Last night I had the privilege of speaking at the Nashua .NET Cloud User Group in Nashua, NH. It was an engaged group to be sure – thanks for all the great questions.

A few followups:

• Azure VM pricing: the $0.013/hour pricing mentioned for Extra Small instances of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Virtual Machine is shown here to be a promotional price, with the regular price of $0.02/hour (two cents per hour) kicking in on June 1. The architectures we spoke of in the talk used Platform as a Service (PaaS) Virtual Machines and the pricing for those is very similar, though slightly lower, and is shown here.
• How many customers does Azure have: here is the 10,000 number that Udai shared, which is from was about three years ago when most of the tech world had not yet even heard of Azure. More recently,  it was mentioned there are 200,000 Azure customers and it has passed $1 billion in revenue. So, according to those numbers, it appears to have grown 20x in a little less than three years. Additional interesting numbers mentioned here and here.
• We focused on use of Cloud Services last night, but we also mentioned Virtual Machines (part of what Microsoft is calling Infrastructure Services, like IaaS) and Web Sites, noting all use different approaches. You can read more about all of them here where you’ll see write-ups for each specific area.
• I mentioned that Blob Storage is also being used to support the persistent disks on the Infrastructure Services Virtual Machines, in part-enabled by new high performance network architecture. I wrote about some of this before in a blog post titled Azure Cloud Storage Improvements Hit the Target.

The deck I used follows.

Architecting for the Cloud — NH Azure — 15-Mar-2013 — Bill Wilder (blog.codingoutloud.com)

My book, if you are interested, is described here. And the Boston Azure Cloud User Group can be found here.

On Saturday March 9, 2013, I teamed up with Joan Wortman on a talk at the 19th (!) Boston Code Camp. Some of the patterns I discuss require some different thinking about application architecture, including aspects that impact the user experience (UX). I teamed up with Joan Wortman (who is a UX expert) to better include some context around how to deal with some of these UX challenges as they intersect with architecture.

• ABSTRACT FROM CODE CAMP SITE: https://www.bostoncodecamp.com/CC19/Sessions/Details/126
• THE SLIDE DECK: How to Architect for the Cloud — Boston Code Camp 19 — 09-Mar-2013 — Bill Wilder and Joan Wortman

I also hope to see many of the attendees at future Boston Azure meetings (held at same location as the Boston Code Camp – NERD in Cambridge, MA). Also feel free to post follow-up questions to this post or email me (codingoutloud on gmail) or ask me on twitter where I am @codingoutloud.

Here are a couple of questions that came up in the talk:

1. How much does the cloud cost? As I mentioned, this is a question that deserves some discussion since it is not as simple as looking at the pricing calculator (which can be found here). Sometimes it will be less costly, sometimes more costly. (I did point out there is a free tier for Windows Azure Web Sites.) One major factor is the cost of resources (which is trending down over time). Another major factor is the impact of reducing resource usage when it is not needed; for example, consider a Line of Business application which is used only during business hours in North America and can be turned off completely (accruing no VM usage charges) during non-business hours/weekends/holidays; as another example consider that you don’t need to own resource for the “spike” at the Superbowl (like Shazam scenario described by Joan) since you can “give it all back” (stop paying) once the rush is over. There are also other considerations when you get into DR and HA and geo-distribution. (I wrote about RPO and RTO terms in the context Engineering for DR in the Cloud recently.) And still another factor is understanding what you are paying for — don’t forget the Iceberg idea — so do not compare pricing with those of traditional hosting (unless that’s what you really want) since hosting is not cloud computing!
2. Why can I only access 32 messages at a time from the Windows Azure Storage Queue? This is the same limit when we talk about “peeking” (looking at what’s on the queue without removing it) and retrieving messages for exclusive access. I don’t know why this particular limit was chosen (why not 20? why not 100?) so could only speculate on that. The bottom line is that all messages can be accessed – sometimes requiring more than one call. I wish I had time to probe into the application scenario that would benefit from grabbing so many messages at once, but due to time constraints did not do that. I will answer the question further if I get a follow-up question.
3. Where can I find the mail app that Joan mentioned? The Mailbox app is for iOS and can be found in your app store or directly on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mailbox/id576502633?mt=8 (and there’s a lot of press – such as this story here).
4. OTHER QUESTIONS? Send ’em along!

Hope to see you at Boston Azure:

Much of the material for the talk also appears in my book:

I am speaking today at NYC Code Camp 7. My talk is Architecture Patterns for Building Cloud-Native Applications here is the abstract:

Just because we get software to run on cloud infrastructure does not make it a good idea. To truly take advantage of the cloud we need to build cloud-native applications. The architecture of a cloud-native application is different than the architecture of a traditional application, an idea we will explore since it can impact costs, availability, and scalability. We will examine several key architecture patterns that help unlock cloud-native benefits, spanning computation, database, and resource-focused patterns. By the end of the talk you should appreciate how cloud architecture is more demanding than you might be accustomed to, but with high payoff such as handling failure without downtime, scaling arbitrarily, and allowing aggressive cost-optimization.

The slide deck is here:

Architecture Patterns for Building Cloud-Native Applications — NYC Code Camp 7 — 15-Sept-2012 — Bill Wilder (blog.codingoutloud.com)