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Today we released a major set of updates to Microsoft Azure. Today’s updates include: Marketplace: Announcing Azure Marketplace and partnerships with key technology partners Networking: Network Security Groups, Multi-NIC, Forced Tunneling, Source ... [More] IP Affinity, and much more Batch Computing: Public Preview of the new Azure Batch Computing Service Automation: General Availability of the Azure Automation Service Anti-malware: General Availability of Microsoft Anti-malware for Virtual Machines and Cloud Services Virtual Machines: General Availability of many more VM extensions – PowerShell DSC, Octopus, VS Release Management All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them: Marketplace: Announcing Azure Marketplace and partnerships with key technology partners Last week, at our Cloud Day event in San Francisco, I announced a new Azure Marketplace that helps to better connect Azure customers with partners, ISVs and startups.  With just a couple of clicks, you can now quickly discover, purchase, and deploy any number of solutions directly into Azure. Exploring the Marketplace You can explore the Azure Marketplace by clicking the Marketplace title that is pinned by default to the home-screen of the Azure Preview Portal: Clicking the Marketplace tile will enable you to explore a large selection of applications, VM images, and services that you can provision into your Azure subscription: Using the marketplace provides a super easy way to take advantage of a rich ecosystem of applications and services integrated to run great with Azure.  Today’s marketplace release includes multi-VM templates to run Hadoop clusters powered by Cloudera or Hortenworks, Linux VMs powered by Unbuntu, CoreOS, Suse, CentOS, Microsoft SharePoint Server Farms, Cassandra Clusters powered by DataStax, and a wide range of security virtual appliances. You can click any of the items in the gallery to learn more about them and optionally deploy them.  Doing so will walk you though a simple to follow creation wizard that enables you to optionally configure how/where they will run, as well as display any additional pricing required for the apps/services/VM images that you select. For example, below is all it takes to stand-up an 8-node DataStax Enterprise cluster: Solutions you purchase through the Marketplace will be automatically billed to your Azure subscription (avoiding the need for you to setup a separate payment method).  Virtual Machine images will support the ability to bring your own license or rent the image license by the hour (which is ideal for proof of concept solutions or cases where you need the solution for only a short period of time).  Both Azure Direct customers as well as customers who pay using an Enterprise Agreement can take advantage of the Azure Marketplace starting today. You can learn more about the Azure Marketplace as well as browse the items within it here. Networking: Lots and lots of New Features and Improvements This week’s Azure update includes a ton of new capabilities to the Azure networking stack.  You can use these new networking capabilities immediately in the North Europe region, and they will be supported worldwide in all regions in November 2014.  The new network capabilities include: Network Security Groups You can now create Network Security groups to define access control rules for inbound and outbound traffic to a Virtual machine or a group of virtual machines in a subnet. The security groups and the rules can be managed and updated independent of the life cycle of the VM. Multi-NIC Support You can now create and manage multiple virtual network interfaces (NICs) on a VM.  Multi-NIC support is a fundamental requirement for a majority of network virtual appliances that can be deployed in Azure. Having this support now enabled within Azure will enable even richer network virtual appliances to be used. Forced Tunneling You can now redirect or “force” all Internet-bound traffic that originates in a cloud application back through an on-premises network via a Site-to-Site VPN tunnel for inspection and auditing. This is a critical security capability for enterprise grade applications. ExpressRoute Enhancements You can now share a single ExpressRoute connection across multiple Azure subscriptions. Additionally, a single Virtual Network in Azure can now be linked to more than one ExpressRoute circuit, thereby enabling much richer backup and disaster recovery scenarios. New VPN Gateway Sizes To cater to the growing hybrid connectivity throughput needs and the number of cross premise sites, we are announcing the availability of a higher performance Azure VPN gateway. This will enable a faster ExpressRoute and Site-to-Site VPN gateways with more tunnels. Operations and audit logs for VNet Gateways and ExpressRoute You can now view operations logs for Virtual Network Gateways and ExpressRoute circuits. The Azure portal will now show operations logs and information on all API calls you make and important infrastructure changes made such as scheduled updates to gateways. Advanced Virtual Network Gateway policies We now enable the ability for you to control encryption for the tunnel between Virtual Networks. You now have a choice between 3DES, AES128, AES256 and Null encryption, and you can also enable Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) for IPsec/IKE gateways. Source IP Affinity The Azure Load Balancer now supports a new distribution mode called Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity). You can now load balance traffic based on a 2-tuple (Source-IP, Destination-IP) or 3-tuple (Source-IP, Destination-IP and Protocol) distribution modes. Nested policies for Traffic Manager You can now create nested policies for traffic management. This allows tremendous flexibility in creating powerful load-balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments. Portal Support for Managing Internal Load Balancer, Reserved and Instance IP addresses for Virtual Machines It is now possible to use the Azure Preview Portal to manage creating and setting up internal load balancers, as well as reserved and instance IP addresses for virtual machines. Automation: General Availability of Azure Automation Service I am excited to announce the General Availability of the Azure Automation service. Azure Automation enables the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in an Azure environment using a highly scalable and reliable workflow engine. The service can be used to orchestrate time-consuming and frequently repeated operational tasks across Azure and third-party systems while decreasing operating expenses. Azure Automation allows you to build runbooks (PowerShell Workflows) to describe your administration processes, provides a secure global assets store so you don’t need to hardcode sensitive information within your runbooks, and offers scheduling so that runbooks can be triggered automatically. Runbooks can automate a wide range of scenarios – from simple day to day manual tasks to complex processes that span multiple Azure services and 3rd party systems. Because Automation is built on PowerShell, you can take advantage of the many existing PowerShell modules, or author your own to integrate with third party systems. Creating and Editing Runbooks You can create a runbook from scratch, or start by importing an existing template in the runbook gallery: Editing experience for runbooks can also be performed directly in the administration portal: Pricing Available as a pay-as-you-go service, Automation is billed based on the number of job run time minutes used in a given Azure subscription.  500 minutes of free job runtime credits are also included each month for Azure customers to use at no charge. Learn More To learn more about Azure Automation, check out the following resources: Azure Automation Blogs MSDN Documentation Azure Automation Forum User Voice Batch Service: Preview of Azure Batch - new job scheduling service for parallel and HPC apps I’m excited to announce the public preview of our new Azure Batch Service. This new platform service provides “job scheduling as a service” with auto-scaling of compute resources, making it easy to run large-scale parallel and high performance computing (HPC) work in Azure. You submit jobs, we start the VMs, run your tasks, handle any failures, and then shut things down as work completes. Azure Batch is the job scheduling engine that we use internally to manage encoding for Azure Media Services, and for testing Azure itself. With this preview, we are excited to expand our SDK with a new application framework from GreenButton, a company Microsoft acquired earlier in the year. The Azure Batch SDK makes it easy to cloud-enable parallel, cluster, and HPC applications by describing jobs with the required resources, data, and one or more compute tasks. Azure Batch can be used to run large volumes of similar tasks or applications in parallel, programmatically. A command line program or script takes a set of data files as input, processes the data in a series of tasks, and produces a set of output files. Examples of batch workloads that customers are running today in Azure include calculating risk for banks and insurance companies, designing new consumer and industrial products, sequencing genes and developing new drugs, searching for new energy sources, rendering 3D animations, and transcoding video. Azure Batch makes it easy for these customers to use hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of cores, or more on demand. With job scheduling as a service, Azure developers can focus on using batch computing in their applications and delivering services without needing to build and manage a work queue, scaling resources up and down efficiently, dispatching tasks, and handling failures. The scale of Azure helps batch computing customers get their work done faster, experiment with different designs, run larger and more precise models, and test a large number of different scenarios without having to invest in and maintain large clusters. Learn more about Azure Batch and start using it for your applications today. Virtual Machines: General Availability of Microsoft Anti-Malware for VMs and Cloud Services I’m excited to announce that the Microsoft Anti-malware security extension for Virtual Machines and Cloud Services is now generally available.  We are releasing it as a free capability that you can use at no additional charge. The Microsoft Anti-malware security extension can be used to help identify and remove viruses, spyware or other malicious software.  It provides real-time protection from the latest threats and also supports on-demand scheduled scanning.  Enabling it is a good security best practice for applications hosted either on-premises or in the cloud. Enabling the Anti-Malware Extension You can select and configure the Microsoft Antimalware security extension for virtual machines using the Azure preview portal, Visual Studio or API’s/PowerShell.  Antimalware events are then logged to the customer configured Azure Storage account via Azure Diagnostics and can be piped to HDInsight or a SIEM tool for further analysis. More information is available in the Microsoft Antimalware Whitepaper. To enable antimalware feature on existing virtual machine, select the EXTENSIONS tile on a Virtual Machine in the Azure Preview Portal, then click ADD in the command bar and select the Microsoft Antimalware extension. Then, click CREATE and customize any settings: Virtual Machines: General Availability of even more VM Extensions In addition to enabling the Microsoft Anti-Malware extension for Virtual Machines, today’s release also includes support for a whole bunch more new VM extensions that you can enable within your Virtual Machines.  