While at MIX09 this year, I had the chance to talk with Microsoft’s Patric McElroy. We start out talking about how Microsoft data services map into cloud computing. While we discuss how existing technologies and techniques are migrated to Microsoft Azure, we also talk about the new functionality that comes with being hosted in the cloud: e.g., self-service provisioning, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and scaling data up (performance wise) to meet high data demands.

I then ask Patric if there’s cloud technologies and techniques that they’re pulling back to on-premise software. There’s some interesting tooling and provisioning tasks he tells us about. We also discuss how the role of the DBA may or may not be impacted in the Azure world. We wrap-up by talking about ADO.NET Data Services (or “Project Astoria,” as I remember it), primarily how the RESTful entity mapping framework fits into Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft covered Tamp;E for MIX09 and sponsored this video.

While at MIX09 accompanied by a rockin’ sound-track from the Rock Band mega-stage down the hallway, I talked with Prashant Ketkar about Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure.

After nailing down the proper pronunciation of “Azure,” I ask Prashant to give us an overview of Azure. We then get into a discussion of the PaaS aspects of Azure and the overall ecosystem that may develop including partner opportunities and roles. I ask Prashant what the developer experience is like: that is, getting started with using Azure. We then briefly touch on the slightly different development concerns when deploying to the cloud.

Finally, we go over the current feature set of Azure and look outwards at it’s road-map, some items of which will announced this coming summer, esp. the pricing structure for Azure.

Disclosure: Microsoft paid T&E to MIX09 and sponsored this video.

While at MIX09 this year, I had the chance to film three different interviews with Microsoft folks. The first of these interviews is with Microsoft’s Steven Martin wherein we go over the bevy of announcements this year: Expression Blend, Silverlight 3, Media Server and Video, Web Platform, Web App Gallery, cloud computing with the Azure Services platform, just to name a few.

Our discussion starts around the Web Platform and the installers that were released at MIX09. We talk about
they fit into the full management of an applications life-cycle. We then get on to discussing the support for PHP and many PHP applications in Microsoft’s Web Platform. This leads naturally to a discussion of the the App Gallery where Microsoft is hosting community projects, many of them open source, that can be added to the Web Platform.

Getting into cloud computing and Azure, we next talk about the different deployment options (or runtime environments) that divide up Steven’s world: the local host, in a data center, to a hoster, or cloud, here, Azure. This last runtime environment gets us into a discussion of why you’d use cloud computing and, implicitly, a discussion of what Microsoft’s understanding of “cloud computing” is.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s RIA and multi-media platform, is the next topic of discussion. Here, we talk about the the out of the browser experience, synchronizing across different applications, and a few other topics.

Disclosure: Microsoft sponsored this video and is a client.