Architect Forum 2008

This week I participated in the Architect Forum 2008 in Portugal.

The event was all about Cloud Computing and the agenda had two sessions:

• Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform : What it is and when to use it, by David Chappell
• Windows Azure, Padrões de Arquitectura e Caso de Uso, by João Pedro Martins, José António Silva, Nuno Godinho

The first session was more introductory and theoretical serving its purpose of presenting this new computing platform paradigm. What I also liked about it, was that the speaker focused not only on the Microsoft’s platform but on other platforms like the one’s from Amazon and Google, showing their differences and similarities, possible strengths and weaknesses.

Personally it seems that Microsoft’s platform given its “late appearance”  (no one is really late) was given more thought and took advantage of the other previous experiments. But everything is right at the beginning and as so I expect everyone to be more or less “on-pair” when these platforms really take off.

The second session made the bridge from the theory to the practice by presenting scenarios where a cloud computing architecture “should” make sense and presenting advantages over “traditional” architectures. They showed a real case scenario with a expense reporting application running in the cloud platform of Microsoft that among other things made use of Live Mesh, .NET Services (e.g. Service Bus) and SQL Services (e.g. Storage).

Overall I really enjoyed the event and look forward to dive deeper and experiment with these cloud platforms.