Both of us have a passion for cloud computing and Windows Azure, and in this book we’d like to share with you what we’ve learned from working with the technology. We want to show you how to get the most out of Azure and how to best use the cloud.

Writing a book is a far more complex project than either of us expected, involving a lot of people, a lot of collaboration, and plenty of late nights hunched over a keyboard. We did it because we wanted to help you understand what happens inside Azure, how it works, and how you can leverage it as you work with your applications. We wanted to show you not only how to run your complete system in the cloud, but all the other ways you can leverage the cloud, specifically by using hybrid applications and distributed applications.

As we worked with all sorts of developers in our day jobs, we knew they could easily learn how to use the cloud, but they were all scared. We hadn’t seen people so afraid of a new technology that could help so much since web services came onto the scene years ago. We knew if developers would take a minute to play with Azure just a little bit, it would become less scary and more approachable. Ultimately, we wanted this book to answer the question, “What can Azure do, and why do I care?” We hope we’ve succeeded.

We’ve leveraged a lot of resources to write this book, and you might have been one of them. We worked in forums, we worked with other cloud techs, we crawled through every scrap of public Azure information we could find (even obscure blog posts in the dark corners of the internet), and we had personal conversations with Azure team members and anyone else we could get to take our calls. We leveraged our own experience and insight. Sometimes we guessed at how things work based on how we would have built Azure, and then pushed Microsoft to give us more details to see if we were right. We wrote a lot of code, and tried out ideas that we would get asked about at conferences, in forums, over email, and as responses to our articles.

The rest is history, with about a year of writing, rewriting, reviews, intense discussion, and coding. We faced two big challenges as a writing team. The first was PDC 2009. We knew that would be the coming-out party for Windows Azure with its official 1.0 release, and that a lot of what we had written up to that point would change. This involved rewriting most of our code, retaking all our screen shots, and changing a lot of our text. The second challenge was the time zone differences between us. With up to fourteen time zones separating us at times, our combined travel schedules exacerbated the time zone challenge. Much of this book was written in airports, hotels, at conferences, during late weekend hours, and at every other conceivable time and place.

Windows Azure was released for commercial availability on February 1, 2010, and by all accounts has been a huge success. Microsoft won’t publicly state how many applications have been deployed to Azure, but you can infer some trends from the case studies and press releases they make available. It looks like tens of thousands of applications (from small test apps to major internet-scale applications) have been deployed to Azure globally. The Azure teams ship new features about every 2_3 months. As a developer, it’s exciting to see so much innovation coming out of Microsoft on a platform you use. It’s gratifying to see the features that customers have asked for being deployed.

For book authors, the pace can be a little grueling, with things changing in the technology all the time, but maybe that just sets us up for a second edition. We hope you enjoy the book.