These extensions can be added and configured using the same EXTENSIONS tile on Virtual Machine resources within the Azure Preview Portal (the same screen-shot as in the Anti-malware section above). The new extensions enabled today include: PowerShell Desired State Configuration The PowerShell Desired State Configuration Extension can be used to deploy and configure Azure VMs using Desired State Configuration (DSC) technology. DSC enables you to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. DSC configuration can also be automated using the Azure PowerShell SDK, and you can push configurations to any Azure VM and have them enacted automatically. For more details, please see this desired state configuration blog post.   Octopus Octopus simplifies the deployment of ASP.NET web applications, Windows Services and other applications by automatically configuring IIS, installing services and making configuration changes. Octopus integration of Azure was one of the top requested features on Azure UserVoice and with this integration we will simplify the deployment and configuration of octopus on the VM. Visual Studio Release Management Release Management for Visual Studio is a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process through all of your environments from TFS through to production. Visual Studio Release Management is integrated with TFS and you can configure multi-stage release pipelines to automatically deploy and validate your applications on multiple environments. With the new Visual Studio Release Management extension, VMs can be preconfigured with the necessary components for required for Release Management to operate. Summary Today’s Microsoft Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Microsoft Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu [Less]

Today we released a major set of updates to Microsoft Azure. Today’s updates include: Marketplace: Announcing Azure Marketplace and partnerships with key technology partners Networking: Network Security Groups, Multi-NIC, Forced Tunneling ... [More] , Source IP Affinity, and much more Batch Computing: Public Preview of the new Azure Batch Computing Service Automation: General Availability of the Azure Automation Service Anti-malware: General Availability of Microsoft Anti-malware for Virtual Machines and Cloud Services Virtual Machines: General Availability of many more VM extensions – PowerShell DSC, Octopus, VS Release Management All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them: Marketplace: Announcing Azure Marketplace and partnerships with key technology partners Last week, at our Cloud Day event in San Francisco, I announced a new Azure Marketplace that helps to better connect Azure customers with partners, ISVs and startups.  With just a couple of clicks, you can now quickly discover, purchase, and deploy any number of solutions directly into Azure. Exploring the Marketplace You can explore the Azure Marketplace by clicking the Marketplace title that is pinned by default to the home-screen of the Azure Preview Portal: Clicking the Marketplace tile will enable you to explore a large selection of applications, VM images, and services that you can provision into your Azure subscription: Using the marketplace provides a super easy way to take advantage of a rich ecosystem of applications and services integrated to run great with Azure.  Today’s marketplace release includes multi-VM templates to run Hadoop clusters powered by Cloudera or Hortenworks, Linux VMs powered by Unbuntu, CoreOS, Suse, CentOS, Microsoft SharePoint Server Farms, Cassandra Clusters powered by DataStax, and a wide range of security virtual appliances. You can click any of the items in the gallery to learn more about them and optionally deploy them.  Doing so will walk you though a simple to follow creation wizard that enables you to optionally configure how/where they will run, as well as display any additional pricing required for the apps/services/VM images that you select. For example, below is all it takes to stand-up an 8-node DataStax Enterprise cluster: Solutions you purchase through the Marketplace will be automatically billed to your Azure subscription (avoiding the need for you to setup a separate payment method).  Virtual Machine images will support the ability to bring your own license or rent the image license by the hour (which is ideal for proof of concept solutions or cases where you need the solution for only a short period of time).  Both Azure Direct customers as well as customers who pay using an Enterprise Agreement can take advantage of the Azure Marketplace starting today. You can learn more about the Azure Marketplace as well as browse the items within it here. Networking: Lots and lots of New Features and Improvements This week’s Azure update includes a ton of new capabilities to the Azure networking stack.  You can use these new networking capabilities immediately in the North Europe region, and they will be supported worldwide in all regions in November 2014.  The new network capabilities include: Network Security Groups You can now create Network Security groups to define access control rules for inbound and outbound traffic to a Virtual machine or a group of virtual machines in a subnet. The security groups and the rules can be managed and updated independent of the life cycle of the VM. Multi-NIC Support You can now create and manage multiple virtual network interfaces (NICs) on a VM.  