Why register for the ‘Meet Windows Azure’ event?

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Tonight at 10 PM South African time, Microsoft will be hosting their ‘Meet Windows Azure’ event in an online webcast that one can register for here.

We realise this is not the most comfortable time for us here in SA to participate in the event, however we would like to list a few key highlights that will take place during the event tonight. If you register for the event, you will have access to the on-demand content the following day.

With the previous iteration of Azure, Platform as a Service (PaaS) did not appeal to many traditional IT Professionals in South Africa. With the next version of Windows Azure, it would be in each and every IT Professionals interest to understand the announcements that will influence the Hybrid Cloud opportunities that will open up in the South African market.

A list of the new capabilities for the event that will be discussed and demonstrated will be:

  • Windows Azure Virtual Machines— Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. Customers are demanding high degrees of flexibility and want to be able to run every possible scenario in a seamless fashion, hence the improvement in offering support for Linux as an operating system.
  • Windows Azure Virtual Network— Virtual Network allows tor the provisioning and management virtual private networks (VPNs) in Windows Azure, as well as securely extend on-premises networks into the cloud.  It provides control over network topology, including configuration of IP addresses, routing tables and security policies and uses the industry-standard IPSEC protocol to provide a secure connection between your corporate VPN gateway and Windows Azure.
  • Windows Azure Web Sites —Build web sites and applications with this highly elastic solution supporting .NET, Node.js, and PHP while using common deployment techniques like Git and FTP.  Windows Azure Web Sites will also allow easy deployment of open source applications like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and Drupal to the cloud with a few clicks.

These new capabilities highlighted above simplify building and bringing applications of all kinds to the cloud and enable flexibility in the following areas:

  • Increased datacenter capacity through secure VPN connections to the cloud
  • Easy operations and management from an improved Windows Azure Management Portal, with powerful operational capabilities for deploying and managing your cloud applications – with similar management support from the command line
  • Cloud scale for building websites with ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js
  • Scale on demand by migrating existing applications to the cloud using portable, industry standard VHDs - delivering global scale with maximum control   
  • Secure connectivity between cloud and on-premises applications
  • Ability to develop, test and configure new applications in the cloud, and then deploy on-premises for production

With these new improvements and capabilities listed above, the IT Professional will now start to play a key role in enabling Business to leverage Windows Azure.

For the last four months, we have been running IT Camps focused solely on Private Cloud and the components that make this up. In the coming months we will start to deliver IT Camps focussed on Cloud, covering Private, Public & Hybrid scenarios. Take the opportunity to register now for ‘Meet Windows Azure’ and start getting the full story behind Windows Azure.

Cheers, Morgan
(@morganwza)