Some customers rent a server from them to host their application, while others (the larger ones) run their own servers. All customers sync their data to a central web server/SQL Server, which the iPad app uses as a data source. We’ll call these servers the ‘mobile backend.’

The customer servers are constantly sync’ing with the mobile backend, even during the evening when there is a lot less new data to move around.

The ISV wanted to move the mobile backend related infrastructure to the cloud, and wanted to ask me some questions about it.

It turns out their web services are running on IIS (written in .NET). This is a single web server running four cores. It uses a dedicated SQL Server for data storage. This SQL Server also runs four cores. The servers are almost always at 70% CPU utilization. Both servers are actually virtual servers. Their database runs evenly at 10GB in size. The system only keeps a certain window of data online for the mobile users, so their primary data growth vector is the number of customers using the service. The rest of the data is stored in the product db of the tenant.

After some discussion, these are the options we came up with for them. All of these approaches are for their production environment. I won’t be outlining their options for dev/test, but they would be very similar. The benefits would be in pricing, with their MSDN subscriptions.

Also, since all scenarios would have the same outbound bandwidth usage, we didn’t factor that into these costs.

1> Lift & Shift

They could simply upload their current virtual servers into Windows Azure using the new Virtual Machines capability. This would be the fastest into the cloud. There would be little to no engineering required. This is usually the least threatening and easiest step into the cloud, but it results in the least cloud benefits. They will gain easy recoverability of their servers, and geo-redundancy on the VHDs the servers are running.

This would save them the Windows licenses on the servers, but they would still pay for the SQL Server license. They would save on having to manage the physical infrastructure, but they would still have to manage the virtual servers (patches, etc.)

Their rough monthly Azure bill would be something like the following, using the WindowsAzure.com pricing calculator.

- Two Large (four core) servers: $460.80 / month

- Storage of their VHDs for the servers (estimated 50GB) : $4.75 / month

- Storage transactions for VHDs (estimated 10 million) : $1.00 / month

Total: About $466.55 / month

2> Lift & Shift with SQL Database

This second scenario is very similar to the first, but instead of shifting both servers, we are only shifting the web server. The SQL Server will be replaced with SQL Database. We discussed their data needs, and SQL Database will meet it nicely. In this scenario, they will now get three replicas of their SQL data.

This scenario will require a few more days of engineering work, to migrate the schema and data to SQL Database.

- One Large (four core) servers: $230.40 / month

- Storage of their VHDs for the servers (estimated 25GB) : $2.38 / month

- Storage transactions for VHDs (estimated 5 million) : $0.50 / month

- SQL Database – 10GB : $45.96 / month

Total: About $279.23 / month

3> Move to Cloud Services

The biggest lack of ‘cloudiness’ in VM’s is that you still have to manage VM’s. If they kept their data in SQL Database (as in scenario 2) and moved their web service code into a cloud service (as a web role) they would reduce their management costs a lot, and reduce their operating costs a bit.

The biggest benefit to moving to cloud services for them will be to simplify rolling out new versions, the ability to scale when things get busy, and to have easy redundancy in the servers. In this scenario they will start using single core servers (small), and scale as needed. While we expect the number of core hours per month would be lower, we estimated with four full time small servers.

It would take their team a few days to a week to move over the code, mostly because they haven’t worked with web role instance and cloud services before. Other than that, the code will mostly move over just fine.

If they tune how the tenants (in house and at the customer site) sync with the mobile backend, they could dramatically reduce the amount of horsepower needed. Right now the service is synced/polled everything three minutes (I am simplifying a bit here). We discussed a truncated exponential back off polling algorithm where the rate of polling would slow down as the tenant had less and less new data to sync. The truncated part comes into play when there is new data to sync, the polling interval immediately speeds back up to normal instead of slowly ramping back up.

You can see a service company that only does jobs during normal business hours would not need to poll at all after 6pm, but would need rapid polling through the day. For a service company that had 24 hour service, they might need some polling at night, so the system can handle that as well.

With this change in polling behavior, they could easily adjust the number of small instances handling the web service servers based on the immediate and expected load. Perhaps a simple plan of four during the day, and only two at night.