Multi-NIC support is a fundamental requirement for a majority of network virtual appliances that can be deployed in Azure. Having this support now enabled within Azure will enable even richer network virtual appliances to be used. Forced Tunneling You can now redirect or “force” all Internet-bound traffic that originates in a cloud application back through an on-premises network via a Site-to-Site VPN tunnel for inspection and auditing. This is a critical security capability for enterprise grade applications. ExpressRoute Enhancements You can now share a single ExpressRoute connection across multiple Azure subscriptions. Additionally, a single Virtual Network in Azure can now be linked to more than one ExpressRoute circuit, thereby enabling much richer backup and disaster recovery scenarios. New VPN Gateway Sizes To cater to the growing hybrid connectivity throughput needs and the number of cross premise sites, we are announcing the availability of a higher performance Azure VPN gateway. This will enable a faster ExpressRoute and Site-to-Site VPN gateways with more tunnels. Operations and audit logs for VNet Gateways and ExpressRoute You can now view operations logs for Virtual Network Gateways and ExpressRoute circuits. The Azure portal will now show operations logs and information on all API calls you make and important infrastructure changes made such as scheduled updates to gateways. Advanced Virtual Network Gateway policies We now enable the ability for you to control encryption for the tunnel between Virtual Networks. You now have a choice between 3DES, AES128, AES256 and Null encryption, and you can also enable Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) for IPsec/IKE gateways. Source IP Affinity The Azure Load Balancer now supports a new distribution mode called Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity). You can now load balance traffic based on a 2-tuple (Source-IP, Destination-IP) or 3-tuple (Source-IP, Destination-IP and Protocol) distribution modes. Nested policies for Traffic Manager You can now create nested policies for traffic management. This allows tremendous flexibility in creating powerful load-balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments. Portal Support for Managing Internal Load Balancer, Reserved and Instance IP addresses for Virtual Machines It is now possible to use the Azure Preview Portal to manage creating and setting up internal load balancers, as well as reserved and instance IP addresses for virtual machines. Automation: General Availability of Azure Automation Service I am excited to announce the General Availability of the Azure Automation service. Azure Automation enables the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in an Azure environment using a highly scalable and reliable workflow engine. The service can be used to orchestrate time-consuming and frequently repeated operational tasks across Azure and third-party systems while decreasing operating expenses. Azure Automation allows you to build runbooks (PowerShell Workflows) to describe your administration processes, provides a secure global assets store so you don’t need to hardcode sensitive information within your runbooks, and offers scheduling so that runbooks can be triggered automatically. Runbooks can automate a wide range of scenarios – from simple day to day manual tasks to complex processes that span multiple Azure services and 3rd party systems. Because Automation is built on PowerShell, you can take advantage of the many existing PowerShell modules, or author your own to integrate with third party systems. Creating and Editing Runbooks You can create a runbook from scratch, or start by importing an existing template in the runbook gallery: Editing experience for runbooks can also be performed directly in the administration portal: Pricing Available as a pay-as-you-go service, Automation is billed based on the number of job run time minutes used in a given Azure subscription.  500 minutes of free job runtime credits are also included each month for Azure customers to use at no charge. Learn More To learn more about Azure Automation, check out the following resources: Azure Automation Blogs MSDN Documentation Azure Automation Forum User Voice Batch Service: Preview of Azure Batch - new job scheduling service for parallel and HPC apps I’m excited to announce the public preview of our new Azure Batch Service. This new platform service provides “job scheduling as a service” with auto-scaling of compute resources, making it easy to run large-scale parallel and high performance computing (HPC) work in Azure. You submit jobs, we start the VMs, run your tasks, handle any failures, and then shut things down as work completes. Azure Batch is the job scheduling engine that we use internally to manage encoding for Azure Media Services, and for testing Azure itself. With this preview, we are excited to expand our SDK with a new application framework from GreenButton, a company Microsoft acquired earlier in the year. The Azure Batch SDK makes it easy to cloud-enable parallel, cluster, and HPC applications by describing jobs with the required resources, data, and one or more compute tasks. Azure Batch can be used to run large volumes of similar tasks or applications in parallel, programmatically. A command line program or script takes a set of data files as input, processes the data in a series of tasks, and produces a set of output files. Examples of batch workloads that customers are running today in Azure include calculating risk for banks and insurance companies, designing new consumer and industrial products, sequencing genes and developing new drugs, searching for new energy sources, rendering 3D animations, and transcoding video. Azure Batch makes it easy for these customers to use hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of cores, or more on demand. With job scheduling as a service, Azure developers can focus on using batch computing in their applications and delivering services without needing to build and manage a work queue, scaling resources up and down efficiently, dispatching tasks, and handling failures. The scale of Azure helps batch computing customers get their work done faster, experiment with different designs, run larger and more precise models, and test a large number of different scenarios without having to invest in and maintain large clusters. Learn more about Azure Batch and start using it for your applications today. Virtual Machines: General Availability of Microsoft Anti-Malware for VMs and Cloud Services I’m excited to announce that the Microsoft Anti-malware security extension for Virtual Machines and Cloud Services is now generally available.  