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Windows Azure news: announcements, big announcements, mega-announcements!

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Over the past few weeks, the Windows Azure platform has received a number of major updates . Most of the announcements took place at TechEd North America 2013, which runs from June 3 to June 6 in the United States.

Among these announcements are the following main:
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Below you will find a more detailed description of each innovation.

Store services and data Windows Azure Store is available in Russia


Windows Azure Marketplace and Windows Azure Store - online stores of services and data - come to Russia. Azure Marketplace was launched in May 2013, and the Azure Store can be used from June 3. Thus, Russian companies gained access to world-class cloud services, and new business development opportunities opened up for domestic application developers.

Azure Marketplace is a cloud services and data store for organizations. Companies from various industries can find applications in it to solve their business problems. Currently, over 600 cloud solutions and 170 data sources are available in the Azure Marketplace.

Azure Store - a store for developers and IT professionals, which houses the necessary components to create an application. This will facilitate the solution of related tasks and allow you to focus on the implementation of the main idea of ​​the created service. Thus, cloud services can now be created faster, cheaper, more functional and simpler (the purchase of a service or data from the Azure Store is carried out from a single Windows Azure management console).

Details can be found in this announcement .

New data centers


During the past couple of weeks, there was an announcement of several Windows Azure data centers in the Asian and Pacific regions. A new region has opened in Japan with two subregions. A new region has opened in Australia with two subregions.

And, for the first time for China, a data center of a third-party multinational cloud provider has opened in this country, which is operated by a local company. All new data centers will soon be available to users.

Per-minute billing


From today, the consumption of computing resources of Windows Azure (effective time of virtual machines, cloud services, mobile services or web sites) will be calculated and paid per minute, rather than for each hour, as it was before.

This long-awaited innovation will significantly reduce the cost of testing processes in the cloud and other scenarios when you need to raise virtual machines on demand for a short period of time.

Fee for stopped virtual machines


From today, there is another important and long-awaited innovation in how the used virtual machines are paid. Now the fee for the stopped virtual machine is not charged.

If you previously needed to delete a virtual machine in order to stop the charge for its simple cash, then now the stopped virtual machine will not cost you any additional costs charged for computing power. You will pay only for the space in the storage that takes the image of this virtual machine.

New BizTalk Services Cloud Service


I am pleased to introduce the new Windows Azure cloud service, which has expanded to a large platform family. Windows Azure BizTalk Services is a service that is designed to meet the challenges of integrating heterogeneous environments at the enterprise and cloud levels, offering Business-to-Business (B2B) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) capabilities.

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BizTalk Services already includes all the necessary components for managing EDI relationships, EDI bridges with on-premium resources, including support for integrating systems based on SAP, SQL Server, Oracle and Siebel.

Introduction to Windows Azure BizTalk Services you can see in this video . An introduction to using the new service can be found in this blog. Manuals, descriptions, articles can be found on the official portal . You can subscribe to the service on the Windows Azure portal . The Windows Azure BizTalk Services Preview SDK is available for download at the following link .

Global availability of AMQP support in Windows Azure Service Bus


Scott Guthrie, in his blog, announced the global availability of open- standard AMQP support for messaging with the Windows Azure Service Bus.

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New features allow you to use the messaging service Windows Azure Service Bus with applications that are written in different programming languages ​​that use different messaging libraries that support the AMQP standard.

The topic is described in detail in the blog by Scott Guthrie with examples of application in Java, Python and PHP.

Custom SSL support for Web Sites


The Windows Azure Web Sites service previously offered SSL support only based on certificates offered by Microsoft. With the current update added the ability to use your certificate for SSL and secure access to sites.

New features in Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to configure SSL bindings both by IP address and based on SNI.

Upgrade Windows Azure Active Directory Service


The current update has added some useful tools to the Windows Azure Active Directory user authentication service.

In particular, a free Directory Sync Tool has been added, which allows you to easily synchronize the existing on-premium Active Directory directory (Windows Server 2003 and higher) with the cloud service directory. This allows you to use the existing user directory without having to configure federation via ADFS.

