Its about driving adoption

So I exchanged a few tweets with Buck Woody yesterday. For those not familiar, Buck is an incredibly passionate SQL Server guy with Microsoft who recently moved over to their Azure product family. Its obvious from some of the posts that Buck has made that he was well versed in ‘the cloud’ before the move, but he hasn’t let this stop him from being very vocal about sharing his excitement about the possibilities. But I digress…

The root of the exchange was regarding access to hosted Azure services for developer education/training. Now before I get off on my rant, I want to be a bit positive. MSFT has taken some great steps to making Azure available for developers. The CTP was nice and long and there were few restrictions (at least in the US) to participation. They also gave out initial MSDN and BizSpark Azure subscription benefits that were fair and adequate. They have even set up free labs for SQL Azure and the Azure AppFabric. And of course, there’s the combination of free downloads and the local development fabric.

All in all, it’s a nice set of tools for allow for initial learning on the Windows Azure platform. The real restriction remains the ability to actual deploy hosted services and test them in a “production environment”. Now the Dev Fabric is great and all, but as anyone that’s spent any time with Azure will tell you, you still need to test your apps in the cloud. There’s simply no substitute. And unfortunately, there is no Windows Azure lab.

Affective November 1st 2010, several of the aforementioned benefits are being either removed (AzureUSAPass) or significantly reduced. Now I fully understand that it costs money for MSFT to provide these benefits and I am grateful for what I’ve gotten. But I’m passionate about the platform and I’m concerned that with these changes, it will be even more difficult to help “spread the faith” as it were.

So consider this my public WTF. Powers that be, please consider extending these programs and the current benefit levels indefinitely. I get questions on a weekly basis from folks about “how can I learn about Azure”. I’d hate to have to start telling them they need to have a credit card. Many of these folks are the grass roots types that are doing this on their own time and dime but can help influence LARGE enterprises. Furthermore, you have HUGE data centers with excess capacity available. I’m certain that a good portion of that capacity is kept in an up state and as such is consuming resources. So why not put it to good use and help equip an army. An army of developers all armed with the promise and potential of cloud computing.

The more of these soldiers we have, the easier it will be to tear down the barriers that are blocking cloud adoption and overcome the challenges that these solutions face.

Ok… my enthusiasm about this is starting to make me sound like a revolutionary. So before I end up on another watch list I’ll cut this tirade short. Just please, either extend these programs or give us other options for exploring learning your platform.

Sincerely – a code monkey

Is this thing on?

Howdy all. So I’ve moved the blog to WordPress now that MSFT is dropping Live Spaces. Sad to see the old go, still trying to get comfortable, but I’m happy to get some new features. Only time will tell if I actually do anything with them.

I really don’t have anything specific today. Just some rambling updates. On October 1st, 2010 I was notified that I have been selected as an Azure MVP. I don’t feel worthy, so now the pressure is on to make sure I get renewed. I feel now that I’ve been selected that if I don’t get renewed, someone will realize it was a mistake. And I hate to disappoint folks. I’ve got a talk for the Twin Cities Cloud Computing user group tonight, another in a couple weeks in Omaha, and yet another planned for December. To top it off, I received an email this morning from a book publisher asking me if I would like to author a book. All in all, its rather overwhelming.

I guess I should try to make this at least partly cloud related…

Recently I had the unfortunate task of trying to work with a datacenter team to try and locate a server for a project I’m working on. After several ‘we can’t do that’ responses we finally found a common ground and I was told it would be $200/month to host it. All this just for a server I can throw a STS (simple token service) on that won’t be used by much more then a couple dozen users a few times a day. I could run it off my wife’s 3yr old laptop for Pete’s sake.

This experience got me to thinking… will the short-comings and bureaucracy of traditional IT infrastructure help drive folks to the cloud? Will business, who need to deliver solutions faster and more efficiently continue to put up with roadblocks and delays when they can just swipe their corporate credit cards and get what they need in just minutes? I often talk to developers that they need to ‘get with the cloud’ if they don’t want to be left behind. Maybe I need to expand that and start also warning the “server huggers” (heard that term at a produce session recently, love it) that if they don’t start embracing the cloud, they too may find themselves obsolete.

*shrug* Oh well. Enough rambles, time to get back to work. I’ve got a team meeting in 10 minutes.  

Till next time!