Digest of news of the Windows Azure platform, November 2013

As part of this news digest, the Windows Azure cloud platform contains basic announcements for developers, IT professionals, and for all professionals interested in cloud technologies and the Windows Azure platform.

In November, the announcement of three completely new services was held on the Windows Azure platform. Produced release into commercial operation of the three services were in the preview. Dozens of functional innovations in existing services were put into operation. The largest announcement of the platform in Russia was the conclusion of a strategic partnership with 1C and Microsoft.
')
In this issue:

• Strategic partnership 1C and Microsoft
• [Release] Commercial Availability of BizTalk Services
• [Release] Commercial availability of the Traffic Manager service
• [Release] Commercial Availability of the Application Access Support Service in Windows Azure Active Directory
• [New] New Windows Azure Scheduler Task Scheduling Service
• [New] New data import / export service on HDD in your storage
• [New] Billing Alerts new service for billing status notification
• Mobile Services. Active Directory, Xamarin support, optimistic concurrency mechanisms
• Storage . Support CORS, JSON, per-minute metrics. Notifications based on storage metrics.
• Virtual machines Gallery update and VIP ACL support
• Web Sites . Support for web sockets and remote debugging. PHP 5.5. Support for automatic logging to blobs
• Notification Hubs. New pricing. Tag Expression Support, New Debug Form
• TFS + Git . Support for continuous deployment based on Git repositories in TFS
• Analytics for developers . Support by New Relic service of projects based on Web Sites and Mobile Services
• Monitoring . Preview of Windows Azure Monitoring Service Library for monitoring the cloud from your code
• Cloud OS Summit conference held in Moscow

Strategic partnership 1C and Microsoft

The leader of the Russian IT market, 1C, and Microsoft agreed on a strategic partnership in the development of the cloud business and conducting a series of pilot projects for deploying 1C solutions on the Microsoft cloud platform. The first solution available on Windows Azure will be 1C: Enterprise: the company's customers will be able to use the familiar solution as a service from the Microsoft cloud.



Details in the press release

Commercial availability of BizTalk Services

Windows Azure BizTalk Services is a new cloud service on the Windows Azure platform that is designed to meet the challenges of integrating heterogeneous environments at the enterprise level and the cloud, offering business-to-Business (B2B) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) interaction capabilities.

The main purpose of the new cloud service is:

• cloud processing interchange electronic data (Electronic Data Interchange, EDI).
• Integration of a variety of solutions at the enterprise level (Enterprise Application Integration, EAI)
• And building hybrid solutions that link cloud services and applications with enterprise services and applications. For example, with SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft solutions.

Details and pricing information.

Commercial availability of the Traffic Manager service

Traffic Manager provides load balancing of inbound traffic between multiple hosted Windows Azure services, regardless of whether they work in the same data center or distributed throughout the world. Effective traffic management will allow you to increase the performance, availability and resiliency of your applications. Traffic Manager supports three methods of load balancing: by performance, fault tolerance or loopback.

Traffic Manager will allow you to increase the availability of critical applications by monitoring services hosted on the Windows Azure platform and automatically failover when a service fails.

The Windows Azure platform allows you to run services in data centers distributed throughout the world. Traffic Manager allows you to process end-user requests using a hosted service that is closest to them in terms of network latency, which allows for faster application response and reduced content delivery time.

Details, documentation and prices on this link .

Commercial Availability of Application Access Support

The Application Access Support service included in the Windows Azure Active Directory is designed to provide access to hundreds of third-party cloud SaaS services through a single authorization mechanism and a single login (Single Sign-On).



Provide users with an easy way to have single sign-on in Microsoft Online Services, Windows Azure-based applications, and hundreds of popular third-party cloud applications. Allow users to quickly and easily launch cloud applications from their personalized web access panel .

New service task scheduling Windows Azure Scheduler

Windows Azure Scheduler allows you to perform various actions, such as HTTP / S requests or sending messages to the storage queue, on a schedule. With the help of the scheduler, you can create tasks in the cloud, which are guaranteed to cause services both inside the cloud infrastructure and outside it. You can perform these tasks on demand or on a regular basis on a schedule, as well as schedule a performance on some date in the future.

A detailed description of working with the service from your code in this article .

New service to import / export data to HDD in storage

The Windows Azure team has introduced a completely new service for cloud platform users. With the help of HDD import / export service, users can quickly upload huge amounts of information to the Windows Azure Storage cloud storage by sending the HDD to Microsoft or upload them back, receiving as a set of hard drives.



To date, the service works only in the United States. A detailed description of the service is presented in this article .

New Billing Alerts service for billing status notification

Windows Azure Billing Alert is a new alert service that allows owners and administrators of a Windows Azure account subscription to monitor the cost of cloud capacity. The recently announced Windows Azure Billing Alert is available as a preview version, where subscription administrators can configure up to five alerts inclusive under different conditions.

Details in the article .

Mobile Services. New features

In November, a lot of new functionality appeared in mobile services.

Active Directory support . Now mobile services support Windows Azure Active Directory to provide authentication and authentication of mobile users through a single corporate cloud mechanism.



Xamarin support . Mobile services received support for Xamarin, a cross-platform tool for writing mobile applications with code separation. Now the creation of iOS and Android mobile applications with a cloud backend is possible directly in Visual Studio 2013



Learn more about partnering with Xamarin. Documentation and code samples are available at this link .

Support for optimistic concurrency mechanisms . Mobile services received additional mechanisms for handling cases of concurrent data access. Using optimistic concurrency mechanisms, your application identifies and resolves conflict situations when data is simultaneously updated by different users.



Now, when creating a new table in mobile services, you automatically get three service columns for storing information about creating a record. In your code, you can use these fields to enable mobile services to automatically solve sharing problems.

