About the Authors
Chris Hay is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev, an international conference speaker, and cofounder of a .NET usergroup in Cambridge, UK (http://nxtgenug.net/). He has spent part of the past year working and living in India. Brian H. Prince is an Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, cofounder of the nonprofit organization CodeMash (www.codemash.org), and a speaker at various regional and national technology events. He lives in Westerville, Ohio. In their own words, here’s what they say about how they came to Azure.
My day job involves building some of the largest m-commerce systems in the world. When Microsoft announced Windows Azure to the world at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in 2008, I immediately thought of how I could use the cloud as part of the systems I was actively building.
Of all of the key scenarios for using the cloud, dynamic scaling is one of the most well-known. I was hoping that the promise of massive numbers of servers and a simplified platform would be able to meet my enormous scale needs, while making it easier to build large-scale systems. Azure offered the promise of being able to deploy an application into the cloud and have an automated deployment and provisioning system, with a complete abstraction of the underlying physical infrastructure. This book is focused on exploring those promises, and seeing how they worked out.