Martyn Talks Azure at C4DI

I like going to the C4DI developer meetups. If you are a programmer and you are based in Hull, you should go along too. You can sign up for developer and also the hardware meetups here. 

Anyhoo, this month we had Martyn Coupland talking about Azure. Martyn works for Inframon as a "Senior Cloud Architect". As he said his job title I had this vision of a meeting full of serious faced engineers saying things like "And this is our new Cumulonimbus 5000, with extra fluffy light bits...". But that would be silly.

What Martyn actually does is map business process onto platforms based in the "cloud". The cloud is basically a bunch of computers on the end of a high performance network connection. It is how you turn computing into a service, rather like water or power, which you can buy based on your needs.

If you have a thing you want to do, for example host a web site, provide the back-end for an application or even run a business, the first thing you do isn't buy a big rack of computers. What you do is talk to someone like Martyn who will design you a system that lives in the cloud.

If your idea takes off big time you don't have a problem, you just crack open the champagne and turn on more cloud based processing power. If your idea sinks without trace you put the champagne back in the fridge, chalk it up to experience and work on the next project, reflecting that at least you haven't got a room full of expensive hardware to get rid of.

Martyn gave a very good rundown of how Microsoft Azure works and how good it is. I knew a bit of this from the Rather Useful Seminar by Caitlin and Peter but it was very interesting to hear how it has progressed even in this short time. Most amazing fact for me was that the majority of Azure installations don't run Windows software. I forget the figure (forgot to write it down) but there are a huge number of open source solutions sitting out there on Microsoft infrastructure. It turns out that you can build an image using your favourite operating system, whatever that is, and then deploy it into the cloud very easily. 

At the end of the talk I was chatting with Martyn about Hull Pixel Bot and mentioned that I plan to make the robots all clients of an Azure based location and communication service. He reckoned that it was eminently doable, which was good to know.  He'll be coming back to Hull to do some more, implementation focused, sessions later in the year. He's also an MVP, which is nice.