Interview with Dave Nielsen on PoC Projects in Azure

While I was out at the MVP Summit in early March I got the chance to do an interview with Dave Nielsen (one of the founders of Cloud Camp) for his Dave on Azure series.  They’ve just released all the interviews from that day on YouTube (embedded below), but will be featuring each independently over on the MSDN Bytes site.

This was a fun interview; however, in watching this I realize I answered almost every question starting with “well…”. 

I think using Cloud Computing for simple proof of concepts (PoC) is a very viable option.  Of course, your mileage my vary if you have a very environment specific scenario you are trying to plan out, but if it’s just a standard web application then you could leverage cloud computing to ensure you have the resources for demoing the application or testing without having to worry about sharing resources with other projects or stealing time on other boxes between their test cycles.

I also think this is a great use of resources for demoing progress or showcasing applications to clients.  You can have a script setup to deploy your application or demo to the cloud a few minutes before your presentation, give the review and then shut it all down afterwards.  This helps ensure you have the resources when you need them and saves money on just utilizing those resources when you are actually using them.