We are releasing it as a free capability that you can use at no additional charge. The Microsoft Anti-malware security extension can be used to help identify and remove viruses, spyware or other malicious software.  It provides real-time protection from the latest threats and also supports on-demand scheduled scanning.  Enabling it is a good security best practice for applications hosted either on-premises or in the cloud. Enabling the Anti-Malware Extension You can select and configure the Microsoft Antimalware security extension for virtual machines using the Azure preview portal, Visual Studio or API’s/PowerShell.  Antimalware events are then logged to the customer configured Azure Storage account via Azure Diagnostics and can be piped to HDInsight or a SIEM tool for further analysis. More information is available in the Microsoft Antimalware Whitepaper. To enable antimalware feature on existing virtual machine, select the EXTENSIONS tile on a Virtual Machine in the Azure Preview Portal, then click ADD in the command bar and select the Microsoft Antimalware extension. Then, click CREATE and customize any settings: Virtual Machines: General Availability of even more VM Extensions In addition to enabling the Microsoft Anti-Malware extension for Virtual Machines, today’s release also includes support for a whole bunch more new VM extensions that you can enable within your Virtual Machines.  These extensions can be added and configured using the same EXTENSIONS tile on Virtual Machine resources within the Azure Preview Portal (the same screen-shot as in the Anti-malware section above). The new extensions enabled today include: PowerShell Desired State Configuration The PowerShell Desired State Configuration Extension can be used to deploy and configure Azure VMs using Desired State Configuration (DSC) technology. DSC enables you to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. DSC configuration can also be automated using the Azure PowerShell SDK, and you can push configurations to any Azure VM and have them enacted automatically. For more details, please see this desired state configuration blog post.   Octopus Octopus simplifies the deployment of ASP.NET web applications, Windows Services and other applications by automatically configuring IIS, installing services and making configuration changes. Octopus integration of Azure was one of the top requested features on Azure UserVoice and with this integration we will simplify the deployment and configuration of octopus on the VM. Visual Studio Release Management Release Management for Visual Studio is a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process through all of your environments from TFS through to production. Visual Studio Release Management is integrated with TFS and you can configure multi-stage release pipelines to automatically deploy and validate your applications on multiple environments. With the new Visual Studio Release Management extension, VMs can be preconfigured with the necessary components for required for Release Management to operate. Summary Today’s Microsoft Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Microsoft Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu [Less]

Today we released a major set of updates to Microsoft Azure. Today’s updates include: Marketplace: Announcing Azure Marketplace and partnerships with key technology partners Networking: Network Security Groups, Multi-NIC, Forced Tunneling ... [More] , Source IP Affinity, and much more Batch Computing: Public Preview of the new Azure Batch Computing Service Automation: General Availability of the Azure Automation Service Anti-malware: General Availability of Microsoft Anti-malware for Virtual Machines and Cloud Services Virtual Machines: General Availability of many more VM extensions – PowerShell DSC, Octopus, VS Release Management All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them: Marketplace: Announcing Azure Marketplace and partnerships with key technology partners Last week, at our Cloud Day event in San Francisco, I announced a new Azure Marketplace that helps to better connect Azure customers with partners, ISVs and startups.  With just a couple of clicks, you can now quickly discover, purchase, and deploy any number of solutions directly into Azure. Exploring the Marketplace You can explore the Azure Marketplace by clicking the Marketplace title that is pinned by default to the home-screen of the Azure Preview Portal: Clicking the Marketplace tile will enable you to explore a large selection of applications, VM images, and services that you can provision into your Azure subscription: Using the marketplace provides a super easy way to take advantage of a rich ecosystem of applications and services integrated to run great with Azure.  Today’s marketplace release includes multi-VM templates to run Hadoop clusters powered by Cloudera or Hortenworks, Linux VMs powered by Unbuntu, CoreOS, Suse, CentOS, Microsoft SharePoint Server Farms, Cassandra Clusters powered by DataStax, and a wide range of security virtual appliances. You can click any of the items in the gallery to learn more about them and optionally deploy them.  Doing so will walk you though a simple to follow creation wizard that enables you to optionally configure how/where they will run, as well as display any additional pricing required for the apps/services/VM images that you select. For example, below is all it takes to stand-up an 8-node DataStax Enterprise cluster: Solutions you purchase through the Marketplace will be automatically billed to your Azure subscription (avoiding the need for you to setup a separate payment method).  Virtual Machine images will support the ability to bring your own license or rent the image license by the hour (which is ideal for proof of concept solutions or cases where you need the solution for only a short period of time).  