Azure Austin

Yesterday's Austin .NET User Group meeting hosted the kickoff of Azure Austin which is a new and different user group spearheaded by Jeffrey Palermo meeting in tandem with the Austin .NET User Group just this once. Jeffrey presented some on Infrastructure as a Service which, as mentioned here, is more or less all about the art of spinning up VMs in Azure and emphasized:

1. The expected over the exotic: The way everyone is used to interacting with a data center or other cloud environments is based in making remote desktop connections to other machines, be they VMs or physical servers. Azure has a lot more crazy, exotic features, but Infrastructure as a Service is what we all know already.
2. The expected, quickly: The data center interactions we all know may now be had quickly. Instead of putting in requests to your datacenter to turn x off and y on, you can just do it yourself, waiting minutes instead of hours. Azure Infrastructure as a Service is thus what you are used to, but better.
3. Endpoints, the exception to the expected: One exception to what I suggest above lies in the Azure concept of endpoints which are holes in the Azure firewalls that allow for ports in. This model is different from merely using Windows Firewall, but then in a traditional datacenter one would have Cisco or SonicWall or something more sophisticated anyways. The endpoints paradigm are Azure's better way of doing the firewall. A Matt Hester spoke at this event too and he touched on endpoints heavily.