Janakiram MSV » Events

IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference

Jani — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:25:12 +0000

Microsoft India is one of the sponsors of IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference in Pune. I had the privilege of delivering the Keynote on day 2 (21^st August).

Windows Azure Keynote

I had about 40 attendees who were business decision makers, developers, architects and IT managers. My objective was to introduce Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and explain Windows Azure architecture. I covered the concepts of Windows Azure Compute and Storage services with a brief introduction to Web Role, Worker Role and Storage components like Tables, Queues and Blobs. I showed a quick demo of developing an Azure application using Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Dev Fabric. The demo ended with a walk through of the Azure portal and deployment options. I thought this was the best way to introduce Windows Azure to attendees in the limited window of 45 min.

Simone Delivering the AWS Keynote

Right after my keynote, it was Simone Brunozzi (@Simon) from Amazon Web Services APAC who delivered his talk. AWS was one of the sponsors for this conference. Simone covered the key concepts of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and did complete justice to the topic within the limited 45 min. slot. His session was highly interactive and I realized that there quite a few AWS customers in the hall.

PuneTech has been live blogging this event and Arun Gupta (@arungupta), Java EE Evangelist from Oracle (who was one of the speakers) has a good coverage of this event on his blog.

The slide deck that I presented can be downloaded from here.

I have been associated with IndicThreads.com brand for the last 3 years as a speaker and like the professionalism of the organizers. I appreciate Harshad Oak and Sangeeta Oak for their passion in making these events a success!

All the presentations from this event are available from Slideshare and below is an embed of the same –

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Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion

Jani — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:59:54 +0000

IBF Media has been running a series of events called Capital Connection 2010 which is focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs looking to connect with participants in the venture capital eco-system, technology executives, and to get access to capital and resources to help build their growing enterprises.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

The latest in the series was a panel discussion on ‘Cloud Platforms and Solutions: Business Models and Architectures for Value Creation in the Enterprise’. The emphasis was more on the value that Platform as a Service (PaaS) brings to an enterprise. The organizers managed to get the best PaaS providers in the business – Google, Microsoft and OrangeScape. While I represented Microsoft Corporation as the subject matter expert on Windows Azure, we had Rajdeep Dua from Google to provide the Google App Engine context. Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape PaaS (which incidentally supports both GAE and Azure) was also one of the panelists. The session was moderated by Raghavan Subramanian from Infosys who did a great job of asking very relevant questions to the panel and driving a meaningful discussion.

The discussion was very lively and made it interesting and valuable for the attendees and panelists. I want to share the answers to the questions that were asked in the panel. This represents only the points that I shared and not the views of other panelists in the discussion.

Q) What does your company offer in terms of PaaS? What are the key differentiators?
A) Microsoft’s PaaS offering is called Windows Azure Platform.

There are three key services within this –

Windows Azure – The Cloud OS from Microsoft
SQL Azure – Relational Database for the Cloud
Windows Azure AppFabric – Bridge between on-premise and Cloud Services

Key differentiators –

Based on familiar .NET Platform
Great integration with Visual Studio and 3rd party tools
Reliable SLAs for the enterprise
Integration with on-premise assets
Choice of storage between relational (SQL Azure) and non-relational (Azure Storage)

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) What is the threat faced from the layers above (SaaS) and below (IaaS) PaaS?
A) I believe the line drawn between IaaS and PaaS is blurring slowly. Windows Azure is clearly a meta-platform and customers can run Java, PHP, Perl along with .NET applications. Worker role and Native Execution mode enables to port legacy applications to Azure. Since Microsoft also plays in the SaaS layer through the Microsoft Online services, it is an opportunity for us rather than threat. We encourage ISVs to build SaaS offerings on Azure.

Q) Who is the target audience? Is it ISVs or enterprise?
A) Our target audience is the following –

ISV – Offer SaaS based solutions of their existing or new applications
Enterprise – Move seasonal and on-demand Line of Business (LoB) applications to Azure
Start-up – Go live quickly by avoiding up-front investment in infrastructure
System Integrators – Offer migration and integration of Cloud Services

Q) What is the role of standards for lowering the entry barrier?
A) Standards are applicable at multiple levels. Here are a few

Security Standards – Azure is SAS70 complaint
Industry Standards – Supporting industry specific standards like HIPAA
Open Standards – Azure storage, compute and management APIs are based on open standards like HTTP, XML and REST.

Q) Are there Cloud friendly languages? Do programming languages need new constructs to target cloud capabilities like multi-tenancy?
A) Developers interact with the Cloud in one of the two ways –

Consume APIs and interact with the Cloud through the management API
Develop applications that get deployed on the Cloud platform

For consuming the APIs, any language with support for HTTP libraries will work. More than languages the frameworks like .NET and Java need to evolved to support Cloud. For example .NET developers are able to leverage the LINQ constructs to interact with the Cloud storage efficiently.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) How do you assure continuity of business? Are you a viable and reliable vendor for the enterprises to bet their business on your Cloud platform?
A) Microsoft has been in the data center business for 15 years. Hotmail was acquired in 1977, Outlook Web Access (OWA) was launched 11 years ago. Hosted Exchange processes more than 1 billion messages per month. More than 2000 institutions signed up for Live@Edu with millions of email accounts. Enterprise customers trust us as we have been a credible player for more than a decade. Windows Azure has the right level of SLAs defined which raises the confidence level of our customers.

Q) How about 3rd party components and licensing on the Cloud?
A) Most of the component vendors are aligning with the Cloud. Players like PayPal started to offer services for the SaaS developers by collaborating with PaaS providers. Companies like Twilio are bringing telephony to the Cloud. Most of the components will evolve to support the new paradigm.

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K-MUG DevCon 2010

Jani — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:42:22 +0000

Last week, I had the opportunity to present at the DevCon 2010 event hosted by the Kerala Microsoft User Group. I am thoroughly impressed by the quality of the event. The event organizers handled it very professionally. I am impressed by the hospitality and the overall quality of the event.

I delivered the keynote on ‘Cloud – The Platform of the Platforms’ and a session which was an end-to-end demo of developing a Cloud application on Azure. You can download the slide deck from the talks sections of my website.

Find the complete report on K-MUG.org.

My good friend and MVP from Bangalore, Vijay Raj (Popularly known as MSIGeek (@msigeek) also presented on App Compat in Win7 and Office 2010. You can find his trip report here.

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Cloud Architecture Session by Amazon

Jani — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 03:59:53 +0000

On June 2nd, Matt Tavis, Solution Architect from Amazon Web Services has delivered a talk to the Cloud Computing community in Bangalore. The session was hosted by ThoughtWorks. Despite being a working day, we had about 40 attendees who made it an interactive session.

Here are a few interesting links covering this event -

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Download Slides from TechEd and GIDS

Jani — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:43:07 +0000

Go to the Talks section of the website to download the slides.

Last two weeks have been incredibly busy. Preparing and delivering a session at TechEd has become an annual ritual for me. Right after TechEd India 2010, it was the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 that kept me busy.

This was my 10th TechEd as a speaker and I can’t believe that I have been associated with this brand for a decade! I delivered only one session this year and that was on Windows Azure Service Management API. I am fascinated by the Programmable Infrastructure paradigm and this session gave me a chance to explore the Azure Programmability. I wanted to highlight the power of this API through a real world scenario. I signed up for Twilio and did a mashup of Twilio REST API and Azure Service Management API to control the Cloud applications through SMS / Text messages. The audience volunteered to send SMS that changed the state of the App from ‘Suspended’ to ‘Running’. It was fun to see a SMS swap the applications between ‘Staging’ and Production’ slots. I will share the sample code in the coming posts.

My session at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 was about deploying Java apps on Windows Azure. I had a lot of fun building the demos for this session. The whole idea is to make the Java developers think of Azure Storage like a portable flash drive that they can access from any of their apps and to treat Azure Worker Role like a Run.cmd to bootstrap the JRE and finally run the Java app. I built a simple Jukebox app built using Swing that uploads a MP3 as a BLOB on Azure with the ID3 tags as the BLOB metadata. A Java Servlet hosted on Apache Tomcat reads the ID3 tags and the album art from the MP3 and plays the audio file. Eventually, this Servlet along with the Tomcat container moves to Azure and gets hosted in the Cloud. I went through the challenge of positioning Azure to Java developers and then walking them through the code for the demo scenario all in 40 minutes!

You can download the slide decks from the Talks section of my website.

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Janakiram MSV » Events

IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference

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