TechDays 2010: Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing

If it’s Autumn, it must be time for TechDays again here in Canada. This year  I was Microsoft Canada’s Content Lead for the “Real-World Patterns for Cloud Computing” session.

The Toronto flavour of the event has been taking place yesterday and today.

Compute, Store, Scale

The Cloud Computing presentation focused on scenarios involving where we use the cloud for compute, storage, and scaling (of both compute power and storage). It looked at a real-world case study using Windows Azure Worker Roles, and multiple Azure Storage account (leveraging Blobs and Queues – Azure Table Storage and SQL Azure are other stories for other presentations).

Demo Path

"Real World Patterns for Cloud Computing" Demo Path (click to embiggen)

Here’s the basic demo path (as pictured above):

1. Efficiently upload content to the cloud

2. After upload, add message(s) to Azure Queue indicating to a Worker Role there’s content to process

3. Use a Worker Role to read messages from the Queue and process the uploaded content

4. Show how to scale the whole thing – both storage (if it exceeds 100TB, the limit of an Azure Storage Account), and compute (if there is too much content to process by a single Worker Role).

The focus of the talk was on incorporating good practices (and avoiding gotchas) throughout this process. We started with some simple code that uploaded content to the cloud and processed it using a worker role, and then modified the solution to incorporate a number of improvements. Then we slammed the whole thing with a heavy load and used the Windows Azure Dynamic Scaling Sample to monitor the growth of the queue and scale up and down accordingly.

(This last part addresses what is certainly one of the most frequently asked questions I get about Azure – does it scale its computing automatically, and if not, how do I do so? The Dynamic Scaling Sample provides one very configurable and suitable solution for automated scaling of Azure computing.)

If you were at TechDays and are interested in the sample code, please contact me and I’ll send a link. You may also be interested in Microsoft Evangelist Wade Wegner’s presentation from TechEd2010, which he delivered with Jerry Schulist from the Tribune Company. I’m indebted to Wade and Jerry for their excellent presentation and their pioneering work with Azure.

Today: More TechDays + streaming PDC 2010

If you’re interested in Azure and cloud computing, you almost certainly will be interested in following what’s going on this week in Redmond at Microsoft PDC 2010. The entire conference will be streamed online – follow that link for a slick schedule and some nice .ics links so you can add talks of interest to your calendar.

[Update, 29 Oct 2010: There were indeed quite a few announcements related to Azure at PDC2010 - check them out!]

Thanks Again

Thanks to everyone who came out – I really enjoyed the day and that was probably the best post-presentation Q&A session I’ve ever had, even if Joey had to “Kanye” me off stage again when question time ran out! My compliments to the MS Canada team – they have the choreography of these large-scale tech events down to an art.

Next stop: Ottawa!

I’m looking forward to presenting this talk again in Ottawa on November 9th for the TechDays Ottawa event.