MVPs Present at the 2013 CloudBurst Conference

Cloud enthusiasts from around the world sat in, logged on and asked questions as MVPs presented at the 2013 CloudBurst conference.  Organized by MVPs Alan Smith and Magnus Mårtensson, the two-day conference sought to provide real-world content for Windows Azure developers and those wanting to explore the platform. 

"Good speakers, interesting topics and relevant sessions,” were among the buzz phrases during the conference.

CloudBurst demonstrates the passion and enthusiasm of MVPs and the Windows Azure development community.  One of the goals of the event was to provide the speakers the freedom to deliver great sessions and keep the event cost free for attendees. 

Videos for CloudBurst are (being) published as an Event on Channel9.

You can find the photos from the conference here

Congratulations to the following MVPs for their contributions to the 2013 CloudBurst conference:

Maarten Balliauw - Windows Azure MVP Maarten Balliauw is a Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. His interests are all web: ASP.NET MVC, PHP and Windows Azure. He's a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Windows Azure and an ASPInsider. He has published many articles in both PHP and .NET literature such as MSDN magazine and PHP architect. Maarten is a frequent speaker at various national and international events such as MIX (Las Vegas), TechDays, DPC, ... How it’s made: MyGet.org Ever wonder how some applications are built? Ever wonder how to combine components of the Windows Azure platform? Stop wondering and learn how we’ve built MyGet.org, a multi-tenant software-as-a-service. In this session we’ll discuss architecture, commands, events, access control, multi tenancy and how to mix and match those things together. Learn about the growing pains and misconceptions we had on the Windows Azure platform. The result just may be a reliable, cost-effective solution that scales.

[ @maartenballiauw | Blog ]

Andy Cross - Windows Azure MVP Andy Cross is an author, software consultant, cloud architect and co-owner of Elastacloud. His passion for distributed computing, big data and high performance compute sees him building massively scalable system utilising the limitless potential of the cloud. Andy’s specialism in the Cloud realm is big data, computation distribution, runtime diagnostics and service elasticity. He is a Windows Azure MVP, Insider, co-founder of the UK London Windows Azure User Group and a Microsoft DevPro Community Leader. Big Data for the Win!! Liberate yourself from the shackles of limited data processing. Embrace unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. Express your logic in best of breed technologies. Utilise thousands of cores of compute to learn how to win the Internet. Andy will explain different data structures and paradigms that can be effectively used to express them. Using Windows Azure, he will provision and interact with Hadoop, Mahout and Neo4j to mine massive data sets, learn and express meaning from them. Although embracing non-Microsoft technologies, this will be presented from a familiar place; hosted on Windows Azure and consumed with C#.

[ @andybareweb | Blog ]

Patriek Dorp, van - Windows Azure MVP Patriek van Dorp is a Technology Consultant for Microsoft technologies at Sogeti in The Netherlands. Over the last 5 years, he has specialized in Cloud Computing and Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform, Windows Azure. Patriek is passionate about bringing different technical communities with different skill sets together and introducing them to the Windows Azure platform. He co-founded the Dutch Windows Azure User Group this contributed to him receiving the MVP award for Windows Azure for three years in a row now. Bursting to the Cloud in 1 Hour Because applications seldom stand on their own, developers are more often facing challenges that cover skills of both Developers and IT Pros. In order to overcome these challenges, both expertises need to evolve towards each other. DevOps are born! This session will show developers how they can extend an existing on-premises infrastructure to the Cloud to facilitate their Cloud applications. The whole process will take no longer than 1 hour and can all be done from the comfort of Visual Studio.

[ @pvandorp | Blog ]

Magnus Mårtensson - Windows Azure MVP Magnus Martensson is the first Windows Azure MVP in Northern Europe. In his work as Technical Lead and Software Architect consultant he aids ISVs and other customers to take off and be successful in the Cloud as well as assists with project effectiveness and development process streamlining. Magnus is also a passionate international speaker and trainer and the next gig he would love to book is Yours! Cloud is the new Black... and all that Jazz! In this session join a true Cloud enthusiast in pondering the opportunities in the Cloud. Let’s talk about what makes the Cloud unique compared to non-cloud predecessors. We will look at the nature of Cloud Computing – service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity and semantic interoperability. How does this relate to the Modern App? How do I get going if I’m not a ‘Cloud enabled Developer’ today and is this urgent? We’ll talk about how to embrace the change. The session will underline the concepts with demos of services in the Windows Azure Platform.

