Show Notes:

• Scott talk: Building Real World Apps with Windows Azure
  • (00:18) Scott's talk covered twelve patterns for building cloud apps using things like continuous delivery, transient fault handling, long term failures, etc.
• What's new in Windows Azure
  • (01:02) Jon asks Scott to overview the highlights of what's new in Windows Azure over the past year
  • (01:25) Scott says they generally ship a major release every three weeks
  • (01:40) Scott talks about how they're using agile approaches to development, and some services update as often as ten times a day
  • (02:19) Scott overviews some of the main things that shipped over the past year
    • Virtual Machine and Virtual Networking
    • Windows Azure Web Sites
    • Auto-Scale support
    • Hadoop
    • Mobile Services
    • Push Notification
    • Media Services
• (06:37) K. Scott asks how Auto-Scale came to be. Scott Guthrie tells the story about how it came from an acquisition of an Azure startup incubation project. The team joined at the end of March and the feature shipped in June.
• (08:42) Scott talks about how Azure and Cloud Development help you move faster with illustrations of how quickly you can create and integrate services and infrastructure and support multiple regions.
• (10:22) Scott talks about the advantages of being able to quickly scale both up and down. He talks about how Troy Hunt was able to scale up Azure instances to crunch through databases of breached passwords to make it easy to see if your password has been compromised, then scaled right back down and spent less than a dollar.
• (14:09) K. Scott asks about Node.js support. Scott talks about how they've been supporting Node for a long time, and how cloud development lets you easily choose between tools for different applications.
• (15:09)Jon asks Scott what books he's been reading lately.
  • (15:45) He's been reading a lot of work related books on things like supply chain management
  • (16:35) Scott mentions the new Web API book by Glenn Block and friends
  • (16:46) He went to Australia and read a book called Fatal Shore, a book about the founding of Australia

Show Links:

• Scott Guthrie (blog, @scottgu)
• Windows Azure
• Video from Scott's talk: Build Real World Cloud Apps using Windows Azure Part I and Build Real World Cloud Apps using Windows Azure Part II
• E-Book version of Scott's talk: Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure
• Troy Hunt: Using high-spec Azure SQL Server for short term intensive data processing
• Book: Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET
• Book: The Fatal Shore