Digest of news of the Windows Azure platform, December-January

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 this issue:
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• Significant price reductions for Windows Azure data storage;
• The availability of new instances of virtual machines for heavy computing with the InfiniBand network;
• Public availability of the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service;
• Web Sites. Catering environment. New Web Jobs functionality. AlwaysOn function;
• Mobile Services. Integration with SenchaTouch. Package.json support. Support for startup scripts;
• Windows Azure Scheduler. Integration with the administration panel;
• Windows Azure Storage. Read access to repository copy. New version of the emulator. Libraries for C ++ and Java;
• Monitoring New monitoring service functions;
• The Windows Azure platform is certified for PCI DSS compliance ;
• And also: a new library for PHP , a Gartner report, a video of reports Cloud OS Summit .

Previous editions of this digest can be found at any time through the following link .

Reduced prices for data storage

Windows Azure cloud power prices are constantly adjusting, including as part of Microsoft’s promise to keep prices lower or at competitor level.

In the wake of the reduction in the price of computing power to 22%, the next announcement of the price correction for the storage of Windows Azure Storage took place. Prices are reduced for blob storage by 20% for all regions, which makes the price for storing information in Windows Azure equal to Amazon and even cheaper for a number of regions. Transaction prices received a more significant reduction in prices - by 50% .

For example, in Windows Azure, reliable geo-distributed storage of virtual machine disks costs $ 0.095 / GB per month. To guarantee the same level of reliability in Amazon, customers will have to pay for Standard Volumes ($ 0.05 / GB per month) and EBS Snapshot to S3 ($ 0.095 / GB per month), which is 34% more than the Windows Azure price tag.

In addition to lower prices, according to the independent report Nasuni 2013 Cloud Storage Report, Windows Azure storage services are ahead of Amazon in terms of performance, scale and stability. Another independent study, A Comparative Analysis of 5 Large Cloud IaaS Providers, shows that Windows Azure is three times ahead of Amazon in terms of price / performance.

New instances of virtual machines with support for InfiniBand

For the Windows Azure platform, there are new instances of virtual machines specifically designed for high performance and HPC scenarios. A distinctive feature of the new A8 instances (8 cores, 56 GB RAM) and A9 (16 cores, 112 GB RAM) is the presence of an additional InfiniBand network with a data transfer rate of 40Gbit / s and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology.

This feature, as well as faster processors, faster data exchange will increase the efficiency of parallel MPI applications for solving industrial problems of modeling, simulation, analysis, video processing and building HPC clusters.

Currently, new instances are only available for Windows Azure PaaS functionality, web, and worker roles. New copies can be placed in the US North Central and Europe West regions (the list of regions will be expanded over time).

Below are the prices for new copies:

• A8 - $ 2.45 (~ $ 1,823 / month)
• A9 - $ 4.90 (~ $ 3,646 / month)

Details can be found on the official portal page .

Public availability of the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service

The Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM) local infrastructure protection and recovery service has become available for commercial use. The new service allows you to organize fault tolerance and disaster recovery (Disaster Recovery) for private clouds, offering for this the necessary functionality and additional configuration options, automatic protection, continuous monitoring of vital signs and managed recovery.



The new service uses Hyper-V Replica technology introduced in Windows Server 2012 to organize the protection and recovery of Hyper-V virtual machines from one local infrastructure point to another. At the same time, only the necessary meta-information about virtual machines is transferred to the cloud via encrypted channels, and all data exchange takes place between points of your infrastructure.

Since the release of the public preview version in October 2013, the following innovations and improvements have been made to the service:

• improved support for failover;
• Kerberos authentication support;
• Support for upgrading from VMM 2012 SP1 to VMM 2012 R2;
• improved service scaling.

You can explore the new features with this walkthrough . Additional documentation is available on MSDN .

New Windows Azure Web Sites

The Windows Azure Web Sites service received another batch of updates and new features.

Staging environment. Now, Web Sites developers can enable the staging environment for their applications to host pre-release versions of applications. The working and staging environment can be swapped at any time by publishing or rolling back the new version of the site.



The staging environment has its own URL, which, if desired, you can specify any DNS address. In addition, SSL can be enabled for the stepping environment.

Details on the use of the staging environment can be found in this announcement .