- Four small (single core) servers: $230.40 / month

- SQL Database – 10GB : $45.96 / month

Total: About $276.36 / month

4> Extreme Cloud Unicorns Riding Rainbows!

Lets take it one step further for fun. What if they hosted their web service front end in Web Sites, and moved their data into Mobile Services Data? Crazy! What if they get really crazy, and dump the web service front end altogether, and use the Mobile Services Data REST service endpoint in their mobile app?

This would take a week or two to move their data into Mobile Services, and to update the iPad app with the Mobile Services iOS SDK.

The REST façade into the data service runs in a free hosting model. The free model does have some limitations. When your service bumps into these you can scale up to dedicated hosts. This price estimate will range based on how often they scale up to four dedicated small instances, and how long they stay at the free tier.

- Mobile Service instances (ranging from the free tier to four small instances) : $0 – $230.40 / month

- SQL Database – 10GB : $45.96 / month

Total: About $45.96 – $276.36 / month

Which way did they go?

They chose to go with option 3. They thought the small investment in time to migrate their code to a cloud service was worth costs savings and agility they would gain. They considered moving to scenario 1 first, and then migrating to scenario 3. They decided that that would just drag the process out, cost them more money in the long run, and not provide any benefits for them.

They didn’t go with scenario 4 because Mobile Services is still in preview, and they wanted to control the web service, and be able to include more intelligence in the service. With the data service, it’s just a REST CRUD façade. They did like the idea of this in the long term however.

Since I am an engineer, and not a sales person, I didn’t go into the commitment pricing options available to them. That would reduce their costs even more.

I hope this helped you gain some insight into what some of the thinking goes on when a company is looking to move some of their infrastructure to the cloud. Please keep in mind that every customer and situation is different, and you need to use the human superpower of Critical Thought to make the right decision for you and your company.

In this case they wanted to balance both soft and hard costs, gain some big IT features they didn’t want to buy for themselves, and gain some agility they couldn’t get while keeping the small dev and IT Pro team that have in place.

You should read part one of these announcements.

1. MSDN licenses are now officially allowed to be used in Windows Azure environments (for dev/test).

2. MSDN subscribers get big discounts on Azure costs. A subscriber can spin up any number of Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and BizTalk Server VMs for Dev/Test scenarios using Windows Azure and pay only 6 cents/hr when running them.

3. The Azure management portal will now tell you how many MSDN credits you have left for the month, and when it resets.

4. Web Sites now has SSL support. During the preview, Windows Azure Web Sites could do SSL, but it had to be with a Microsoft certificate, and not your own. This was just a small technical limitation of the preview. We have now released features that will let you use your own SSL certificate. With today’s release we now support the ability to setup both IP Address Based SSL Bindings as well as SNI Based SSL Bindings. 

5. Updates to Windows Azure Active Directory. Namely, we now have a sync tool that will sync from your on-premises directory, to the one in the cloud. Yeah! It works all the way back to Windows Server 2003, so some great backwards compatibility there.

6. Free Trials are now easier! Until now, the free trial was like the MSDN benefits. You received a certain amount of access to each service. That was both complicated, and hard to understand. Now, each trial receives $200 per month of service credit! Yes, $200!

This credit can be applied to any service, how you would like. No more quotas per service. Like the MSDN update above, trial users will now be able to easily see what their remaining credits are, how long they will last, and how they have used them.

Totally go sign up for a free trial now, at http://aka.ms/AzureForFree.

7. We announced the preview of BizTalk Services. These services will focus on EAI and B2B scenarios, just like BizTalk Server (which remains close to my heart after all these years). These services will connect to your on-premises infrastructure, and integrate with on-premises BizTalk Server as well. Click here to learn more about how to setup and starting using the Windows Azure BizTalk Services preview today.

1- If you stop a VM, you won’t be charged. This is very new. Until now, if you stopped a VM, we would turn the virtual machine off, but we would leave it deployed to the environment, leaving the hardware allocated to your machine, which continued to trigger billing. You had to ‘delete’ your machine to de-provision it from the environment, and then we would stop charging you. This caused a lot of confusion with customers, so we will now stop charging your VM when you ‘stop’ it. This is a  great example of how we are constantly working to make the cloud simple AND powerful.

