clouds

The beginning of the end of large companies writing new home insurance business in Florida started with Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The final death blow came after the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. Most of the home insurance companies available to Floridi...

AWS is soon going to have Windows instances available!

Quoted: Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform 'in the cloud'. These pay-as-you-use cloud computing services include Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon FPS, and others .

These several "layers" of functionality potentially differentiate Microsoft from the competition.

Quoted: Our research identifies several layers of functionality ranging from system infrastructure to business process. Microsoft’s offerings include:
- System infrastructure services (Amazon EC2)
- Application infrastructure services (Force.Com & AppEngine)
- Application services (Exchange Online)

Quoted: We also hear that second half next year, Microsoft will announce their own Windows Azure on Premises solution, they’re already working with hardware manufactures (we know DELL for sure, but there are more). After the release of Windows Azure, the new Cloud Operating System at PDC this year (press release here), Microsoft is following their business plan to offer what they do best - software - to enterprises.

I agree. Interested how this plays out at Microsoft w.r.t. Azure.

Quoted: In this era everything is different - the stack, the players and the potential for value creation. Let's outline the basic shape of this emerging era, in particular defining what makes up the new stack

Check out the "Full Armor" case study. It illustrates how they, as an ISV that leverages Microsoft's cloud technologies, deliver solutions for Ethiopian school teachers.

I know it's a PR video, but it's pretty exciting and very well done nonetheless.

A very simple App Engine app for taking notes on your mobile phone. I created this to learn App Engine and plan on doing this on Azure and AWS as well.

"Azure for Web Developers" tutorials.

Quoted: The Azure™ Services Platform is designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web applications and services. Learn more about the elements of Azure for web developers: Windows® Azure and Live Services below.