[ @noopman | Blog ]

Mike Martin - Windows Azure MVP Mike is Microsoft Lead Consultant and Architect at Crosspoint Solutions (part of the Cronos group), a company with a strong focus on BI, Data and CRM. Mike is mainly focused on the complete Microsoft product stack and therefore very flexible to work with. He’s been active in the IT industry for over 15 years and has performed almost all types of job profiles, going from coaching and leading a team to architecting and systems design and training. Today he’s primarily into the Microsoft Cloud Platform and Application Lifecycle Management. He’s not a stranger to both dev and IT Pro topics. In January 2012 he became a crew member of AZUG, the Belgian Windows Azure User Group. As an active member he’s both involved in giving presentations and organizing events. Mike is also a Windows Azure MVP and Windows Azure Insider. Mike likes helping out in the community and introducing new & young people into the world of Microsoft and technology. Windows Azure though the eyes of an IT Pro and how to cope with Developers and Business Stakeholders The Job of an IT Pro is changing in every aspect. Windows Azure is there as an extend to your domain. Hence Windows Azure even gives you opportunities in areas you might not even have been involved yet. In this session we hand you some practical tips for the SDLC and really focus on those areas that you need to master to better understand the people you have to work with in your everyday environment. Topics here are maintenance and deployment of applications, and the set up of environments.

[ @TechMike2kX | Blog ]

Alan Smith - Windows Azure MVP Alan is from England and resident in Stockholm where he works as a consultant for Active Solution, a company specializing in Windows Azure and .NET development. He has been in the IT industry since 1995 and delivering training courses since 2005. Between courses he acts as a mentor and coach to other developers and teams, sharing his knowledge of Windows Azure to improve their project development. He also works closely with Microsoft, taking part in technology preview programs, attending software design reviews and providing feedback to development teams. Alan has an active role in the developer community running a local Windows Azure user group as well as playing a leading role in organizing the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp and the CloudBurst conference in Sweden. He is a frequent presenter at conferences and user groups in Sweden and around Europe and has held the Microsoft MVP award for nine years, currently as an MVP for Windows Azure. Handling Big Data in Windows Azure Storage Windows Azure Storage provide massively scalable storage services with local and geo-redundancy. Organizations can store terabytes of data off-site and in a reliable, highly available and cost efficient manner. For those of you wishing to explore the capabilities of Windows Azure Storage there are bound to be a number of questions that will arise. Can a blob storage container really handle millions of blobs effectively? How efficient is a Table Storage query when the table contain over a billion entities? How can these data volumes be uploaded reliably and effectively? How can the usage and billing of a data intensive solution be monitored? This demo-intensive session will answer these questions and show how big data scenarios can be effectively implemented using Windows Azure Storage. The Windows Azure Storage API will be covered in depth, along with techniques to increase the speed and reduce the cost of uploading data to Windows Azure. A solution storing the 4.3 million articles that make up the English Wikipedia content and providing a simple text index search will be used as a case study.

[ @alansmith | Blog ]

Michael Wood - Windows Azure MVP Michael Wood is a Senior Application Developer for Resurgent Capital Services. He describes himself as a problem solving, outdoorsy, user group founding, dog-loving, blog writing, solution creating, event planning, married, technology speaking, father of one kind of guy. When he's not living up to that title he's an avid reader, (horrible) violinist and gamer. Michael is one of the Founding Directors of the Cincinnati .NET User Group in the States as well as the founder of the Cincinnati Software Architecture Special Interest Group. He is also a Microsoft MVP in Windows Azure. Dependable Cloud Architecture Felix Baumgartner jumped from over 128,000 feet to break a world record for sky diving. An image was posted to a Facebook account after his landing and in 40 minutes it had logged over 216,000 likes, 10,000 comments, and 29,000 shares. The Pottermore website, digital home to one of the world’s greatest known Wizards, saw a billion (with a “B”) page views just two weeks after it launched and was signing up new users at a rate of 25,000 per day. Whether you need this level of instant scalability, or you are simply wanting to be ready for it when your own idea takes off the cloud allows you to create solutions that can scale easily and have high availability, however, these do not come automatically. You need to know how best to leverage a cloud platform to achieve these capabilities successfully. This presentation focuses on architecture patterns and coding techniques that help provide reliable cloud solutions. While the content for this presentation can be applied to many cloud platforms the examples will be given using Windows Azure.

[ @mikewo | Blog ]