Ironically, one of the more interesting presentations yesterday at the nljug jfall 2011 was a presentation by David Chou of Microsoft on Azure.
The largest part of his presentation discussed and demoed how you can create and deploy a java application on Azure. But the part I liked best was where he discussed architecture patterns in applications designed for the cloud. He showed a couple of architecture diagrams from different large cloud applications, and discussed what they had in common. Very interesting subject, cloud architecture, it’s a shame he didn’t dedicate the entire presentation to this topic.
His presentation isn’t online yet as far as i know, but the following presentation from cloudconnect contains many of the same diagrams: CloudConnect 2011 - Building Highly Scalable Java Applications on Windows Azure.