I was invited to give a talk at DevReach 2012 – the largest developer conference in South-Eastern Europe. DevReach 2012 will host 60+ sessions in 6 parallel tracks (Web, Mobile, Cloud, Architecture, Agile and Testing) in 2 days. It will be held in Sofia (4-5 October) and is organized by Telerik and Martin Kulov.

My Talk at DevReach 2012: Public .NET Clouds

In the last year I got solid experience about cloud development, public cloud platforms, cloud database, storage and other cloud services. I organized a practical cloud development course at Telerik Academy last year. I teach C# and JavaScript and I focus on .NET and HTML5 platforms, so I am notably interested in .NET clouds. I have researched many clouds that claim to provide .NET cloud platform but most of them do not really provide .NET PaaS solution, but just IaaS cloud hosting, which is different. My lecture and demonstration will be about the public .NET PaaS platforms: “Public Cloud Platforms for .NET Developers”.

.NET Public Clouds – Video

Public .NET Clouds – Presentation

.NET Public Clouds – Downloads

• The .NET Clouds presentation: Nakov-Public.NET-Clouds-DevReach-2012.pptx
• The demos (ASP.NET MVC app deployed on AppHarbor and Uhuru AppCloud): Nakov-.NET-Clouds-DevReach-Demo-MessagesWebApp.rar

Public Cloud Platforms for .NET Developers

Public clouds platforms are rapidly growing and many businesses move partially or fully their IT infrastructure to the cloud. The big players like Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Amazon operate their own public cloud platforms while the smaller players provide cloud services and PaaS platforms and on top of the larger. What about the .NET developers and the cloud?

In this talk the speaker will introduce the public .NET clouds and will compare the leading .NET PaaS clouds: Windows Azure, AppHarbor, Uhuru and AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET. The .NET public clouds will be compared in terms of architecture, programming model, pricing, development stack, available services, deployment model and tools for administration and monitoring. A live demo will show how to deploy and run a typical .NET application (based on ASP.NET MVC and MS SQL Server) in AppHarbor and Uhuru.

I will not show a demo about Amazon AWS and Beanstalk for .NET as well as about Azure. Azure and AWS will be well covered at DevReach 2012 and it will be more practical to demonstrate the other .NET cloud platforms: AppHarbor and Uhuru. In fact most public clouds like Heroku, Engineyard, OpenShift and CloudBees, Oracle and VMware do not support .NET as a development and deployment stack. You have two options: use IaaS and handle the entire architecture and deployment yourself or use some of the four main players at the .NET public cloud market (as of September 2012):

• Windows Azure and SQL Azure – the Microsoft’s .NET cloud which requires to adopt and partially rewrite your application to run in the cloud. Many developers avoid it due to high prices and the differences in the platform.
• Amazon AWS Beanstalk for .NET – the Amazon AWS cloud adapted for .NET developers. It is in fact a mix of IaaS service well suited for .NET development and deployments and Amazon’s PaaS services. Many developers prefer it, but I personally don’t like Amazon because the charge for resources which are not allocated and not in use.
• AppHarbor – my favorite .NET public cloud. It has free version for testing and deployment of small applications and is really made easy for developers, pure .NET platform and APIs, scalable, with many plugin services.
• Uhuru – the other public .NET cloud which has free version for testing and small .NET applications. It is based on a solid general purpose cloud platform, the CloudFoundry, adapted to support Windows and .NET.

DevReach 2012 – New PowerPoint Template

At each large conference where I am speaker, I need to fix and improve the PowerPoint template that the organizers send to the speakers for the conference slides. I don’t know why but seems like designers are hired to make good looking slides and their design does not cover all use cases for typical developer conference slides (e.g. consistent colors, layout showing source code, layout for titles slides, layout for normal slides, layout for the questions slide).

For all DevReach 2012 speakers I provide my fixed version of the PowerPoint (PPTX) template (with my presentation included in it):

• Nakov-Public.NET-Clouds-DevReach-2012.pptx

The improvements over the original DevReach PPTX template are:

• 1st, 2nd, 3rd, … level of text – with similar colors like the original design
• Fixed the “Title Slide” slide layout
• Fixed the “Title and Content” slide layout
• Fixed all broken colors
• Created a source code template