Active Directory and backups in the cloud, site tracing and other Windows Azure updates

The Windows Azure platform is once again pleased with the updates. This time, we are pleased to announce the public availability of the Windows Azure Active Directory service, the announcement of the new Windows Azure Backup service, the new functionality of Web Sites tracing and the update of other services.

Details of all the updates are presented in the blog by Scott Guthrie at the following link . Below you will find brief descriptions of the new products presented.
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Active Directory in the cloud

Now, Windows Azure clients have access to a full-featured Active Directory cloud service that allows them to perform single user authorization tasks for multiple services (Single Sign On), maintain a single user directory, synchronize directory data with Active Directory in the enterprise, and so on.





Windows Azure Active Directory is a complete directory implementation in the cloud. At the same time, the platform supports popular open standards for providing federations: SAML 2.0, OData, WS-FED. Over the course of a few days, support for other popular standards will be added: OAuth 2.0 / OpenID

The Windows Azure blog describes in more detail about the release of the new platform and the stages of preliminary testing. In particular, it provides the following data:

• Windows Azure Active Directory is already widely used to provide authentication of Microsoft products such as Office365, Dynamics CRM online, Windows Intune, and Windows Azure itself;
• Service services solutions located in 14 Microsoft data centers around the world;
• over the past 90 days, the service has processed more than 65 billion authentication requests, maintaining reliability of more than 99.97%;
• since the launch, the service has been used by more than 2.9 million business representatives who have made more than 265 billion authentication requests.

In addition, with the public release of Windows Azure Active Directory, the Windows Azure Active Directory Graph service has also become publicly available, which offers programmatic access to the directory through the REST API. Read more about Directory Graph here .

Detailed documentation and guidance on how to use Windows Azure Active Directory can be found here . Information on supported protocols can be found at this link . Additional documentation can be found here .

New Windows Azure Backup service

Along with other news, there is a new service in the Windows Azure family - Backup. This service offers the ability to organize a secure infrastructure for saving Windows Server backups in the cloud.

The Windows Azure Backup service provides support for backups of information from systems based on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012 , Windows Server 2012 Essentials and System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1 to the Windows Azure cloud.



Windows Azure Backup storage is fast and easy to set up and extremely easy to set up. Incremental backups are supported, which allows you to save traffic and storage space and be able to restore to a selected point from a variety of versions. Policies and all standard Windows Server backups for organizing data compression and encryption are supported.

While the service is in the preview to access it, you need to send a request to the following link . Confirmation comes in one to two days.

More information can be obtained from the following guides:

• Tutorial- Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent
• Windows Azure Backup Agent

Improved monitoring and diagnostics of Windows Azure Web Sites

This wave of announcements of Windows Azure also presents significant improvements in the monitoring and diagnostics system of solutions based on Windows Azure Web Sites.

In particular, the functions of tracking and storing information in log files with subsequent access via FTP are added. In addition, a variant of streaming data in real time was proposed to receive data of tracing in chunks as it arrives.



New features integrate perfectly with the existing functionality of tracing platforms and libraries like .NET and others. The tracing feature is supported on all Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Details can be found on Scott Hanselman's blog at the following link .

Other Windows Azure Innovations

Along with major updates, the smaller issues are presented in the Windows Azure platform with this release:

• Windows Azure HDIsight (Hadoop) - added dashboards with the ability to monitor diagnostic metrics in real time, as well as in other Windows Azure services;
• Logs of operations - the name of the user who made changes to the services in the specified subscription is now entered in the logs of operations;
• Windows Azure Media Services - expanded set of pre-installed presets for encoding video formats;
• Windows Azure Virtual Machines - increased the default size for the OS drive in new VMs, added the ability to specify the user name when creating a VM.

Another news was the increase in the database of virtual machine images based on Linux for Windows Azure VMDepot community to 200 names.

Soon, expect more news about the Windows Azure platform.

useful links

Below you will find links to resources that will help you in using the Microsoft cloud platform:

• Video recordings of Windows Azure Summit reports and video interviews that were conducted during the conference
• Free 90 Day Windows Azure Trial
• Free access to Windows Azure resources for startups, partners, teachers, MSDN subscribers
• Windows Azure Development Center (azurehub.ru) - scripts, tutorials, examples, recommendations on choosing services and developing on Windows Azure
• Latest Windows Azure News - Twitter.com/windowsazure_ru

And if you are already developing on Windows Azure or want to find the developers of your service, visit appprofessionals.ru .

We will be happy to answer your questions at azurerus@microsoft.com .

And we are waiting for you in the Windows Azure Community on Facebook . Here you will find experts (don't forget to ask them questions), photos, and lots and lots of news.