Richmond Code Camp May 2010 Materials: Azure talk

On May 22, I presented “Azure: Taking Advantage of the Platform.” Here’s the slide deck, sample code, and sample PowerShell script from the talk:

Thanks to everyone who attended, and for all the great questions! Here are a few takeaways from the talk:

• The Azure portal is http://www.azure.com. Here’s where you’ll be able to administer your account. You’ll also see a link to download the latest SDK.
• To set up an MSDN Premium account, visit my blog post here for a detailed walkthrough.
• Download the SDK here. Then grab the Azure PowerShell cmdlets here.
• To understand the true cost of web and worker roles, visit my blog post here, and the follow-up regarding staging here.
• The official pricing plan is here. MSDN Premium pricing details are here.
• The Azure teams have several blogs, as well as voting sites for future features. I compiled a list of the blogs and voting sites here.
• Remember to configure your service and storage to be co-located in the same data center. This is done by setting affinity when creating your services.
• While all storage access is REST-based, the Azure SDK has a complete set of classes that insulate you from having to construct properly-formed REST-based calls.
• We talked about the limited indexing available with table storage (partition key + row key). Don’t let this be a deterrent: Tables are scalable up to 100TB, where SQL Azure is limited to 50GB. Consider using SQL Azure for relational data, and offload content to table storage, creating a hybrid approach that offers both flexible indexing and massive scalability. You can reference partition keys in a relational table, for instance.
• Clarifying timestamps across different data centers and time zones (a question brought up in Brian Lanham’s Azure Intro talk): Timestamps are stored as UTC.
• Don’t forget about queue names: they must be all lower-case letters, numbers, or dash (and must start and end with letter or number)

If anyone’s interested in a 2-day Azure Deep Dive, I’ll be teaching a free 2-day Azure Bootcamp July 7-8 in Virginia Beach. Register here.