Windows Azure Platform: Januaury 13th Links

Slalom Consultant Joel Forman specializes in cloud computing and the Windows Azure Platform.

Happy New Year everyone! My first blog of 2012 highlights some of the resources and news around the Windows Azure Platform that caught my eye over the last couple months. Again, this is not a comprehensive list, but pieces that caught my eye in particular.

• Facelift for www.windowsazure.com: Late last year, Microsoft updated the look and feel, and site structure, for windowsazure.com. I think they did a really nice job. One feature that I am using and enjoying is some of the account management features available right from this site that give you a preview into your quotas and monthly usage for your subscriptions.
• Learn Windows Azure Event on Channel9: In December, Microsoft hosted an online event for learning Windows Azure. You can watch the event in its entirely, or in specific sections, on Channel9. Speakers include Microsoft technical leaders such as Scott Guthrie, Dave Campbell, and Mark Russinovich. The three of them take open questions from the audience at the end.
• Open Source Updates for Windows Azure: Windows Azure continues to improve its ability to run open source technologies. This post describes some of the recent updates around Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, and more.
• SQL Azure Q4 Release: As expected, the Q4 release of SQL Azure shipped late last year. Read about the improvements and features. One nice call out I will make is that while max DB size increased from 50GB to 150GB, Microsoft did not increase the price meaning that there is no price difference for SQL Azure between 50GB-150GB.
• Building and Deploying with Azure 1.6 SDK: Tom Hollander came out with a great blog post talking about how to update your build processes to take advantage of some of the new SDK features for Azure around publishing. He beat me to it! I previously had a post describing one way to manage builds and releases. Rather than update mine, check out Hollander’s post.
• Experience Improvements for Windows Azure: Microsoft highlights some of the experience improvements made late last year for Windows Azure.
• SQL Azure Performance and Elasticity Guide: Here is a good guide that includes a lot of references as well as topics to be considering around tuning SQL Azure.

Happy reading!

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