A few notes from the March 29, 2012 Boston Azure cloud user group meeting…

Jason Haley was the featured speaker and provided a fantastic overview of the Windows Azure SDK and related platform features.

My talk was the opening act. I extended on my Hadoop on Azure talk from February and climbed up the stack to talk about HIVE and Pig which generate MapReduce under the hood. I only used a few slides in the talk, but they have some useful references, and are available here: Hadoop-BostonAzure-29-Mar-2012.

These items were also mentioned at the meeting:

• Boston Azure is on Twitter as @bostonazure
• New England Give Camp 2012 (A handful of Boston Azure members are signed up – including (off the top of my head) me, Jason, Maura, Joan, and Gladys): http://newenglandgivecamp.org/
• UX and Cloud studies were discussed and the vast majority of the attendees indicated they would prefer offers/opportunities be sent to/shared with the Boston Azure community – I will post on the Meetup.com distribution

Upcoming Boston Azure events include:

• Tuesday April 24 – Michael Cummings from Magenic on building mobile games with a Windows Azure back-end (signup here)
• Wednesday May 30 – SDK again – but this time will be hands-on – BYO laptop! (Tables and power strips will be provided.) (signup here)
• Fri-Sat June 22-23 – TWO FULL DAYS of Bootcamp! (signup here (Fri) and here (Sat))
• Thu June 28 – (Awesome topic TBD) – Michael Collier from Neudesic (signup here)
• Thu July 26 – maybe CQRS? (signup here)

There was interest in incorporating some topics into future Boston Azure meetings:

• Tools – what tools are useful in building/managing/monitoring cloud applications, especially Azure ones (PowerShell, cspack, Cerebrata, Storage Explorer from CodePlex, CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage, monitoring tools, IntelliTrace from Visual Studio Ultimate, other Visual Studio tips/tricks, …)
• Comparisons of Azure with other clouds, e.g., OpenStack, AWS, Eucalyptus (note: AWS and Eucalptus are now partners), Rackspace, others…
• More big data via Hadoop on Azure (maybe a whole dedicated meeting is in order)