UP UP AND AWAY!

I've been spending a lot of time the last few years on cloud development and have been getting more and more questions about how it all works, why we to do it, and how to go beyond the basics. In this blog I'm going to focus on creating cloud applications (Cumulo) using agile methods (Nimblus). Most of these blog posts will be technical how-to's, but some will be descriptive of general architecture and often the posts will be process related.

It's not enough just to talk about putting a web page on a cloud server. We need to think about things like:

• Creating a cloud environment that includes both production instances and test instances
• Managing security certificates in a team environment so that multiple people can help debug problems in prod
• Setting up continuous integration builds with automated testing for the web apps
• Symbol servers for stepping through your apps in production

In short we're going to engineer big applications in the cloud.

For technology, we'll focus on Azure because of the breadth and depth of Microsoft's cloud technology. The pace of innovation at Microsoft has been staggering lately. They're bringing their technology into the cloud environments, making it easier to deploy apps on production servers, and also embracing key open standard and open source technologies like HTML5, Node, and JQuery. It's a great time to be a developer and I hope the posts in this blog add to our development community.