Boston Azure meeting to feature Microsoft’s Curt Devlin on Identity in the Cloud

Thursday February 25, 2010 at NERD in Cambridge, MA

The following is an update to the agenda for the upcoming Boston Azure User Group meeting this coming Thursday.

To RSVP for the meeting (helps you breeze through security and helps us have enough pizza on hand), for directions, and more details about the group, please check out http://BostonAzure.org.

To get on the Boston Azure email list, please visit http://bostonazure.org/Announcements/Subscribe.

[6:00-6:30 PM] Boston Azure Theater

The meeting activities begin at 6:00 PM with Boston Azure Theater, which is an informal viewing of some Azure-related video. This month will feature the first half of
Matthew Kerner‘s talk on Windows Azure Monitoring, Logging, and Management APIs from the November 2009 Microsoft PDC conference.

[6:30-7:00 PM] Upcoming Boston Azure Events and Firestarter

Around 6:30, Bill Wilder (that’s me) will first show off an interesting CodeProject contest, then will lead a discussion about the future of the Boston Azure user group and the upcoming All-Day-Saturday-May-8th event.

Curt Devlin will take the stage at 7:00 PM.

Before the meeting, if you want a little more context, you may wish to read Kim Cameron’s essay The Laws of Identity, which is an insightful analysis of challenges around Identity.

[7:00-8:15] Featured speaker: Curt Devlin of Microsoft

Abstract

The Azure platform presents new challenges for identity management. As developers and architects, we will still have to answer the same two perennial questions: 1) Who are you? 2) And what are you allowed to do? But the traditional on-premise approaches to authentication, authorization and identity lifecycle control are not adequate to meet these new challenges. The Geneva suite of technologies for claims-based identity management can be help because cloud computing can be thought of as a “special case” of federation, with many similar requirements. Together these two paradigms appear to be converging to create the perfect storm of paradigm shifts. However, even WIF, ADFS 2.0 and CardSpace 2.0, will only take us part way to a complete solution in the near term. This session will provide a simple recipe for claims-based identity management in Azure using Geneva, discuss some of the most important reasons why this is necessary, and finally some of the shortcomings we will still have to contend with on the road ahead. The aim is to educate, motivate, and caution.

About Curt Devlin

Curt Devlin is currently an architect in Microsoft DPE (Developer & Platform Evangelism) focusing on distributed solutions across many industries and customer segments. Curt is a Microsoft veteran of many technology wars, with more than 20 years of experience developing solutions on the Windows and .NET. platforms. He is also a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander with avid interests in sailing, skiing and nearly everything else.

Curt blogs as the philosophical architect, plus you can check out his MSDN articles Enterprise Authorization Strategy and SaaS Capacity Planning: Transaction Cost Analysis Revisited.

Curt’s blog post announcing his participation in this meeting: http://blogs.msdn.com/curtd/archive/2010/02/23/an-evening-with-identity-in-the-clouds-and-the-boston-azure-user-group.aspx