Read more about the use of the new mechanism in this guide .

Storage. New features

The Windows Azure Storage team has announced a whole set of long-awaited innovations in the work of cloud storage.

CORS support . The long-awaited support of the CORS mechanism has been added to the Windows Azure Store for providing access and management of storage elements (tables, queues and blobs) from the browser. Windows Azure Storage now supports both types of CORS requests: preflight request and actual request.

A detailed description of the mechanisms and their use can be found in this article .

OData 3.0 and JSON support , Windows Azure Storage also adds support for accessing OData 3.0 data and JSON format. Transferring data in JSON format can significantly save on traffic. The platform supports several types of JSON data: without metadata, with a minimum of metadata and with a full set of metadata.

Detailed description can be found in this article .

Per-minute metrics . Until recently, Windows Azure Storage generated hourly reports on metrics that were convenient to use to monitor service availability, errors, use APIs, and access data. With the update, it became possible to receive minute reports. Such reports will allow users to receive information in a much more operational mode.

Notifications based on repository data . The Windows Azure Alerts subsystem, designed to notify about the parameters and costs of cloud services used by users, received support for Windows Azure Storage.



Now users can set up notifications about the parameters of their storage in the cloud.

Additional changes . Service Windows Azure Storage has received a whole set of innovations. Among them:

• Shared Access Signature ( SAS ) support for the Copy Blob function for a remote blob;
• Blobs now support Content-Disposition and the ability to control HTTP-response headers such as cache-control, content-disposition, and others via request parameters included in SAS. Content-Disposition can be set statically via the Set Blob properties;
• Blobs now support HTTP conditional header sets for Get Blob and Get Blob Properties . These features are useful for working with blobs from the browser, when access to them comes through a proxy or CDN, which add their own headers;
• Blobs now support the Delete Blob operation for unconfirmed blobs that were created using the Put Block operation but were not confirmed;

Along with all these updates, the release of a new version of the Windows Azure Storage Client Library, which can be found here, has taken place . Details about all the innovations you can find in the blog developers .

Virtual machines. New features

Gallery update . The virtual machine gallery has been updated with a new tree view of images, categories, sorting, pricing information and a convenient search.



ACL support for VIP . In the Windows Azure Management Portal, useful functionality has been added to access virtual machines located in the cloud. Previously, these functions were available through PowerShell commands. With the introduction of new features of the portal, administrators and developers can distribute and close access to the end points of their virtual machines through a convenient user interface.

Details in the article .

Web Sites. New features

Remote debugging . With the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.2 tools, developers of cloud applications and Windows Azure services have received an excellent extension of Visual Studio 2013, which allows you to debug code remotely. Remote debugging of applications is available for both cloud services (Cloud Services) and websites (Windows Azure Web Sites).

Details in the article .

PHP 5.5 support . Windows Azure Web Sites now supports hosting projects based on PHP 5.5. You can personally manage the version of your project in the Windows Azure Control Panel.

Web socket support . Web socket technology allows web applications in a browser to exchange real-time data with the server backend. Web socket support was added to Windows Server 2012, a bit earlier it was available to Windows Azure cloud services. Now web applications hosted on Windows Azure Web Sites also have the ability to use web sockets.

Details in the article .

Notification Hubs. Change in pricing. New features

The push notification service Notification Hubs has received a number of notable innovations. The most important news was the change in the pricing of the service for all users.

Reduced price . Service prices are now formed regardless of active devices, this indicator of limits will be removed for all paid levels. Users will now pay 1 million push-notifications for $ 75 or 5 million for $ 200 without any limit on active devices.

Tag expressions . Notification Hubs has always had as a strength a support for tagging devices and users for segmenting mailings. The new tag expressions function allows you to use tags even more flexibly, sending push notifications not just a group of tags, but forming special expressions from tags using merge operations, exceptions and others (AND (&&), OR (||), NOT (!) ).



New functionality is fully supported from the code:

hub.SendNotificationAsync (notification, "(Follows: RedSox || Follows: Cardinals) && Loc: Boston");

Debug form . A new debugging form for push notification service has been added to the Windows Azure administration panel.



Using this form, developers can more conveniently debug the process of distributing push-notifications, send notifications on request to a selected group of users.

Continuous deployment support for TFS + Git

Windows Azure Web Sites has long supported the continuous deployment of the most popular tools for working with code and version control: Git, TFS, GitHub, Codeplex, BitBucket, and others. As you know, TFS, which initially offered users its own version control format, added support for version control based on Git repositories. In a recent update of the Windows Azure Web Sites platform, support was added for such projects hosted on Team Foundation Services with Git.

Details in the article .

Developer Analytics

The company NewRelic developer of the popular eponymous service analytics web applications and cloud services introduced the official support for the services of Windows Azure Web Sites and Mobile Services.





You can subscribe to the NewReilc service directly from the Windows Azure administration panel through the Windows Azure Store.

Release of Windows Azure Monitoring Service Library

For developers, the new Window Library Azure Monitoring Services Library has become available, which offers the long-awaited functionality for obtaining metrics for monitoring cloud services from its code, software configuration of notifications, rules for autoscaling services.

The full list of features available in the first release:



The library is available through the installation of the NuGet package . Detailed documentation is available at this link .

Conference Cloud OS Summit

On November 27, 2013, the Cloud OS Summit conference was held in Moscow, which gathered over 500 people on-site and tens of thousands of people online. We conducted more than 30 reports in five parallel tracks and all broadcast online in real time.

Many conference reports were devoted to the themes of using the platform for various tasks and scenarios. The conference program and the reports in their raw form are already available at http://mscloudsummit.ru . Soon, the processed reports will be posted on the website http://techdays.ru .