2- Charged by the minute. Since the first release of Windows Azure we have charged by the clock hour. That meant that if you started a machine at 10:30, and stopped at 12:30, you would be charged for three hours (the 10 o’clock hour, the 11 o’clock hour, and the noon o’clock hour). This was to simplify billing, but it mean higher charges for customers because of rounding on the time used. Starting today, we charge VMs by the minute. This will save customers a lot of money. We are one of the first major cloud vendors to move to minute based billing.

An example: If I use a two core Linux virtual machine with just over 3GB of memory on Windows Azure for 65 minutes, or one hour and five minutes, it would cost $.13, charged to the minute.  If I use a similar configuration on an alternative cloud provider I would pay more as they will bill me for a full two hours even though I am only using five minutes of the second hour. Depending on my location choice at the alternate provider, my cost could be as high as $.32 for the equivalent service, a difference of $.19 for that one instance.

3- MSDN subscribers receive free credits. Up until today MSDN subscribers receive ‘free Azure time’. This was expressed as a grid, with a certain amount of free time, allocated per service. You might get 750 hours of free CPU, and then 1GB of free data, etc. etc. This was very complicated, and we were always tuning the ‘right amount’ of each free resource to make sure that it was useful by the developer.

Today we are shifting to a free credit per month plan. Depending on your level, you are granted a spend limit per month. For example, if you are granted $150 per month, you can spend that in Azure however you would like. Go crazy, invite the neighbors over, and tear up the lawn. No more getting a free allocation for a service you don’t even need. You can spend it based on what works best for you. Use of this free credit is for dev and test scenarios only.

How  much do you get?

The first month after activating your MSDN Azure benefits, you will receive a $200 credit. After that, each month you will receive a credit based on your subscription level. Full details are here.

Visual Studio Professional, Premium and Ultimate with MSDN subscribers who activate and use their Windows Azure MSDN benefit before September 30^th, 2013 are also automatically entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win an Aston Martin V8 Vantage sports car!

4- Additions to the support VPN devices list. VPN devices from F5, Citrix and WatchGuard are now supported for point-to-site networking, in addition to already supported devices from Cisco and Juniper.

5- New datacenters being developed. New investments including new global datacenters in China, Australia, and Japan, will help our customers to achieve global scale while continuing to enable both developers and IT Pros to take full advantage of the benefits Windows Azure can provide. These regions include: Japan East (Tokyo), Japan West (Kansai), Australia-New South Wales (Sydney), Australia-Victoria (Melbourne), and China.

You can keep reading part two of the announcements here.

Most load balancers in the corporate world have a setting called ‘sticky sessions.’ This feature will route a user back to the same web server over and over again. This is done with performance in mind. People think that if the same user goes to the same server, the application will run faster because their data is probably cached on that particular server.

I think this is a fallacy in most cases, and that sticky sessions in a load balancer is a bad smell hinting at some rotting architecture. When I see sticky sessions somewhere, it is usually because of one of the following is true:

1. The application is using a ton of session state, and the servers aren’t sharing it.

To me this is a big crime in and of itself. You should not be using session state, and if you are, it must be kept to a minimum. Session state turns out to be a huge crutch that helps people get their heads around how the web is truly stateless. You will see this most often with people that don’t understand the web at a low level, and probably spent their early part of their careers architecting client/server applications. Or they are just lazy.

The second half to this first problem is that they aren’t sharing said evil session state across their servers. For crying out loud people! If you insist on having session state, please for the love of binary share that state amongst your servers.

This sharing is easy to do with the variety of providers available to you, most are ‘out of the box’. Sharing state means that ASP.NET will read/write the state to a central location, instead of the in-process on box memory. For example, you can share it in a SQL box, or in off box memory. You can share it in Azure storage, or even AppFabric. You can share it with a box. You can share it with a Fox. Ok, not a fox. All by easily changing a line of configuration in your application.

Avoid bloated session state, and share with your friends.

If you are sharing your state amongst the web server group, then you don’t need a sticky load balancer, since no matter which server the user goes to they can get their state.

2. They are trying to shoehorn a stateful application into the web

The web isn’t stateful. Embrace it and move on. Every time a browser makes a connection to a web server it’s starting from scratch. In a natural call (without any crutches) all the server has to go on is the user agent info (browser type, ip address, etc.) and the contents of the requested URL. That’s it.

