In our first Webinar of the year four experts on cloud computing gave us valuable information on how to deploy a cloud app running on Windows. The Webinar had four different guest speakers: Cole Humphreys and Thomas Duesing from Rackspace and Juan de Abreu and Juan Diego Raimondi from Making Sense.

In only an hour the four experts talked about their own experience working together to create the recently launched application “Rackspace cloud for Windows 8.” The fact that all four speakers were highly involved in the project enabled them to talk about useful strategies, obstacles, and achievements while working in a challenging project.

Cole Humphreys, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Rackspace Hosting, began the webinar by introducing Rackspace as the service leader in cloud computing. The company delivers enterprise-level hosting services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world. He also explained the company needed to develop a responsive custom application and decided to team with Making Sense, a creative company experienced in developing Windows 8 apps.

In addition, Cole made reference to the vast information and resources available online for developers. According to him, information about the Rackspace Development Center, API Documentation, Developer community, and Rackspace Knowledge Center can be easily found at the following web addresses:

Cole insisted on the importance of these sites and explained that the Development Center counts with a user community and lots of informative documentation. In contrast to this, he also mentioned that the API Documentation site provides all the necessary information to understand the API in a simple and detailed way. Finally, he highly recommended to visit the Rackspace knowledge since it contains many current news articles and historical articles about the Rackspace systems.

Juan de Abreu who is the current VP at Making Sense and has over twenty years of experience in Information Systems Development and Implementation talked about his own experience working with Rackspace. He made reference to REST (the technological approach on HTTP communications) and the authentication and communication processes. He explained that the Representational State Transfer is perfect to decouple any type of application. It allows for a great variety of options, gives significance to actions and it is also really easy to integrate on any platform. Juan also made reference to the simple authentication protocol called SSL, available for secure transmission and for the different versions and services of the API.

On the other hand Thomas Duesing who is Technical Product Manager for Cloud Servers at Rackspace explained the what can be done with the API and helped to understand the OpenStack API’s Capabilities and what can be done with the Rackspace servers.

In addition to the valuable information given by Thomas, Juan Diego Raimondi who is a Software Architect at Making Sense and has over 7 years of experience with .NET technologies made emphasis on how the use of REST makes easier the integration and allows the disparity of system clients (e.g. Rackspace web, desktops, tablets, mobile phones, and sysadmin) to properly communicate.

Juan Diego helped to build the architecture for the Window 8 Rackspace application and assisted with the integration of different technologies. His experience working on the project allowed him to provide valuable advice and to suggest useful practices at the webinar:

  • To separate the communication with the logic from the rest of application
  • To read all the documentation. It is totally worth doing it!
  • If something is not supported, it must be clear that it isn’t a mistake.

The webinar was closed with a great Q&A session where the invited speakers answered all questions from the audience.

We leave you with the powerpoint guideline used on that day so you can take a look, share it and even download it!

Power point updated from Making Sense