new CloudApp()

Microsoft hasn’t even released Azure yet, still they felt compelled to start a little developer competition. And SDX is participating… .

During the last 4 weeks a team of my colleagues has put together a working application, simulating an actual business scenario. Starting at point zero, coming up with a meaningful idea – in terms of a cloud solution, and putting together a working application, is quite some achievement. Congrats, guys.

Now business scenario sounds a little drab, and banking, especially related to credits, may not actually cause people to applaud hilariously these days. But frankly, since the winner is decided by a community voting and we never thought about that application as particularly “sexy”, we never aimed for that goal. Our aim was to demo the potential of the cloud. Nothing less.

And that’s what the application does. It takes big amounts of data (storage), runs advanced statistical calculations (Monte Carlo simulations) (compute), and delivers the results. Since these are peek time usages, we may use several worker roles to scale out the calculations, cutting back when they are not needed (dynamic provisioning). Exactly what the cloud is about.

And what I really do like is that it doesn’t stop there. Service Bus may be leveraged to integrate this application with “local” solutions, calling back when the calculation has finished. SQL Data Services (once they become available with reporting) may be used for longtime data mining and trend analysis. One can even think of producing information needed to calculate a single credit contract and using Live Mesh to distribute it among the sales people.

So, check it out: http://ratingsimulator.cloudapp.net/  

That’s all for now folks,
AJ.NET