Over the years, especially early on, our industry has adapted several crutches to help get us around this statelessness that bothers us so. All of them have lead to horror when over used, so a light touch goes a long way. Those are namely session state (see above) and cookies.

Cookies are in some ways the same as session state. They save state for the application between calls. But instead of the storing the state on the server, it is stored on the client. Many people wave this off. “Oh, it’s not state, just some bits of data.”

Data is state.

The Real Problem

The real problem with sticky sessions is that it leads to fragility in your web cluster/farm/group/collective. If user A is always going to Server x, and all of their evil state, and data is on that server, then you have introduced a single dependency on your user. All of our infrastructure efforts always lead us to high availability and reliability. This sticky load balancer throws it’s hat in our faces and says, with an outrageous accent, “I don’t think so!”

All of a sudden, all of our hard work in building our web farm is thrown out the window because of some lazy architecture decisions. Your group of super servers is reduced to a simple group of individual servers.

When that one server does go offline (and it will because failure happens, embrace it) you will lose all those users. They will lost their state, and data. They will hit that button on their screen, and when the browser round trips and refreshes (because if you’re doing this, you likely aren’t doing SPA) the browser will return an error. That person won’t get their star trek pizza cutter, will have a bad experience, and their day will spiral out of control. They will go home and likely kick their neighbors dog. All because you used a sticky load balancer. Note: please do not kick anyone’s dog.

A secondary issue is load leveling. A great use of a load balancer that many people aren’t aware of is <sarcasm> that it can level the load</sarcasm> across several servers. In a sticky LB scenario, it is easy for server x to get really busy, while server n is lonely and sits idle and unused. This always leads to resentment on the part of the server doing all the work, so try to avoid this.

If you were running your load balancer in a normal way, your users and their requests would be flooding evenly (fairly so anyway) across all of those web servers you paid for, giving the user a great experience. A server could go down, and the users work would be picked up by any of the other servers on the next trip. Boom goes the dynamite.

Do you really hate state?

I didn’t mean for this post to turn into a hate piece on state (session or cookie). I will soon get to why I wrote this post, but I wanted to get off my chest how I have seen state be abused before. Like I mentioned above, I don’t think you are evil for using it. An experienced and critically thinking developer who knows when to break the rules is allowed to break the rules.

So, what does this have to do with Windows Azure?

Good question my good man! In Windows Azure, the load balance we started talking about is a non-sticky load balancer. Yes, if you start up the local simulator, and try some tests you won’t see that happening. If you start up a group of web roles in Cloud Services, and try hitting F5 really fast in IE you won’t see balancing either.

That’s because there is some intelligence in the balancer, and because you can’t cause enough traffic with your own keyboard. Nor my super awesome-backlit-mechanical-Cherry-MX-red-switch-keyboard-that-the-neighbors-can-hear-when-I-am-typing-keyboard.

But, some people NEED a sticky balancer. They just NEED it. Either they are migrating something that is built that way, and they just can’t make the investment to fix it yet, or… that’s the only reason I can come up with.

So, here is you escape hatch, IIS Application Request Routing. ARR adds a layer of load balancing in software at the server level, instead of lower down the network stack. This lets it use some intelligence as to what the software is doing.

The IIS ARR can be used on-premises, or in Windows Azure. Basically your front-end your application with servers running ARR. Officially, ARR is:

So, if you need sticky load balancing, or maybe some smarter session routing in your application, either on-premises, or in the cloud, check out ARR. You can read all about it at the IIS website.

ARR also has some great caching features included as well. ARR Cache would be a good alternative to AppFabric cache, if you don’t want to run that.

There are essentially five challenges that you will work through. Over time you will build a web application hosted on Azure that uses Azure data services, virtual machines and provides a great mobile experience. Everything a modern cloud based application needs.

The five challenges are fairly easy and they include a small writing task. I like that there is a writing component to the challenges. I find that that writing about what I am doing helps me think with more clarity about what I am building and how I am doing it.

I have summarized the challenge for you here, but you should read and understand all of the details at http://aka.ms/AzureDevChallenge.

What is the reward?

There will be tiered prizes for the winning submissions, including an editor’s choice award for the most creative submission. 

