Final Day at TechEd Australia 2013

Today was the final day of TechEd Australia, and I was privileged to attend probably the most relevant session to my chosen specialty area, apart from BizTalk Bill‘s WABS presentation yesterday. Brady Gaster from the Windows Azure SDK team gave a terrific presentation on integrating Windows Azure Websites with On-Premises Systems. billed as a discussion on “various techniques of connecting a Windows Azure Web Site to an on-premises enterprise architecture”. It certainly did not disappoint!

Brady demonstrated the use of Windows Azure Service Bus topics and relays in order to connect a website hosted  application to on-premises systems and databases by running iterative solutions based on an “Enterprise Pizza Store” concept. He used a Service Bus topic to accept orders from the website and process them, with multiple subscriptions based on the processing status. He then progressed to using Service Bus relays to expose services that perform the database operations rather than having external sources update the data directly. Finally, he included a “surprise demo” that exhibited the use of the Windows Azure SDK for Java, using a Java client to log messages.

All the demos were very smooth and impressive, and effectively demonstrated how easy it is to leverage cloud resources to implement hybrid solutions that cross organisational boundaries. All the code (excluding the “surprise”  Java demo) can be found here on GitHub, while the slides from his USA version of this presentation can be found on Channel9. He also has an extensive blog post on this. I highly recommend checking it out!

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Coming Soon to a Region Near You – Windows Azure (Australia)!

Microsoft announced today that they will create a new Windows Azure major deployment region in Australia, consisting of two sub-regions in Sydney & Melbourne! This is outstanding news and a welcome development for numerous organisations that would otherwise embrace the scalability, flexibility, affordability and rapid implementation capabilities afforded by cloud-based and hybrid solutions, were it not for concerns regarding data sovereignty and latency.

Moreover, the geo-redundancy offered by two distinct locations separated by over 700 kilometres (440 miles) means that clients can be assured of business continuity even if one major city was taken out by a catastrophic disaster – all while still maintaining their data within national borders.

Here are two excellent blog posts by my colleagues Dean Robertson and Paul Bouwer explaining these principles in much greater detail:

• What an Australian Azure Region Means for Customers
• Understanding the Benefits of Windows Azure Geo-Redundancy in Australia

This means that at least one of my current clients in the financial industry can reconsider using Azure Service Bus to enable a scalable & robust asynchronous integration scenario between on-premise systems and external customers. Looking forward to seeing more of our Australian clients willing to embrace the cloud now!

Service Bus Messaging Deep-Dive on Channel 9

152 minutes of comprehensive Windows Azure Service Bus Messaging deep-dive by the master himself, Clemens Vasters! Even comes with topic time markers so you can jump to the bits you’re interested in:

You can also download his freely-usable slide deck from here.