Last week, Windows hosted a by-invitation only event called Windows Azure Conference  held on 20-21st March, 2014 in Bengaluru, India. The event was an announcement and a manifesto expressing Window’s bifurcation of its attention from licensed software to include Cloud services.

We’re proud to say that Vinfotech was invited to be a part of Windows Azure Conference. We picked a few of our senior .Net developers Ritesh Modi, Satish Patidar and Lokendra Solanki to attend the conference on our behalf.

On their return, we interview our developers about what they learned and how we can use this new knowledge for the future of Vinfotech and to enable greater control and greater achievement for our development processes and for our clients.

First off gentlemen, congratulations and welcome back. Tell us a little bit about the event and what was it about?

SP: It was event by Microsoft cloud services, to explore limitless possibilities and vast opportunities made possible by Windows Azure.

RM: Windows Azure is a Cloud platform offered by Microsoft. Along with Windows Azure subscription we get around 17 different type of service that we can use to deploy our application. Windows Azure can be used in both Cloud and Hybrid environment. Windows Azure conference was primarily for Developer, IT professionals and in some cases the End User who want to host their application on Windows Azure.

LS: Windows azure is platform for Organizations and IT Professionals to deploy their services/application/app on it. Its new punch line is "Think Aloud Think Cloud".

What was the importance of this event for Vinfotech as an organization?

RM: This event was really helpful for us to understand the all the service offered by Windows Azure deeply and get a chance to explore the Live demo of each that will help us to provide share knowledge with Team and customer so that we can give suggest the right approach.

SP: Importance for Vinfotech is in following ways –

• To explore cloud services those are new to Vinfotech.
• To validate our current development and deployment strategies.
• How to simplify hybrid cloud models with multi-tenancy and cross-cloud connectivity with Windows Azure by our side.
• To find out various ways and services that can benefit our applications.

LS: Event is really very informative for all of us we learn a lot and get a chance to explore the new services provided by Windows Azure. Which help us to provide the proper solution to our customers.

What are the near future and long term plans that include using this information from WAC for Vinfotech?

LS: In this event we understand and learn about the new services provided by Microsoft windows azure. With the help of this information we got the direction and near future we will use these services for our upcoming projects.

SP:

• Nowadays data related to any application is very large so we can use BigData (Hadoop) for our future plan.
• For future projects we can use caching techniques to improve performance of applications.
• In future we can move our code to cloud based services, so that anybody can have access resource without any difficulty.
• We can explore new possibilities with Hybrid cloud.

RM:

• We will provide the help to current and future projects to troubleshoot the issues.
• What are the feature Window Azure provide to us
• We will explore the services on which we are working and many get a chance to work in future will in depth and will share it with other projects.

Individually, what did you learn and observe and what was the quality/event that stood out most in your view?

RM: We get a chance to meet the team who is developing the Windows Azure Product and cross question them about the product.

• We get the knowledge of what are the things we need to keep in mind while working with SQL Azure.
• How we can troubleshoot the issue occur in SQL Azure using system views.
• How we can host the Open Source application on Windows Azure and how to Split load using Loadbalancer on virtual machine.

SP: Events like this are most important from a developer point of view. Following are our learnings from this event –

• BigData (Hadoop) was a quality topic for us.
• Different caching techniques.
• Service Bus and Messaging.
• Different storage techniques.
• Hybrid cloud services.

LS:

• It will help us to grow in cloud environment.
• Using the Windows Azure mobile services we will do much better for mobile apps.
• We have explored how to work with big data and improving application performance.
• How to write optimum SQL queries.
• Understand the Hadoop framework for big data handling.
• How to configure and deploy the Open Source projects on Azure Platform.

Q5: What do you think should our ambitions should be, when factoring the WAC and what we learned from there?

SP: It was a big learning experience; we have explored some things that were completely new to us. There are some things that we were already familiar with and have been using with our current projects. Now that the world is moving towards cloud services and we have to keep our team updated with these technology trends so that we can provide the best solutions to our customers.

LS: We have worked on Windows Azure Cloud since last 4 years. We were aware of many aspects of Azure, but day by day Azure is growing and providing so many new services, that we have to keep ourselves updated these new services and attending this event was a good starting point.

Vinfotech is a web and mobile app development and design firm catering to startups and enterprises alike. We’re here for your web and mobile application development requirements. Take a look at web services we offer and give us a call. Let’s build the future together.