ICON’s Chief Technology Officer Gareth Gauci presented at the Windows Azure bootcamp organised by Microsoft and the Tech-Spark user group. Mainly targeted at developers and IT professionals the bootcamp was held at the Microsoft Innovation Centre at Skyparks on April 27th.
The one day event was part of a global initiatve to organise and execute the Windows Azure Bootcamp at more than 96 locations across the globe on the same day. This initiative was a huge success and ICON successfully executed this event in Malta. The local 7-hour workshop was presented by Gareth Gauci who has a lot of experience on developing and managing real-world applications deployed on Windows Azure.
The day started with an overview of cloud computing in general and what Windows Azure brings to the table. Then throughout the next sessions different Windows Azure technologies were used including Platform-as-a-service (Cloud Services) Infrastructure-as-a-service (Virtual Machines) Azure storage (blobs tables and queues) as well as relational databases SQL Azure.
As part of the bootcamp attendees also took part in a global load experiment all deploying hundreds of virtual machines all working together as part of a grid computing network deployed on Windows Azure. Participants recorded 3D scenes using a Kinect controller and submitted the recording to the grid computing network whereby a polyray 3D animation was rendered in parallel.
What usually would take days or weeks to render was done within minutes. A central monitoring website was created that recorded how many computing instances and frames rendered by each country and we’re glad to say that Malta was 9th across the world for rendered frames!
“Windows Azure is a very interesting platform especially for Maltese companies! For the first time there’s a platform that opens up powerful capabilities at economies-of-scale pricing. I believe that in the next 5 to 10 years we’ll see an exodus of web applications migrating to cloud hosting services such as Azure. The rest will be left behind.” explained Gareth Gauci after the event.
Event sponsored by Pluralsight.
