What App Fabric brings to the cloud is an Enterprise Message Bus that enables some pretty impressive functionality. They focused on four elements that make up the service bus: Eventing, Tunneling, Service Remoting, and Discovery.
The details of these four elements are pretty impressive. Instead of getting into the details and paraphrasing these guys, let me talk about some of the cool application of this 4 point attack.
Eventing - Handles multi-cast subscriber message relaying. Imagine sending a single message to an Event hub and having all subscribers informed instantaneously. Think of how this changes your pub/sub models. Furthermore, there are message buffers here (Note - they are not MSMQ and are not durable queues).
Remoting - Nothing super impressive here except app fabric will leverage SOA and WCF services/investments.
Discovery - Default is an ATOM feed. However, with a little majic from Joval's utility classes, you can have a fully programmatic discovery of services being broadcast (currently not enabled in app fabric from my understanding of Joval and Clemens back and forth). Joval has extended discovery to include announcements - something that is currently not available out of the box. Very cool.
Tunnelling - This is where things got above my head. Ultimately the built in tunnelling ability of app fabric can tunnel down into any on premis asset that isn't plugged into WCF. Think about how you might move an application to the cloud yet many of the tight coupling hooks are back to non-cloud non-internet accessible links.
The real interesting part of all this was a small backhanded statement by Joval to Clemense. Clemense remarked that it was 'taking a while for an demo to start and Joval should upgrade his notebook'. Joval responded - 'This is Gods notebook, 8 cores, 8 gigs of ram - what does that say of your software Clemense?'. I think this highlights perhaps a chink in the azure app fabric armour. How computationally intense is it for some of these services to initiate? Time and examples will tell.
The second presentation of the day before packing it in for the week was put on by Karen Forster. Trying my hand at understanding the full cost or even hidden costs of rolling out a solution. This presentation's key nugget was the idea of: Spaghetti Infrastructure (not just code). Clean, linear vertical IT stack:
Finally there was the MS Tech Ed Party - this was an interesting event. Showing up to Mardi Gras world was a little... peculiar. This is where they store a ton of the Mardi Gras floats, I was met with what looked like the Burger King mascot that left me feeling like I should turn around and find bourbon street. But the lure of free beer kept me strong. That was about the only good thing about the party - free beer, but even then, they ran out of good free beer quickly and people started leaving when only Bud Light was left. What does that tell you about bud light that people who make a decent living are willing to go buy their own booze on Bourbon street then take it for free. I felt sorry for anyone who paid the $125 sticker value to get in.
Regardless of the lack luster final party the conference was stellar. The energy was great and the set up was awesome. There were a few glitches with the wifi/internet dying for a complete afternoon - rendering some demo's useless (especially cloud computing ones... take now - perhaps another 'chink' in the armour).
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