• Each challenge will have 3 winners, with each winner receiving a 64 GB Surface RT with black Touch Cover (in the US only), or cash equivalent (outside of the US). That’s $2,100 in prizes every two weeks, $10,500 in total

• Each challenge will also have up to 10 spot prizes of $100 each. That’s $1,000 on offer per challenge.
• The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $2,500 and promotion on CodeProject and Microsoft owned and operated properties. Fame and fortune.

Does this have to be a .NET thing?

No! Windows Azure is open and flexible, with open source SDKs for all of the common web platforms. Check them out here. Use C++, use node.js, use PHP with MySQL, or C# on ASP.NET with MVC and SQL Server, Your call, as long as you complete the challenges

This competition is to help you learn about building and hosting applications on Windows Azure, so obviously applications that run on the Azure platform are required. However, not just anything will get you a winner’s jersey. Be creative, be daring, over extend and over achieve. The more you show off your understanding of Azure, and the more you focus on explaining what you’re doing, the better your chances.

Late Entrants: If you missed out on any one of the challenges then you can jump in at any time as long as you complete the stages you missed.

1. First Challenge: Getting Started. April 15 – April 28 May 3
The first challenge is a gimme. You need to setup a free trial Azure account (super easy) and post an article on CodeProject (in the Windows Azure Contest section) outlining your idea on what you’ll build for the remaining stages. Most important: in 2 sentences or less explain how Azure might benefit or change the way you do things today. You can keep your article brief if you want to protect your ideas, or you can write up something juicy if you want to win the prize for this challenge. It’s your move in this game of chess.

2. Second Challenge: Build a website. April 29 – May 12

Again, not really a challenge for any webdev worth their salt. However, what about packaging it up for simple deployment? What about responsive design? What about the other 9 free sites you can setup under your free Azure account? And how will your web app tie into the next challenge? Remember to write up your work in your article on CodeProject to have a chance at the prize for this second challenge.

3. Third Challenge: Using SQL on Azure. May 13 – May 26

Now it starts getting interesting. Use SQL on Azure in whatever way you wish. Add a little data to season the mix or use it as a backup.recovery solution. It’s not just about data access. Again, write up what you’ve learned, what you’re doing, and how you did it.

4. Fourth Challenge: Virtual Machines. May 27 – Jun 9

Never used a VM before? Never spun up a virtual machine from your application? It’s time to try. Maybe you want to host a Windows or Linux application, or spin up a test environment, or have your own instance of SQL Express in a VM, or you can just spin up an instance of an existing web application to sit alongside your  application in a VM. We’re really going to be digging into your article at this point. Is there code? Are there explanations of how you conquered challenges? Tell us your story.

5. Fifth Challenge: Mobile access June 10 – June 24

You’re done. You’ve built a distributed n-tier cloud based data drive web application hosted on multiple virtual machines and you are the Master. But does it work on your Nokia, iPhone or Galaxy? I mean really work. Nicely, intuitively, seamlessly. Offline. It’s up to you what you do at this point, but the judges will be testing your final masterpiece on their phones and tablets. Your CodeProject article, at this point, should be mostly complete.

During each challenge spot challenges will be announced and prizes will be awarded. Possible spot announcements could be the 1,000th entry, the first to complete a 5 minute challenge, or the best haiku in an article’s sample code. You never know.

Before you race off and complete the challenges in one fell swoop, be warned that your entry for one challenge cannot be used as an entry for a subsequent stage. If you build a data driven website in Challenge 1 then you need to enter something new for the data driven portion of Challenge 2.

I have pasted the complete email below, but here is a quick summary.

1. All Guest OS 1.x images will be deprecated on June 1, 2014. This gives you a full one year warning. The 1.x series were some of the earliest images, and are based on Windows Server 2008.

2. Much like our other services (Office 360), as of June 1, 2013, when a new version of the guest OS comes out, you will have 60 days to upgrade to the latest, on second latest image version.

3. Older versions of the Windows Azure SDK for Cloud Services will be deprecated on June 1st, 2014. This is one full year’s notice. The version numbers affected are 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. We just shipped version 2.0.

Please read the full notice below for the full details, and links to further reading.

