Scaling Down with Windows Azure

Awhile back, Neil Kidd created a great blog post on scaling down in Windows Azure.  The concept is to multithread your Azure worker roles (and web roles, too) – even if you have a single core (small instance) VM, most workloads are network IO blocked, not CPU blocked, so creating a lightweight framework for supporting multiple workers in a single role not only saves money, but makes sense architecturally. 

In this screencast, I updated Neil’s concept a bit, and bring it forward to work with the latest Azure SDK:

Download the sample project (Visual Studio 2010) used in this screencast here.