Chris Hay

Chris Hay is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev, an international conference speaker, and cofounder of a .NET usergroup in Cambridge, UK (http://nxtgenug.net/). He has spent part of the past year working and living in India.

My day job involves building some of the largest m-commerce systems in the world. When Microsoft announced Windows Azure to the world at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in 2008, I immediately thought of how I could use the cloud as part of the systems I was actively building.

Of all of the key scenarios for using the cloud, dynamic scaling is one of the most well-known. I was hoping that the promise of massive numbers of servers and a simplified platform would be able to meet my enormous scale needs, while making it easier to build large-scale systems. Azure offered the promise of being able to deploy an application into the cloud and have an automated deployment and provisioning system, with a complete abstraction of the underlying physical infrastructure.

Coupling this newfound passion with my long-held desire to someday write a book, I settled down to write the proposal that I would send to Manning, pitching my idea for a book titled Azure in Action. And a year later, here it is!