Both Azure Direct customers as well as customers who pay using an Enterprise Agreement can take advantage of the Azure Marketplace starting today. You can learn more about the Azure Marketplace as well as browse the items within it here. Networking: Lots and lots of New Features and Improvements This week’s Azure update includes a ton of new capabilities to the Azure networking stack.  You can use these new networking capabilities immediately in the North Europe region, and they will be supported worldwide in all regions in November 2014.  The new network capabilities include: Network Security Groups You can now create Network Security groups to define access control rules for inbound and outbound traffic to a Virtual machine or a group of virtual machines in a subnet. The security groups and the rules can be managed and updated independent of the life cycle of the VM. Multi-NIC Support You can now create and manage multiple virtual network interfaces (NICs) on a VM.  Multi-NIC support is a fundamental requirement for a majority of network virtual appliances that can be deployed in Azure. Having this support now enabled within Azure will enable even richer network virtual appliances to be used. Forced Tunneling You can now redirect or “force” all Internet-bound traffic that originates in a cloud application back through an on-premises network via a Site-to-Site VPN tunnel for inspection and auditing. This is a critical security capability for enterprise grade applications. ExpressRoute Enhancements You can now share a single ExpressRoute connection across multiple Azure subscriptions. Additionally, a single Virtual Network in Azure can now be linked to more than one ExpressRoute circuit, thereby enabling much richer backup and disaster recovery scenarios. New VPN Gateway Sizes To cater to the growing hybrid connectivity throughput needs and the number of cross premise sites, we are announcing the availability of a higher performance Azure VPN gateway. This will enable a faster ExpressRoute and Site-to-Site VPN gateways with more tunnels. Operations and audit logs for VNet Gateways and ExpressRoute You can now view operations logs for Virtual Network Gateways and ExpressRoute circuits. The Azure portal will now show operations logs and information on all API calls you make and important infrastructure changes made such as scheduled updates to gateways. Advanced Virtual Network Gateway policies We now enable the ability for you to control encryption for the tunnel between Virtual Networks. You now have a choice between 3DES, AES128, AES256 and Null encryption, and you can also enable Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) for IPsec/IKE gateways. Source IP Affinity The Azure Load Balancer now supports a new distribution mode called Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity). You can now load balance traffic based on a 2-tuple (Source-IP, Destination-IP) or 3-tuple (Source-IP, Destination-IP and Protocol) distribution modes. Nested policies for Traffic Manager You can now create nested policies for traffic management. This allows tremendous flexibility in creating powerful load-balancing and failover schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments. Portal Support for Managing Internal Load Balancer, Reserved and Instance IP addresses for Virtual Machines It is now possible to use the Azure Preview Portal to manage creating and setting up internal load balancers, as well as reserved and instance IP addresses for virtual machines. Automation: General Availability of Azure Automation Service I am excited to announce the General Availability of the Azure Automation service. Azure Automation enables the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of resources in an Azure environment using a highly scalable and reliable workflow engine. The service can be used to orchestrate time-consuming and frequently repeated operational tasks across Azure and third-party systems while decreasing operating expenses. Azure Automation allows you to build runbooks (PowerShell Workflows) to describe your administration processes, provides a secure global assets store so you don’t need to hardcode sensitive information within your runbooks, and offers scheduling so that runbooks can be triggered automatically. Runbooks can automate a wide range of scenarios – from simple day to day manual tasks to complex processes that span multiple Azure services and 3rd party systems. Because Automation is built on PowerShell, you can take advantage of the many existing PowerShell modules, or author your own to integrate with third party systems. Creating and Editing Runbooks You can create a runbook from scratch, or start by importing an existing template in the runbook gallery: Editing experience for runbooks can also be performed directly in the administration portal: Pricing Available as a pay-as-you-go service, Automation is billed based on the number of job run time minutes used in a given Azure subscription.  500 minutes of free job runtime credits are also included each month for Azure customers to use at no charge. Learn More To learn more about Azure Automation, check out the following resources: Azure Automation Blogs MSDN Documentation Azure Automation Forum User Voice Batch Service: Preview of Azure Batch - new job scheduling service for parallel and HPC apps I’m excited to announce the public preview of our new Azure Batch Service. This new platform service provides “job scheduling as a service” with auto-scaling of compute resources, making it easy to run large-scale parallel and high performance computing (HPC) work in Azure. You submit jobs, we start the VMs, run your tasks, handle any failures, and then shut things down as work completes. Azure Batch is the job scheduling engine that we use internally to manage encoding for Azure Media Services, and for testing Azure itself. With this preview, we are excited to expand our SDK with a new application framework from GreenButton, a company Microsoft acquired earlier in the year. The Azure