And yet, when I go talk to customers in Australia about moving their sites across to Windows Azure, some of them are reluctant to move to the cloud citing two major concerns: Data sovereignty/regulatory requirements and network latency worries.

The reason for these concerns is that Microsoft has 6 regions around the world where Windows Azure is run from, and none of them are based in Australia. But with the announcement today that Microsoft are opening a new Australia region with two sub-regions – one in NSW, and one in VIC, it makes it easier for these companies to finally make the jump.

Data sovereignty/regulatory requirements

Data sovereignty concerns, stem from the fact that the data, which is actually stored in another country, could be subject to the laws of that country. Companies are afraid that once the data leaves the shores of Australia, they lose control on who has access to it. I have heard people quote the Patriot Act every so often, saying the “Feds” can now get their data easily. Most of these fears arise out of the lack of knowledge around these issues. If your data is legal, you really have nothing to fear about things such as the Patriot Act, but that is another story. (And of course, if you’ve broken the law and the “Feds” need access to your data, even if stored in Australia, it is highly likely that will get to it – but like I said, that is another story)

What you need to really worry about is that there are some regulations (both industry as well as government) that could cause problems for you if the data leaves the shores of Australia.

But now that Microsoft will have a data center in Australia, you do not really have to worry about it.

One other thing that excites me about the new announcement is that the new Australia region will have two datacenters and they will provide geo-replication of data without affecting sovereignty and regulatory issues.

Network Latency

As all the Windows Azure data centers currently reside outside Australia, there is always going to be some amount of network latency, when the data is accessed from Australia (unless it is exposed via a CDN). It could take several hops in some instance to get to the data, and that could be a problem for some applications. Well written web applications that are hosted within Azure, with its data also residing in the same data center may not necessarily be problematic. Although there may still be latency issues with the delivery of webpages, most of the data transfer will happen within the data center and this will not be affected by latency issues.

Problems will arise mainly when the application resides outside the data center and the data resides within (or the other way around). You can re-architect your application to avoid some of these problems (make coarse grained calls, and making your application less chatty), but you get really good gains if the latency is reduced dramatically.

And that is what you will get when the Azure data centers are located within Australia, and applications that access them also reside locally. With this announcement from Microsoft, this is soon going to be a reality.

6 weeks of Azure is a program being run by Microsoft and lets you run through the Windows Azure Training Kit (WATK) at a nice easy to follow pace. You can attend two virtual meetings every week, where you get to learn about the things to do for the week (presentations and labs), and also ask questions. There are a bunch of handy links the program provides to get you up to speed.

You can also attend one of the boot camps if you want to come face to face with other people participating in the program and talk to the speakers and other experts. The best part of the 6 weeks of Azure program is that it is FREE .

Here are the details of the boot camp:

Melbourne
16 March 2013
10am-5pm
Monash University Law Chambers, Marsh Building, 555 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne VIC 3000
Register >
Add to Calendar

Sydney
23 March 2013
10am-5pm
Microsoft Offices
1 Epping Road
North Ryde 2113
Register >
Add to Calendar

Brisbane
27 March 2013
10am-5pm
Cliftons
288 Edward Street
Brisbane QLD 4000
Register >
Add to Calendar

Microsoft is also running Azure Dev Camps at Cliftons a day before the actual event.

If you are playing catch up, you can visit the Agenda page that contains links to all the previous presentations, videos and labs that you should have done by now (You can even watch the presentation I did yesterday for the event  )

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36837

What about the first poster, you ask? Here is the link to that:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=35473

From the p&p group:

• Autoscaling Application Block and Transient Fault Handling Application Block
• Building Elastic and Resilient Cloud Applications – Developer’s Guide to the Enterprise Library 5.0 Integration Pack for Windows Azure
• Building Hybrid Applications in the Cloud on Windows Azure
• Moving applications to the cloud

Others:

• Create your First Application: Node.js and Windows Azure
• Drupal on Windows Azure
• Migrating Data-Centric Applications to Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Prescriptive Guidance
• Windows Azure Service Bus Reference
• Programming Windows Azure 

(Not sure if I should be showing the last link, which I am not sure is a legal download! It’s a great book though)

There is also a heap of whitepapers available from Microsoft, that you may want to look at:

• https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/other-resources/white-papers/ 

http://prezi.com/fh4xbz60bprr/architecting-for-the-cloud/?auth_key=d3c9b14288cd3710eff6647e95eecedbaab29bd1