On to the review..

As I mentioned above, The book starts out with a very general discussion of what is cloud computing.  Currently, the cloud is a pretty over used word and it’s important to understand what is meant by it.  Things like “Application as Service”, “Cloud Storage”, etc. are all important to understand when talking about the cloud.

Following that, the book dives into the details of Azure (and there are a lot of details).  It goes into great details (and specifics) on Azure Blob Storage, Azure Queues, Azure Tables, AppFabric (formerly Velocity), Azure Service Bus, and also discusses deployment issues.

I do recommend this book.  I believe it will help if you want to get into the cloud using Microsoft’s offerings.

Windows Azure Platform (Pro)

We’ve been looking to find the best Cloud based host to put our soon to be virally growing web site up on.  Our requirements are it must run IIS7 and use Sql Server 2008 as it’s database. We have lots of wants (like Service Broker, Replication, etc.) but primarily we want the web tier to scale easily.  After doing research and testing, we got frustrated with our options at Amazon’s EC2.  We emailed their support (with our paid support contract) and were basically told we should go do our own Windows research to find out what works best.

At any rate, I emailed Steve Evan’s who is a frequent speaker at conferences and also an expert consultant on all things Windows and IT related and asked for some advice.  He told me that he had been asked that question often recently by others so he would do some research and get back to me.  He did one step better.  He wrote a blog post describing the ups and downs of the different cloud providers including Amazon’s EC2.  I respect Steve’s opinion a lot and rather than try and paraphrase it, I’ll just link to his post.

Here it is:  http://serktools.com/2009/04/20/load-balancing-iis-web-farm-on-amazon-ec2/

Good luck and feel free to post comments here if you’ve got opinions on Cloud Hosting of IIS and Sql Server 2008.