Batch SDK makes it easy to cloud-enable parallel, cluster, and HPC applications by describing jobs with the required resources, data, and one or more compute tasks. Azure Batch can be used to run large volumes of similar tasks or applications in parallel, programmatically. A command line program or script takes a set of data files as input, processes the data in a series of tasks, and produces a set of output files. Examples of batch workloads that customers are running today in Azure include calculating risk for banks and insurance companies, designing new consumer and industrial products, sequencing genes and developing new drugs, searching for new energy sources, rendering 3D animations, and transcoding video. Azure Batch makes it easy for these customers to use hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of cores, or more on demand. With job scheduling as a service, Azure developers can focus on using batch computing in their applications and delivering services without needing to build and manage a work queue, scaling resources up and down efficiently, dispatching tasks, and handling failures. The scale of Azure helps batch computing customers get their work done faster, experiment with different designs, run larger and more precise models, and test a large number of different scenarios without having to invest in and maintain large clusters. Learn more about Azure Batch and start using it for your applications today. Virtual Machines: General Availability of Microsoft Anti-Malware for VMs and Cloud Services I’m excited to announce that the Microsoft Anti-malware security extension for Virtual Machines and Cloud Services is now generally available.  We are releasing it as a free capability that you can use at no additional charge. The Microsoft Anti-malware security extension can be used to help identify and remove viruses, spyware or other malicious software.  It provides real-time protection from the latest threats and also supports on-demand scheduled scanning.  Enabling it is a good security best practice for applications hosted either on-premises or in the cloud. Enabling the Anti-Malware Extension You can select and configure the Microsoft Antimalware security extension for virtual machines using the Azure preview portal, Visual Studio or API’s/PowerShell.  Antimalware events are then logged to the customer configured Azure Storage account via Azure Diagnostics and can be piped to HDInsight or a SIEM tool for further analysis. More information is available in the Microsoft Antimalware Whitepaper. To enable antimalware feature on existing virtual machine, select the EXTENSIONS tile on a Virtual Machine in the Azure Preview Portal, then click ADD in the command bar and select the Microsoft Antimalware extension. Then, click CREATE and customize any settings: Virtual Machines: General Availability of even more VM Extensions In addition to enabling the Microsoft Anti-Malware extension for Virtual Machines, today’s release also includes support for a whole bunch more new VM extensions that you can enable within your Virtual Machines.  These extensions can be added and configured using the same EXTENSIONS tile on Virtual Machine resources within the Azure Preview Portal (the same screen-shot as in the Anti-malware section above). The new extensions enabled today include: PowerShell Desired State Configuration The PowerShell Desired State Configuration Extension can be used to deploy and configure Azure VMs using Desired State Configuration (DSC) technology. DSC enables you to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. DSC configuration can also be automated using the Azure PowerShell SDK, and you can push configurations to any Azure VM and have them enacted automatically. For more details, please see this desired state configuration blog post.   Octopus Octopus simplifies the deployment of ASP.NET web applications, Windows Services and other applications by automatically configuring IIS, installing services and making configuration changes. Octopus integration of Azure was one of the top requested features on Azure UserVoice and with this integration we will simplify the deployment and configuration of octopus on the VM. Visual Studio Release Management Release Management for Visual Studio is a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process through all of your environments from TFS through to production. Visual Studio Release Management is integrated with TFS and you can configure multi-stage release pipelines to automatically deploy and validate your applications on multiple environments. With the new Visual Studio Release Management extension, VMs can be preconfigured with the necessary components for required for Release Management to operate. Summary Today’s Microsoft Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Microsoft Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu [Less]

I’m excited to announce today that Microsoft is partnering with Docker, Inc to enable great container-based development experiences on Linux, Windows Server and Microsoft Azure. Docker is an open platform that enables developers and administrators ... [More] to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. Earlier this year, Microsoft released support for Docker containers with Linux on Azure.  This support integrates with the Azure VM agent extensibility model and Azure command-line tools, and makes it easy to deploy the latest and greatest Docker Engine in Azure VMs and then deploy Docker based images within them.   Docker Support for Windows Server + Docker Hub integration with Microsoft Azure Today, I’m excited to announce that we are working with Docker, Inc to extend our support for Docker much further.  Specifically, I’m excited to announce that: 1) Microsoft and Docker are integrating the open-source Docker Engine with the next release of Windows Server.  This release of Windows Server will include new container isolation technology, and support running both .NET and other application types (Node.js, Java, C++, etc) within these containers.  