[dba-VB] Calling all you guys interesting in Cloud Computing -Azure / S3 / EC and Scrum techniques

Hi Mark --

Yes, I'm interested in subject software development techniques/technologies.

Thank you for your nomination but I have to leave Chief Scientist position
to somebody else here as it promise to be very time consuming and it could
be rather troublesome for the subject distributed computing/development
techniques (see below), and I will not have free time for that activity in
the coming half an year/year - I can currently only accept "Chief Lurker"
position with casual participation in code review discussions and testing.

Please take the lead in this project.

Thank you.

-- Shamil

P.S. Based on experience of our last year first SCRUM project I'd first of
all try to develop a distributed virtual team development infrastructure,
and I'd not rely on somebody's of the team having free/available server(s)
to be used by others or CodePlex (I'd use CodePlex as secondary code
repository/public discussion area only) - the mentioned above "distributed
virtual team development infrastructure" should be available for anybody (of
the team) to clone on any (ASP.NET) hosting site to be used in their own
projects/purposes - that goal IMO would "pour a good portion of fuel" in the
beginning of this project as having such an infrastructure would save a lot
of time in long run...

P.P.S. Welcome to the world of "big trouble and painful learning
experiences"! - read first "Fallacies of Distributed Computing"
http://michael.toren.net/mirrors/eight-fallacies-of-distributed-computing/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing   


-----Original Message-----
From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Mark Breen
Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 2:29 PM
To: Discussion concerning Visual Basic and related programming issues.;
Discussion of Hardware and Software issues; Discussion concerning MS SQL
Server
Subject: [dba-VB] Calling all you guys interesting in Cloud Computing -Azure
/ S3 / EC and Scrum techniques

Hello Guys,

Last year Shamil kicked off a scrum team which about five / six people
participated in.  We did a project and it was fun.  I think one or two
people ended up with the lions share of the work but in general it was fun
and the project is more or less complete / dormant now and is available on
codeplex.

I would love if we could do another project whereby we create a real world,
demo app that runs on Azure or S3.

I know almost nothing about it but I am intrigued to imagine that both my
data (my Database) and my application (my IIS Server and IIS Code)  are all
running on thousands of different servers and yet never on any one
particular machine.

If I understand it right, Azure / S3 / EC is not virtual, or even clustered
servers:  it is a service that offer interfaces for running objects or
processing and storing data.

Would we like to start a project designed with the intention of learning
cloud computing?

I would nominate Shamil to be a Chief Scientist and CEO, I would take his
lead in all things technical, and I would suggest that us mere mortals do
the heavy lifting, IOW we do not end up forcing Shamil or Gustav to be
pushed into quietly writing the code but we do it and we share the workload
and we all learn.  Shamil will guide is and assist but he will not write our
homework for us.  We have to learn it ourselves.

If we do it, I would suggest that we take it one step at a time and for the
first version, we create an application to store the just the Customers
table in the cloud.  When all interested parties have built that and seen it
working really live, we can move on to Order and Products etc.  Maybe
finally, we could even put in a credit card processing element, or VAT
number verification (like Gustav mentioned last year).

I am also interested in exploring Amazons S3 and EC2

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/>http://aws.amazon.com/
<http://aws.amazon.com/>http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
<http://aws.amazon.com/s3/>http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/>What else do we need to read up on,
 we actually need a program of education for the next six months.  By that
time we might be telling all customers "Sql Server is the old way, nowadays
I only store data in the cloud" ;)

BTW, I have not spoken to Shamil about this, and I hope he does not mind
me nominating him, I think that his technical leadership in our group over
so long qualifies him for this role (for this project anyway).

Thanks to all you good friends,

Mark