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Desired State Configuration in Stateless Environments The Cloud enables us to have hundreds of servers at our disposal in minutes. These servers, however still need to be configured before they’re in their…

Desired State Configuration in Stateless Environments The Cloud enables us to have hundreds of servers at our disposal in minutes. These servers, however still need to be configured before they’re in their…

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This weekend, a worldwide community initiative was executed, called Global Windows Azure Boot Camp. Global Windows Azure Boot Camp was a free community training day that is organized by User Groups all over the world in a timespan of 24 hours. To give the event a truly global effect, Alan Smith, modified his ‘Rapid Massive On-Demand Scalability Makes Me Fast!’ demo to make it available on a global scale and handed out a very easy to deploy package to all organizers and attendees of the Global Windows Azure Boot Camp. He also created a dashboard with which we could follow the latest statistics of the global Render Farm. Apart from the high entertainment value, at first glance, this render experiment didn’t seem to have very much educational value. Attendees could simply deploy a .CSPKG file to Windows Azure and scale the hell out of it :-). When we look a little closer, though, this global experiment actually shows the true essence and beauty of Cloud Computing and Windows Azure as a Cloud Computing platform.

The last time I checked, I needed to create a new Windows Azure subscription, using my onmicrosoft.com account, for enabling Windows Azure Active Directory in the Windows Azure management portal. Today I found out that this isn’t the case anymore…

As Corey Sanders stated in many presentations: If it’s going to be better, it better be better! And today, Microsoft is confident enough to say that it’s better!

This week Microsoft announced general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Up until now Microsoft’s Cloud platform has offered a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). PaaS is great for developing custom software solutions and to keep a clear focus on what matters most: data and business logic. To make it possible to focus merely on data and business logic, however, a PaaS provider needs to standardize the underlying technology, making it, in some cases, hard to deploy existing systems and key server components that were not designed to run in a stateless environment. This is where Infrastructure Services come to play.