“Write only the code that only you can write”

What I mean is, if the code you are writing could be written by any competent developer (because it is infrastructure and not germane to the IP or ‘special sauce’ of what you are doing) then you should find a tool, or a framework, or something to provide that for you.

There is of course a right way and a wrong way to plug in any tool/framework into your code, but that is a blog for a different day.

I have really fallen in love with WAMS (Windows Azure Mobile Services). I love how it is easy to use, scaffolds out the back end data simply, and has open source tools for all the popular platforms out there. It’s just great stuff.

I also like how quickly the team moves with enhancements, and how open they are to listening to developers input on what the next set of features are.

One thing I would really like is something to scaffold on the client side. I am tired of writing property bag objects (or whatever name what to call them, PONO’s, etc.), it’s just boring. There are several tools out there that will scaffold a REST interface (which is what the data services in WAMS gives you) but those don’t generate concrete enough objects.

Then I found a tool called APPA WAMS. It will generate client side c# code for you to use. Sometimes I prefer code generators over runtime frameworks. They help with the heavy lifting and get out of the way. You can then tune and tweak from there, without having to live with the sins of the box you installed.

The tool will generate all the code for:

• Your table definitions
• Insert statements
• Read statements
• View models for your tables

The code it generates will work with any .NET project, especially Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 Store apps.

If you are playing with WAMS you should check this tool out. You can read more, with a walkthrough at their site.

With a half day format we can make it easier for people to get away from work (getting a whole day away can be harder). This half day also gives us the flexibility to offer two scenarios in a day, and mix and match them as we roll out the tour.

Starting soon we will do four events in some local cities (local to where our team is). These events are meant to be low key, and a way for us to try out the format, and the materials, and to get real attendee feedback on the value to them.

If you are interesting in being a guinea pig, please try to visit one.

There are three registration links for each event. You can sign up for the whole day, just the AM, or just the PM. If you sign up for just AM, and decide to stay all day, that is fine as well, just let us know.

These will have some hands on lab components, so please read the abstracts and requirements below. At the bottom you will find the registration links.

AM Session:

Datacenter Scenarios, You and Windows Azure Infrastructure Services: Backup up your Data to the Cloud with Windows Azure

Your data needs are growing every day.  Being able to backup and secure your data is something you need to do daily.  When you think about protecting your data is it safe, can you afford a offsite disaster recovery center, how do you protect it.  What would happen if your data was lost?  Well if you are not sure how you protect your data.  Then join us for an exciting half-day event.
In this session you will see how you can use the cloud to provide a quick, easy and inexpensive way to backup your data to the safety of the cloud.   Windows Azure Backup provides automated server backups that are stored securely offsite, in the cloud.  You will also gain hands on experience to leverage the cloud for backing up your important data to Windows Azure.  You will also see how you can leverage Windows Azure for SQL backups as well.

Technical Requirements:

· 4 GB RAM (8 GB preferred)

· At least 70 GB of free disk space (90 GB preferred)

· x64 compatible processor with hardware assisted virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V technology)

· Installed Windows Server 2012 (Preferred) or Windows 8 with Hyper-V virtualization enabled

· Required: Come with a Windows Azure subscription Download free 90-day trial

· Download Windows Server 2012 Trial (both ISO and VHD)

· a modern web browser, including IE 9, IE 10, Chrome, Firefox and Safari

· a remote desktop client

o Pre-installed on Windows 7 and Windows 8

o Microsoft client available for Mac at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18140

o Mac and Linux client available from 2X at http://www.2x.com/rdp-client/windows-linux-mac/downloadlinks/

Recommended: Although wireless internet access will be available, you may find that bringing your own mobile connectivity (MiFi™, phone data tethering, etc.) will be desirable.
The lab portion of this exercise will require you to connect to the Windows Azure Portal via a modern web browser where you will provision three separate virtual machines in the cloud and configure them each via a Remote Desktop client connection.  The lab materials are all online, so no special software is required to install or use them.

PM Session:

Datacenter Scenarios, You and Windows Azure Infrastructure Services: Build Your SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure … for FREE!

