What is Azure–Quick intro

Hopefully you know, Feb 5th, 2011, @AZGroups, @Gangplank, @awilsong, @coneybeer, and @scottcate are hosting an #Azure Bootcamp. The basic idea is 4 hours of training + labs, and four hours of time to build and create an azure app from the attendees.

You can read more, and register here for the Feb 5, 2011 Event.

Andrew posted a nice comment, with a basic into to What is Azure, and I wanted to cross post it here. Thanks Andrew.

 

to    AZGroups@yahoogroups.com
date    Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:39 AM
subject    Re: [AZGroups] Azure Bootcamp in Chandler Feb 5th

To answer Brandon’s question– Azure is a blueish color…[?]

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud offering. It’s different than many other cloud
services, in that it has primarily focused itself around Platform as a
Service (PaaS) instead of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This has some
pretty cool implications for people who develop in .NET– because the
barrier to entry is not much more than a "right-click & deploy" setting.

There are, of course, many other exciting features available that you can
leverage via Azure as well. Non-Relational data storage, Roles, hybrid
hosting, CDN, and a Caching Framework being some of the primary ones.
Relational data is also available in the cloud via SQL Azure. There is
even a marketplace for sharing/selling components built.

I do not say this lightly, but it’s my belief that this offering is going to
be critical for .NET developers to understand over the next few years.
Microsoft has made a huge investment in Azure and already has much of it’s
flagship software being offered on it.

Finally– one of the big misconceptions about Azure is that it only supports
.NET based languages. While it’s true that is a primary focus– one of the
single largest sites on Azure right now is a Java application. Language
Interop was an intentional focus of the platform from the beginning. Azure
currently has great tooling support for PHP & Java, and because much of the
offerings are RESTful, it can be further leveraged by other languages well.

We are intending through this event to cover many of the topics above– some
at a high-level and some bootstrapped to get you running with it. If any of
it sounds interesting, PLEASE RSVP so we can get an accurate head count.