About Computing in the Cloud

Cloud computing is the most evolving technology in recent days. Microsoft with their cloud offering with Windows Azure has done a considerable work towards the technology and evangelizing the same in different cities all over the world. Some of the community initiatives which almost every country irrespective of how small or how big, has done are Global Azure bootcamp and Cloud OS Roadshow. Being in Siliguri, we are generally deprived of such events, but it is us (Inspiria) who went ahead and did this event for the first time with Microsoft which was a great success.

It was a bright Sunday morning, people started to gather for the event at Inspiria campus on Enterprise Ready Cloud Roadshow. It was not only a gathering of youngsters, but of a mixed group. It was an enthusiastic crowd, ready to learn and explore all the new aspects and technology on Cloud Computing and Microsoft Azure.

Session started with a brief introduction of Cloud Computing and the general introduction with concepts. Mr. Abhishek demonstrated the actual power of cloud and windows Azure with introduction to different approaches of cloud and its types like SAAS (Software as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a service) and IAAS (Infrastructure as a service). The presentation covered a quick demo by hosting a small Website in Windows Azure and demonstrating how you can create and publish a website within minutes by using Visual Studio. The demo also demonstrated how to use Server explorer for quick handling and debugging the remote cloud services deployed in cloud.

The session was about mobile backend, the new PAAS as Mobile service introduced in Azure which help developers to quickly build a mobile backend service with all the basic functionalities like data storage, Push message handling etc. The speaker had created a new application for Windows 8.1 Store and used the created Mobile services to show the APIs which would allow the developers to store / retrieve data from cloud. The application also showed a real-time push messages passed from Cloud to the application as toast notification.

The third session was about Machine learning. The speaker introduced the functionalities of Machine learning component in cloud and threw some light by developing an experiment which demonstrated the trend of Adult income with Predictive Decision algorithm. The speaker also showed how you can use this learning experiment and use it as a web service to determine the probability and do a prediction based on sample data findings.

The fourth session is all about IOT (Internet of things). The speaker showed the latest Intel Galileo board and how you can program over the chip with embedded windows OS running on and write algorithms which can access different types of sensor to produce data. He continued to use Windows Azure event hubs to produce stream analytics from the device and showed us reports. A brief introduction of header files and C++ coding styles was an additional takeaway from the event.

The most important thing to deal in software world is Data. Mr. Abhishek came up again with his storage session to demonstrate scalable data storage service over app-fabric which can be used to store and retrieve data at low cost and using standard REST AP’s. The session demonstrated the concepts with hands on demo which makes the attendees aware of the concept and enable them to create an Azure based data service.

Mr. Sumantro demonstrated the backup and disaster recovery techniques in Azure. The session started with Windows Azure 101 and helped the attendees to learn the power of Azure and how to handle a catastrophe. The session demonstrated the Affinity Group, CDN and Availability sets which can be configured while creating virtual machines for disaster recovery.