SharePoint 2013 offers many exciting new features, but you may not have spare hardware capacity to evaluate it on-premise.  In this session, you’ll learn the steps involved in leveraging the Windows Azure Virtual Machine cloud platform to build a functional evaluation and pilot environment for SharePoint 2013.  Best of all, you’ll step through how to get your lab started for free by leveraging the Microsoft Windows Azure Free 90-Day Trial program.  By the end of this session, you’ll also understand the architecture of the Windows Azure cloud platform for building similar pilot, development and test environments for other application workloads.
Technical Requirements:

· Required: Come with a Windows Azure subscription Download free 90-day trial

· a modern web browser, including IE 9, IE 10, Chrome, Firefox and Safari

· a remote desktop client

o Pre-installed on Windows 7 and Windows 8

o Microsoft client available for Mac at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=18140

o Mac and Linux client available from 2X at http://www.2x.com/rdp-client/windows-linux-mac/downloadlinks/

Recommended: Although wireless internet access will be available, you may find that bringing your own mobile connectivity (MiFi™, phone data tethering, etc.) will be desirable.
The lab portion of this exercise will require you to connect to the Windows Azure Portal via a modern web browser where you will provision three separate virtual machines in the cloud and configure them each via a Remote Desktop client connection.  The lab materials are all online, so no special software is required to install or use them.

Registration Links

So what’s new?

Web Sites – VS Tooling for diagnostics, management, and simplified publishing

Cloud Services Diagnostics – VS Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data on a live service without redeployment

Cloud Services – Support for newly available high memory VM sizes

Storage – Storage client 2.0 in new projects + VS Server Explorer Tooling for working with Service Bus – Updated client library with support for browsing messages, the message pump programming model, and auto-deleting idle messaging entities .

In 2.0, you can now create and delete Windows Azure tables, add/edit/delete table entities from Visual Studio server explorer itself. This saves you time and allows you to use Visual Studio as the single tool you need to build apps using tables.

Get Thee the Bits!

You can download the new SDK from WindowsAzure.com or the Web Platform Installer.

In addition, Windows Azure PowerShell (separate download) has moved to PowerShell 3.0 while adding numerous commands for Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs, and more.  You can find the full change log here.

New Sizes for You

You can see what the two new high memory instance sizes that are now available on this updated chart.

Virtual Machine Size	CPU Cores	Memory	Disk Space for Cloud Services	Disk Space for Virtual Machines	Allocated Bandwidth (Mbps)	Maximum data disks (1 TB each)	Maximum IOPS (500 maximum per disk)
Extra Small- A0	Shared	768 MB	19 GB	20 GB	5	1	1×500
Small- A1	1	1.75 GB	224 GB	70 GB	100	2	2×500
Medium- A2	2	3.5 GB	489 GB	135 GB	200	4	4×500
Large- A3	4	7 GB	999 GB	285 GB	400	8	8×500
Extra Large- A4	8	14 GB	2,039 GB	605 GB	800	16	16×500
A6	4	28 GB	999 GB	285 GB	1,000	8	8×500
A7	8	56 GB	2,039 GB	605 GB	2,000	16	16×500

]]> http://www.brianhprince.com/2013/05/20/windows-azure-sdk-2-0-released/feed/ 0 http://www.brianhprince.com/2013/04/22/driving-your-career-app-in-the-windows-store/ http://www.brianhprince.com/2013/04/22/driving-your-career-app-in-the-windows-store/#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:11:00 +0000 Brian H. Prince http://www.brianhprince.com/?p=4091 I started my time at Microsoft by giving a farewell talk at my old company. I wanted a way to pass on the tribal knowledge we had built. That talk became the ‘Soft Skillz’ talk, which I have now given over 150 times. Sometimes it is a one hour talk, and sometimes a much longer three hour talk.

A few years ago, during the worst of the recession, Microsoft started a web site, Thrive for Developers. For that site I contributed 32 weekly episodes, all based on the Soft Skillz talk. Since then, Geoff Mazeroff provided a complete transcript of each episode.

I have published an app in the Windows Store that replays these shows. It streams the videos from Windows Azure Media Services, and displays the transcript that Geoff so kindly provided.

Because the content was already ready to go, this app took me about 16 hours to put together using HTM5, CSS, and WinJS. I had to upload, and encode all of the video, and paste in all of the content (and clean it up HTML wise). The data binding and templates really did most of the work.

Please download it, and let me know what you think. It is completely free.