Carl and Richard talk to Richard Astbury about migrating applications to Azure. The conversation starts out dealing with the basic idea of why you would migrate to the cloud - typically right before you have to buy more hardware to scale up or replace existing equipment. Richard then walks through the various challenges of migration, including migrating data, determining the particular style of cloud you want to use, maximizing advantages while minimizing cost. He talks about the fact that Java applications can be easier to migrate into Azure worker roles, since they tend to live in a sandbox and not touch the restricted elements of Windows inside the Azure world. Richard also digs into bootstrapping, providing links to tools to facilitate getting a worker role instance up and running with all the bits you need. Finally, the conversation digs into taking advantage of Azure - optimizing designs to reduce cost as well as utilizing the resources of Azure including Azure Fabric, Service Bus, diagnostics, etc.