I attended the Biz Start-up Camp April 12/13 2010. This was my birthday weekend but it is not unlike me to do something geeky.
This was a great experience to be able to play with and see Azure SQL and PHP. My friend Erle attended with me and we presented our concept at the end of the camp. Having access to the technical support team was great. We created some basic connectors in PHP for Azure SQL. I was able to finally get to the bottom of the issue I was having with local Azure storage replication for testing and development.
There was presentations from venture capitalists who where able to provide us with some tips and good advice. As well as just general business discussions and best practices for looking at moving your current idea to the cloud.
Some interesting things we learn’t where that deploying an application or service to the cloud is easy for GPL code and does not break licensing agreements. The Azure cloud will live in Singapore, there will not be a cloud facility located in Australia. This means that the data stored on the Azure cloud would be governed under Singapore data regulations. This could be an issue for some developers depending on their terms and agreements with their user base.
So all in all it was a great two days.
http://blog.bartjellema.com/2010/04/11/azure-bizspark-camp-sydney/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bizspark_au/archive/2010/04/13/first-bizspark-camp-in-australia-wrap-up.aspx