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High Availability vs. Disaster Recovery

Any good system that is targeting the public or the enterprise these days must be built to expect the unexpected. No system is perfect and at some point, something will happen that will render a system inoperative – a fire, a hurricane, an earthquake, human error – the list goes on. Because there are so…

Using Azure Active Directory to Add World-Class Security in Under an Hour

Thanks to all that made it out to the Azure in the ATL meetup last night and thanks to Microsoft and Agile Thought for sponsoring the event and to John Garland for leading the group.  Here are the slides from last night:  Using Azure Active Directory to Add World-Class Security in Under an Hour For…

Microsoft’s Privacy Suit Against Department of Justice Will Go Forward

A federal judge ruled Thursday that a lawsuit Microsoft filed against the U.S. Department of Justice to protect customer privacy can continue. At issue are so-called ‘gag orders’ that DOJ sometimes imposes on tech companies who have provided customer emails and other data to the department as part of an investigation. Microsoft says its customers…

A Brief Tour of Azure IoT Hub

I’m preparing some material for a webinar on Azure IoT in mid-October (you are signed up, aren’t you?) and thought I’d do a quick intro to the basic concepts and moving parts. Azure IoT Hub is a cloud-scale service for managing and securely communicating with large numbers of field devices (potentially millions at once); communication…

Microsoft Publishes REST API Guidelines

Microsoft has publicly shared its REST API design guidelines, the internal rules that its developers use to create cloud services. The guidelines recently became available on Github. “It’s our hope that by contributing our [guidelines] to the community conversation, we can add to the body of community knowledge and reusable content so that anyone can…

Microsoft Launches Venture Capital Group

Microsoft has started a formal venture fund to invest in early-stage companies working on cloud-related projects. Microsoft Ventures, announced in a company blog post Monday, aims to fill the gap between Microsoft’s large-scale investments and acquisitions and the assistance it provides to startups through its Microsoft Accelerator program. Among the products and services Microsoft is…

Microsoft: Gag Order Suit ‘Is About the Future of Cloud Technology’

A lawsuit filed by Microsoft against the U.S. Justice Department Thursday could determine the future of privacy in the cloud, Microsoft’s chief legal officer told Geekwire. The suit challenges the federal government’s use of secrecy orders to compel Microsoft and other technology companies to turn over customers’ information—without informing customers that they are targets in…

A Microsoft Project Orleans Primer

If you’ve been wanting to learn more about Microsoft’s Project Orleans programming model, this primer will give you the basic concepts you need to understand to get started. Actor Based Programming Actor based programming is designed to allow for objects representing multiple instances of related real-world artifacts to interact as independent single threaded entities in…

Amazon Releases New Cloud Services at re:Invent Conference

This is a big week for Amazon developers as Amazon’s annual web service developer conference kicks off in Las Vegas and the Day 1 keynote brought with it a slew of new product announcements.  Among them are a new Business Intelligence service, an interesting new device for transporting petabytes of data between data centers, and…

Azure Bits #4 – Adding the Azure Web Job

This post’s main objective was originally about completing the initial skeleton of uploading an image from a web page and generating a thumbnail from an Azure Web Job using Azure Blob Storage and Azure Queues, but it turned into a pretty large refactoring in anticipation of having something a bit more realistic to eventually post…

Cloud Saturday Atlanta – a Call for Speakers

Cloud Saturday is a new event for the Atlanta area, and we are currently looking for speaker submissions. The event is being planned for 9/26, and will be held in Alpharetta at Microsoft’s regional training facility. While Microsoft is a sponsor, this event is open to ALL cloud platforms. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and any other…

Amazon Releases New Developer Web Services

At the Amazon Web Services Summit in New York City last week, Amazon announced the availability of several new developer focused services.  These services include a hosted private Git repository service, a continuous deployment automation service, and a device testing farm service. Amazon API Gateway Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting…