I wonder if Scott Gu can sing? If so he has a lovely basso.
There was very little news to me in this session as I am a frequent attender of the Swedish Azure User Group, however a little repetition might improve my knowledge.
There are a couple of things that still amazes me when it comes to Azure. the first one is the 99.95% monthly SLA. This means that Microsoft guarantees that your servers are up all but about three hours during a 30 day month.
The next thing that amazes me is still the cost of hosting a server. Two small instances (1.6 GHz processor, 1.75 megs of ram, 225 Gb of storage) with 100 Gb of data transfer cost 90 per month from the first month! I can easily tell you the names of a couple of providers that will charge you 600 for the same service.
Also remember this: MSDN Premium and Ultimate comes with Azure! So there is nothing stopping you from giving it a try at least, perhaps time frames but not cost. You only pay for what you use. Start small and scale up or use it heavily in a few hours and the close them. You don’t pay any more.
Virtual private networking is finally here. They talked about it for a while before but now you can have a network within the cloud and the connect to your local network using VPN tunneling. They even provide a way of scripting the Virtual network so that the local network can use VPN to access it (and vice versa).
Since all machines that are running in Windows Azure are VHD you can use VHD that you already have on premise or perhaps other providers.
I stared thinking about something: What can you do locally that you cannot do in Windows Azure? There was no time for questions at the end but perhaps someone can give me a suggestion on twitter.
The next now cool thing is Azure Websites. Something I really wish I had access to back in the day so I could focus on content and not building the actual stuff. Well, you get 10 free with MSDN. They are very very to deploy using VS 2012. you can also connect them to TFS (Online version as well) and make use of continuous build and deploy.
Blog Post by: Mikael Sand