Support Always function. The new Web Sites feature called Always On allows you to keep the hosted web application in an active running state.



After enabling this feature, Windows Azure will periodically ping your site so that it does not turn off or fall asleep and is always “warmed up”.

New Web Jobs functionality. New Web Sites feature called Web Jobs offers the easiest way to launch applications, services or background tasks based on Web Sites. You can upload exe, .cmd, .bat files or scripts .sh, .php, .py, .js to your site and run them .



The download package should be a zip archive containing your executable file or script with any additional files necessary for the script to work. Package size should not exceed 200 megabytes.

You can execute the script once, specify continuous execution or flexibly schedule its periodic execution.



For more flexible work with Web Jobs, Windows Azure WebJobs SDK is provided , which allows you to simplify the solution of many problems of background code execution in your sites. The SDK offers a task status bar for easy monitoring.

Additional Information:

• How to Use the WebJobs feature in Windows Azure Web Sites
• Getting Started with Windows Azure WebJobs SDK
• Scott Hanselman article: Introducing Windows Azure WebJobs
• WebJobs Samples on CodePlex
• Links on how to use Azure WebJobs

Mobile services update

SenchaTouch support .
Windows Azure Mobile Services mobile services have been integrated with Sencha's third-party SenchaTouch framework. SenchaTouch is a tool for creating building cross-platform mobile applications and HTML5 / JS websites. Thanks to the new integration, you can use Windows Azure mobile services in your SenchaTouch-based applications.



You can download the Windows Azure extension for Sencha at the following link . To explore the new features, use the Getting Started tutorial guide. Documentation is also available via the Mobile Services Sencha extension link.

Package.json support . The new feature of mobile services allows you to automatically install NPM packages specified in the package.json configuration file. To enable this functionality, you must have the mobile service code repository enabled. Announcement of innovations made in the blog developers.

Support for startup scripts . Now mobile service developers can take advantage of a new startup script feature that allows you to set code that requires execution when the application is launched. This innovation is part of a larger novelty - expansion points that will allow developers to expand the Mobile Services backend features. The announcement of the new function can be found in the developers blog.

Windows Azure Scheduler

In the last digest, we talked about the new Windows Azure Scheduler service , which is a powerful CRON service in the cloudy Windows Azure environment. Details of its use from their applications are described in this article .



In the next platform update, Windows Azure Scheduler service was integrated into the administration panel. Now, creating tasks for a CRON service can be done from a convenient panel in steps.



The task execution status is displayed on the service page of the administration panel in a convenient way, which allows you to monitor the progress of tasks.

Additional Information:

• Documentation
• .NET API NuGet Package
• MSDN forum
• Pricing (note the free mode).

New Windows Azure Storage

The cloud storage service Windows Azure Storage has received a number of new products and library updates.

Read access to repository copy . As you know, the fault tolerance of Windows Azure storage is guaranteed by storing three copies of user data within one data center, plus three more copies of data in another data center if geo-distributed storage is enabled.

However, access to these copies of data in the second data center was closed and the backup copies were not available to the user in the usual situation. With the recent update of the platform, the read access to such a copy of Read-Access Geo Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) has become available to users.



This innovation allows you to get immediate access to your data in the event of a temporary failure in the primary location of the data. And also allows you to test and track the replication of your data. To access the data, you can use the corresponding URL in the format myaccountname - secondary . <Service> .core.windows.net.

For more information you can refer to this article .

New version of Windows Azure Storage Emulator. For Windows Azure application developers, a new version of the storage emulator is available with support for new storage features introduced earlier - CORS, JSON, and others.

You can download the new version of the emulator at the following link . The official announcement in the blog developers.

New libraries for C ++ and Java. Good news for C ++ application developers! With the new Windows Azure Storage Library Library for C ++, you can easily integrate storage capabilities in the Windows Azure cloud with your applications.

The new library offers support for working with tables, queues and blobs of Windows Azure storage. It supports new access functions to Read Access Geo Redundant Storage, and also supports JSON storage access protocol.

Details about the library and its capabilities can be found at the following link . Examples of the use of the library, as well as the source code of the library can be found on GitHub .

