We are back in the keynote room with Adam Jorgensen talking to us about the financial state and health of the PASS organization.  It’s currently very healthy with over $1 Million in reserve.

Thomas LaRock is back and thanking those folks who are rolling off the PASS board and have dedicated so much time and PASSion.  Sri Sridharan is thanked for his amazing work in helping volunteers take on bigger challenges and being successful.

Denise McInerney talks about how she got involved with the PASS community and her journey of how it helped her become so successful in her career.  This leads up to the awarding of the 2014 PASSion award.  There is only 1 of these given out every year to a volunteer who has gone even more than above and beyond for the organization.  Andrey Korshikov from Russia is announced as the winner.  Congrats Andrey!

Denise announces the PASS Business Analytics Conference and also the dates for the next PASS Summit back here in Seattle.

Dr. Rimma Nehme is coming on stage to talk about Cloud Databases.  She talks about where she is from and how she got where she is as MS Grey Labs today.  She is explaining what cloud computing is, as a computing service that is available from anywhere, at anytime, and is always on. Cloud computing is an on demand service, location transparent, and rapid delivery.  First she is explaining cloud elasticity that features quick and easy deployment.  She is showing some very cool pictures on Microsofts physical cloud infrastructure (datacenter).  Everything is stored in shipping containers (18 wheeler trailers).  She shows all the servers and how they look on the inside of the container.  A very cool look behind the scenes.

Now she is explaining how they get all the power to these DCs that they need and how they cool them with “swamp cooling”. She is now explaining software as service using the analogy of pizza as a service.  A great and easy to remember explanation.

Dr. Nehme moves on to explaining virtualization and the cloud.  The analogy here is roommates having to share a bathroom with a single sink and how now get a large sink to service everyone.  We now move on to multi-tenancy and the tiered approach and options. She now explains SLAs. 3 nines gives you 8.76 hours of down time a year and 4 nines gives you 52.56 minutes of down time.

SQL DB in Azure is explained as we look at it from the software perspective.  We have an the infrastructure layer (hardware), platform layer, services layer, and client layer.

Dr. Nehme is now talking about how we still need DBAs even with all the automation and simplicity of the cloud.  She encourages us take our skills, add cloud, and give ourselves a new title as “Cloud DBA”.

Okay folks that’s it for today!