The Global Windows Azure Bootcamp is on 27 April - happening in several locations globally on the same day.

What is the Windows Azure Bootcamp?

A one day deep dive class that will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Windows Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned.

Where is it happening and how much does it cost?

This event is FREE for the attendees, so find the location closest to you and sign up today! For our customers and partners in Central & Eastern Europe, we have bootcamps happening in Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia.

If you don’t see a location that is convenient for you and you would like to organize such an event, contact the team to discuss hosting one in your country!

We’ve made some really great announcements related to Windows Azure recently.

Firstly, we’ve announced the acquisition of MetricsHub, a service that automates cloud performance management and helps customers manage their cloud services more efficiently. Read about how they do this by continuously collecting data, making intelligent decisions based on what they collect, and scaling cloud services up or down to match current demand. This inherently allows customers to cut unnecessary costs while supporting periods of peak demand. The MetricsHub approach to automating performance optimization, while reducing cost, with little effort on the part of customers is what makes the service so attractive.

How do you get your hands on this great service? All Windows Azure customers can get started today: with the announcement of a pre-release, no charge, version of MetricsHub’s Active Cloud Monitoring which is available now through the Windows Azure Store.  You can learn more at the MetricsHub site.

Secondly, we’ve made a bunch of announcements with regard to the Windows Azure platform and technical/feature updates. Take a look at Scott Guthrie’s blog post here which outlines the details of all these updates:

• Mobile Services: Android support, East Asia Region Support, iOS dev content
• SQL Reporting Services: Support in the management portal
• Active Directory: Support in the azure management portal, user and domain management
• Availability Monitoring for Cloud Services. Virtual Machines, Web Sites, and Mobile Services
• Service Bus: New configuration tab and metrics
• Storage: Ability to download blobs directly in management portal
• Media Services: New monitoring metrics and quickstart experience
• Cloud Services: Support for .cer certificate files upload
• Localization:  support for five new languages
• Windows Azure Store: Support in 22 Additional Countries

I am fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with customers and partners across Central & Eastern Europe talking with them about their adoption of or hesitation about cloud computing, topics I thoroughly enjoy. I hear a broad range of interesting perspectives, objections, concerns, benefits, etc….basically, the good, the bad, and the ridiculous.

One of the most common conversations I have has to do with customer’s concerns over lack of control and the location of their data when moving applications or services to the public cloud domain. These are of course natural and pragmatic concerns, and they should absolutely be discussed and addressed. But, this shouldn’t be paralyzing. There are almost certainly workloads in every organization that could reap the benefits of cloud computing and by putting a ‘no public cloud’ rule in place, IT leaders might be exposing themselves to an unpleasant surprise…and that is the “rogue” cloud.

I was talking with one of my colleagues recently who told me a story about visiting a customer in Poland to discuss Windows Azure (more specifically using IaaS Virtual Machines for their development & test environment). The IT Manager was absolutely adamantly against it: a ‘no public cloud’ rule is instituted. Later, my colleague was approached by someone in the IT department who disclosed that he uses AWS to spin up virtual machines for testing because it takes too long to get a VM via their private cloud. How does he pay for this? With his own personal credit card and then he expenses it back to the organization.

Now, sometimes rogue cloud is unintentional. For example, take the marketing manager who adopts a SaaS platform for tracking leads from a digital marketing effort. This could very likely be done without ever thinking to involve IT.

In either case, the rogue cloud is something that IT needs to be cognizant of and they should have a plan for the best way to handle both the intentional and unintentional scenarios.

CA Technologies’ Vice President of Strategic Solutions, Andi Mann, recently guest authored an article on Cloud Times about this topic. He raised a few very valid points for consideration. Andy points out that IT has to:

• recognize the expansion of the rogue cloud
• innovate approaches that help the business manage the risk while
• recognizing the benefits users are getting from it, and
• find ways to securely deliver those benefits to the organization at large.

In taking this approach, the rogue cloud could become an inspiration instead of a threat.

What do you think?

Nasuni has released their 2013 State of Cloud Storage report. Last year Amazon held the top spot, but Windows Azure has outperformed all other major providers to take the top spot this year! Windows Azure not only ranked #1 in the categories of performance and availability, but was the only cloud storage provider with ZERO read and write errors. Check out the infographic here and download the full report here.

The content from //build has now been posted. Check out the 25+ sessions focused on Windows Azure here. And if you’re looking for a summary of the highlights and announcements that were made about Windows Azure, read this post from my colleague, Brent Stineman.

Forrester analyst James Staten attended //build and wrote this fanastic article about Windows Azure. ‘You’re running out of excuses to not try Microsoft Windows Azure‘. These are some of the best points from the article:

• “…this cloud service has become a serious contender for the top spot in cloud platforms.“
• “Microsoft said it now has over 100,000 separate named accounts using Azure, is adding thousands per month, and compute use is doubling every six months.”
• “If you are a government agency, an airline, a pharmaceutical maker, media company, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, an oil company, or a financial services firm, your peers are already using Windows Azure.”
• “Our surveys of developers, development managers, and even I&O pros show Microsoft as a top-five most used cloud platform.”
• “Where Microsoft is differentiating itself centers around its integration with the on-premises world.“