Another good news is the release of a new version of the Windows Azure Storage Client Library Library for Java v. 0.5.0. The library upgrade aims to support new Windows Azure storage features for Java developers. Details about the release and all the links you can find in this blog post developers.

New monitoring features

Monitoring functions for the performance of various Windows Azure cloud services are constantly evolving. This update introduced the following new features.

Per-minute monitoring . The mechanism of statistics Windows Azure has received a significant update and now offers users to monitor the work of services with a minute interval.



Premium SQL Database Metrics. The premium edition of the Windows Azure SQL Database cloud database allows the user to have a guaranteed level of performance for their database, thanks to isolation from other users' databases. In the update of the monitoring services, the CPU metrics and I / O activity for the Premium edition databases were added.

In addition, new metrics were added to the update to track storage metrics for both SQL Database Premium and Standard editions.

Containers for storing statistics Web Sites . Previously, to configure the web site statistics collection mechanism, you had to select an existing storage blob container.



The update has the opportunity to create a new one and set a separate container for information about the logs and statistics of your sites.

History of Mobile Services operations . Thanks to the transaction logging mechanism, administrators and users of a Windows Azure account can track transactions that were performed on objects within that account.



The update has added more than 20 new operations related to working with Windows Azure Mobile Services, which are now noted in the history of operations for further auditing.

Notifications about the status of services. The notification feature (Windows Azure Alerts) allows administrators and users of a Windows Azure account to receive email notifications when certain cloud services running within a subscription are exceeded. This allows you to be informed in advance about the increase or fall of the load, exceeding the power limits and so on.



The update has added support for notifications about the status of the Windows Azure SQL Database service, as well as a significantly expanded set of metrics for notifications about the operation of Windows Azure Web Sites.



For example, the CPU Time and Data Out metrics will allow you to learn in advance about the exhaustion of the quota of free copies of Windows Azure Web Sites sites.

The update also provides support for notifications about the operation of the SQL Database.



For the standard database level, you can get information about current storage usage. For a premium database level, IOPS and CPU Cores are also available to you.

Windows Azure platform certified for PCI DSS compliance

We are pleased to announce that the Windows Azure platform has passed the necessary independent checks for compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) standards . The certificate of compliance was issued by an independent certified expert (Qualified Security Assessor, QSA) as a result of an audit of Windows Azure for compliance with PCI DSS 2.0 Level 1 security standards. To inform customers about certification, the relevant Windows Azure PCI Attestation of Compliance and Windows Azure Customer PCI Guide documents are published on the official portal and are available for download.



Details can be found in this announcement in Russian.

More news

Support for Windows Azure Media Services for PHP . With the release of the new version of the Open Source PHP SDK for Windows Azure , PHP developers have been able to use the cloud-based media processing service Windows Azure Media Services . PHP developers have access to all Media Services functions: content coding, content conversion, content protection, on-demand streaming and live video streaming.

An announcement and a small introduction to the use of new features can be found on the Microsoft Open Technology Portal page.

Gartner Report: PaaS Market Leaders for Enterprise Applications . Gartner Agency presented its PaaS (Platform as a Service) market report for enterprise applications (aPaaS). Gartner analyzed the current market offerings for deploying corporate solutions in a cloud environment within PaaS and presented the findings in the classic “magic quadrant” for the company.



As a result of the analysis, Salesforce.com and Microsoft (Windows Azure platform) were named aPaaS market leaders. Details of the analysis of the Windows Azure platform you can read in this article in Russian. Detailed information on each platform is presented in the report.

Video reports Cloud OS Summit 2013 . Most recently, the Moscow hosted the Cloud OS Summit 2013 conference, in which experts from Microsoft, partners of the company and independent professionals shared their knowledge, news, experience and real-life scenarios of how to use the cloud technologies of Microsoft Cloud OS.

As part of the four tracks of the conference participants and viewers of the online broadcast listened to more than 30 reports on the hottest topics on all the latest technologies for building private and public clouds and cloud services: Windows Server, System Center, SQL Server, Windows Azure, Visual Studio and others.

We are pleased to inform you that all the conference reports were recorded and are now available for viewing to all interested IT professionals, developers, company managers and other professionals and professionals interested in cloud technologies.

Visit the conference page on TechDays to view any of the 30+ reports of the Cloud OS Summit. The conference program can be viewed on the official website .