Another useful update was support for managing existing Windows Azure Active Directory directories of third-party services, such as Office 365, using a Windows Azure account. This feature greatly simplifies the integration of Windows Azure services with Office 365 and other systems.

Details can be found in this blog post .

Update PowerShell scripts for IaaS and PaaS


Windows Azure PowerShell automated management tools have received an update . The following innovations are reported:


Details of the update and description of all new products can be found in this blog entry .

Improving MSDN Subscription Terms, Software Development Scripts, and Software Testing


Significantly changed the conditions and benefits of Windows Azure for MSDN subscription users, within which you can access the entire spectrum of Microsoft software for development and testing purposes.

First, MSDN subscribers are now granted the right to use Microsoft’s server subscription products in the Windows Azure cloud: SQL Server, Windows Server, BizTalk Server and others. This offer applies only to software testing and development scenarios and does not apply to production.

Secondly, MSDN subscribers have dramatically reduced the cost of computing power (virtual machines) that can be used to test and develop software.

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In the picture you can see a comparison of prices for a regular copy of a virtual machine with an installed server and prices for offers for MSDN subscribers for software testing. Discounts reach 97%! Developers have the right to raise any number of virtual machines at these prices! Discounts are automatically applied when you bring up one of the virtual machines with a pre-installed server using an MSDN subscription.

These new proposals offer tremendous opportunities for organizing software testing, offering significant savings when using ready-made, pre-configured, powerful Windows Azure cloud.

Thirdly, the approach to providing cloud service benefits to MSDN subscribers has changed. If earlier subscribers could count on certain, predetermined capacities of each element of the platform, then today subscribers are provided with only a certain amount that can be spent on anything. Below is the value of the provided benefit in dollars per month and several options for its use:

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The new approach to benefits and a drastic reduction in the price of computing power for subscribers will allow MSDN users to more efficiently apply subscriptions and significantly reduce the cost of organizing testing in the cloud.

Lastly, the Windows Azure team announced the raffle for the Aston Martin car among MSDN subscribers who activate the subscription until September 30th. Activate your subscription and get a chance to win a racing car.

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Node.js library for authentication with Windows Azure Active Directory


The Microsoft Open Technologies team has released a library for the Node.js framework, which is designed to apply authentication based on Windows Azure Active Directory in projects based on Node.js.

The library is released open source and is available via npm:

npm install passport-azure-ad

Windows Azure Media Services .NET SDK Release


Released Windows Azure Media Services Developer Tools Update for .NET platform. This release is notable for the fact that all source codes were published on GitHub under the free Apache 2.0 license.

The following innovations have been announced:


Improved cost portal


Presented convenient innovations in the management portal, which will allow more convenient to work with the costs and billing of cloud services.

The first innovation allows you to see the current consumption by the benefits of MSDN subscribers and the number of days left until the new period.

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The second innovation concerns the subscription and billing control center, where you can see the details of spending MSDN subscription benefits.

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Updated trial for Windows Azure testing


Along with the renewal of the MSDN subscription, the approach for platform trial accounts intended for testing and testing Windows Azure has changed.

If earlier, within the framework of the trial, strictly defined capacities were offered, the excess of which led to the completion of the entire trial period, now, during the trial period, users are offered a free loan of $ 200, which can be spent on any Windows Azure services as part of standard pricing.

Changes to the portal also apply to new trial offers. The user who is trying to Windows Azure is now much easier and more convenient to monitor the expenditure of allocated funds.

Training Kit Update


Released Windows Azure Training Kit update. In the latest update, the following changes were made:


In total, the Training Kit for self-study includes 17 laboratory work, 22 demonstrations and 36 presentations.

Download the Windows Azure Training Kit - May 2013 by the following link .

Do not miss


Do not miss the previous announcements of updates to the Windows Azure platform, which are released almost every week:


useful links


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


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.

Video recordings of Windows Azure Summit reports and video interviews that were conducted during a large cloud conference.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/182122/

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