The Windows Azure team recently posted about the Windows Azure Trust Center.   One of the most frequent conversations that comes up when discussing moving applications to the cloud revolves around security and compliance, and it’s also one of the most challenging conversations to have.  What makes it particularly challenging is the fact that the responsibility of compliance is typically shared between the hardware, platform, and software. The site has a few sections that in particular drill ... [More]

Want to run @home with Azure for another team or use a more powerful CPU? For the true geeks out there, running the Folding@home client involves tweaking, high performance computing, and knowing the difference between the GPU and CPU clients.  We heard from a couple of folks about maximizing their Windows Azure usage, and Jim made some changes to the client piece to accommodate.  In truth, we did a little of this last time we ran @home, but we didn’t draw much attention to it for fear it would ju... [More]

Thursday, April 5th, at noon, we’ll be having our second from the last @home webcast, this time focusing on debugging and diagnostics in the cloud.   While a lot of what we show is in the context of our @home app… … much of what we’ll be doing is fairly general in nature, especially some of the diagnostics material we’ll be covering this week.  From this week’s abstract: In this third webcast episode, we talk about debugging your application. We look at debugging locally and how the emula... [More]

Windows Azure has a great caching service that allows applications (whether or not they are hosted in Azure) to share in-memory cache as a middle tier service.  If you’ve followed the ol’ Velocity project, then you’re likely aware this was a distributed cache service you could install on Windows Server to build out a middle tier cache.  This was ultimately rolled into the Windows Server AppFabric, and is (with a few exceptions) the same that is offered in Windows Azure. The problem with a traditi... [More]

On most (or perhaps even all?) of the production servers I’ve worked on, antivirus/antimalware detection apps are often not installed for a variety of reasons – performance, risk of false positives or certain processes getting closed down unexpectedly, or the simple fact most production machines are under strict access control and deployment restrictions. Still, it’s a nice option to have, and it’s now possible to set this up easily in Windows Azure roles.   Somewhat quietly, the team released a ... [More]

Tomorrow (Thursday, 3/15/2012) at noon ET or 9am PT, we have our first screencast in the @home series:  an introduction to the @home distributed computing project! This is the first in a series where we’ll dive into various aspects of Windows Azure – in this first webcast, we’ll keep it 100 level, discussing the platform, how to get started, and what the project is about.  From the abstract page: In this 100-level webcast, we introduce Windows Azure. We look at signing up a new account, evalu... [More]

Two years ago, Jim O’neil and I developed a quick Azure training program called “@home with Windows Azure” – a way to learn Windows Azure and have some fun contributing to a well known distributed computing effort, Folding@home.  A few months later, Peter Laudati joined the cloud team and we developed the game RockPaperAzure.   RockPaperAzure was a lot of fun and is still active, but we decided to re-launch the @home with Windows Azure project because of all of the changes in the cloud sinc... [More]

SQL Azure just got some better pricing!  Here are the details: Database Size Price Per Database Per Month 0 to 100 MB Flat $4.995 Greater than 100 MB to 1 GB Flat $9.99 Greater than 1 GB to 10 GB $9.99 for first GB, $3.996 for each additional GB Greater than 10 GB to 50 GB $45.954 for first 10 GB, $1.998 for each additional GB Great than 50 GB to 150 GB $125.874 fo... [More]

Windows Azure has been capable of running multiple websites in a single web role for some time now, but I found myself recently in a situation with 2 separate Azure solutions and was looking to combine them to create a single deployment.   Just like in IIS, this is most often done via host headers, so requests coming in can be forwarded to the correct site. The Goal The fine folks at infragistics created a really cool Silverlight-based reporting dashboard for Worldmaps.  Until now, each was... [More]

Credit to a colleague for this slide, but for those who follow Microsoft’s cloud platform might get this reference: