Azure Forecast: Cloudy with a Chance of Service Updates
Microsoft's Windows Azure platform and SQL Azure database became generally available on February 2. In the weeks since the commercial launch, the company has continued to advance its services.
The first service update (SU1) to SQL Azure went live last week. According to David Robinson, Microsoft senior program manager on the SQL Azure team and author of the SQL Azure team blog, several Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) similar to the 'views' functionality in SQL Server have been added for monitoring the relational database service. The service is also more flexible, allowing developers to now upgrade from the Web Edition (up to 1 GB/month) to the Business Edition (up to 10 GB/month) and vice versa (downgrade) with a simple command. Idle connections have been extended from 5 to 30 minutes before timing out. Work has also been done on improving support for long running transactions.
This week Microsoft expanded its location options for Azure app deployment to Western Europe and East Asia. According to the company, developers can now deploy their apps in six sub-regions: West Europe and North Europe, East Asia and Southeast Asia, South Central U.S. and North Central U.S.
As analysts proclaim the cloud a turning point in application development as disruptive as the Internet, many developers share the "I really don't know clouds at all" sentiment expressed so well in Joni Mitchell's haunting song about life's illusions. This is especially distressing for project managers who need to figure out how billing and subscriptions might play out based on an app's evolving usage data, number and size of compute instances and services. The Windows Azure team tries to shed some light on these issues in a blog posting this week, with a comparison chart and diagrams definitely worth checking out.
Still cloudy? Express your thoughts on the Azure rollout so far. Drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 02/23/2010 at 2:58 PM