Imagine if architects had to be the janitor for every building they designed. With an understaffed Channel 9 development team handling production support on a web farm built from mismatched servers, something had to be done. When Windows Azure was launched in the summer of 2010 the development team saw it as a way to hand off support and return to building features.
IronRuby is Microsoft's implementation of the Ruby language we all know and love with the added bonus of interoperability with the .NET framework. It's supported by the .NET Common Language Runtime as well as, albeit unofficially, the Mono project. This article gives an introduction to IronRuby, and discusses how to run Rails applications in IronRuby as well as potential issues to look out for.
Adrian Cole discusses his jclouds project, which is an open source library that helps Java developers get started in the cloud and reuse their Java development skills. Cole also talks about some of the challenges of creating a cloud agnostic library, such as the use of different hypervisors and that various cloud implementations are written in different languages, such as VB, Python, Ruby, etc.
In late December 2011, Microsoft announced the pre-release of a set of services labeled Windows Azure Service Bus EAI Labs. These enhancements to the existing Windows Azure Service Bus make it easier to connect (cloud) applications through the use of message routing rules, protocol bridging, message transformation services and connectivity to on-premises line of business systems.
Windows Azure team announced major updates including support for Node.js, better scalability for SQL Azure through Federation and higher individual DB Size limits (upto 150 GB), a limited preview for Hadoop and more.
Publishing improvements, Team Build capability and streamlined service creation allow developers to centrally manage all aspects of application creation and deployment.
Microsoft has announced at the BUILD conference a number of new tools for developing applications that interact with the cloud: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8, Windows Azure SDK 1.5, Windows Azure Marketplace, Replication for Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus September Release, and Windows Azure Service Management API.
With 274 sessions at the //Build/ conference it is hard to predict which are going to be important and which are just filler. Here is a rundown of the sessions we think are going to be important to enterprise developers.
Windows Azure AppFabric Features, Queues, Topics and Subscriptions, which were in CTP for some time now have now been released. These enable new scenarios for Applications hosted on Windows Azure such as asynchronous Cloud Eventing, Event-Driven SOA, Load leveling/balancing and more.