Developers and organizations will be able to use Docker to create distributed, container-based applications for Windows Server that leverage the Docker ecosystem of users, applications and tools.  It will also enable a new class of distributed applications built with Docker that use Linux and Windows Server images together.   2) We will support the Docker client natively on Windows.  Developers and administrators running Windows will be able to use the same standard Docker client and interface to deploy and manage Docker based solutions with both Linux and Windows Server environments.   3) Docker for Windows Server container images will be available in the Docker Hub alongside the Docker for Linux container images available today.  This will enable developers and administrators to easily share and automate application workflows using both Windows Server and Linux Docker images. 4) We will integrate Docker Hub with the Microsoft Azure Gallery and Azure Management Portal.  This will make it trivially easy to deploy and run both Linux and Windows Server based Docker images in Microsoft Azure. 5) Microsoft is contributing code to Docker’s Open Orchestration APIs.  These APIs provide a portable way to create multi-container Docker applications that can be deployed into any datacenter or cloud provider environment. This support will allow a developer or administrator using the Docker command line client to launch either Linux or Windows Server based Docker applications directly into Microsoft Azure from his or her development machine. Exciting Opportunities Ahead At Microsoft we continue to be inspired by technologies that can dramatically improve how quickly teams can bring new solutions to market. The partnership we are announcing with Docker today will enable developers and administrators to use the best container tools available for both Linux and Windows Server based applications, and to run all of these solutions within Microsoft Azure.  We are looking forward to seeing the great applications you build with them. You can learn more about today’s announcements here and here. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

I’m excited to announce today that Microsoft is partnering with Docker, Inc to enable great container-based development experiences on Linux, Windows Server and Microsoft Azure. Docker is an open platform that enables developers and administrators ... [More] to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. Earlier this year, Microsoft released support for Docker containers with Linux on Azure.  This support integrates with the Azure VM agent extensibility model and Azure command-line tools, and makes it easy to deploy the latest and greatest Docker Engine in Azure VMs and then deploy Docker based images within them.   Docker Support for Windows Server + Docker Hub integration with Microsoft Azure Today, I’m excited to announce that we are working with Docker, Inc to extend our support for Docker much further.  Specifically, I’m excited to announce that: 1) Microsoft and Docker are integrating the open-source Docker Engine with the next release of Windows Server.  This release of Windows Server will include new container isolation technology, and support running both .NET and other application types (Node.js, Java, C++, etc) within these containers.  Developers and organizations will be able to use Docker to create distributed, container-based applications for Windows Server that leverage the Docker ecosystem of users, applications and tools.  It will also enable a new class of distributed applications built with Docker that use Linux and Windows Server images together.   2) We will support the Docker client natively on Windows.  Developers and administrators running Windows will be able to use the same standard Docker client and interface to deploy and manage Docker based solutions with both Linux and Windows Server environments.   3) Docker for Windows Server container images will be available in the Docker Hub alongside the Docker for Linux container images available today.  This will enable developers and administrators to easily share and automate application workflows using both Windows Server and Linux Docker images. 4) We will integrate Docker Hub with the Microsoft Azure Gallery and Azure Management Portal.  This will make it trivially easy to deploy and run both Linux and Windows Server based Docker images in Microsoft Azure. 5) Microsoft is contributing code to Docker’s Open Orchestration APIs.  These APIs provide a portable way to create multi-container Docker applications that can be deployed into any datacenter or cloud provider environment. This support will allow a developer or administrator using the Docker command line client to launch either Linux or Windows Server based Docker applications directly into Microsoft Azure from his or her development machine. Exciting Opportunities Ahead At Microsoft we continue to be inspired by technologies that can dramatically improve how quickly teams can bring new solutions to market. The partnership we are announcing with Docker today will enable developers and administrators to use the best container tools available for both Linux and Windows Server based applications, and to run all of these solutions within Microsoft Azure.  We are looking forward to seeing the great applications you build with them. You can learn more about today’s announcements here and here. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

I’m excited to announce today that Microsoft is partnering with Docker, Inc to enable great container-based development experiences on Linux, Windows Server and Microsoft Azure. Docker is an open platform that enables developers and administrators ... [More] to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. Earlier this year, Microsoft released support for Docker containers with Linux on Azure.  This support integrates with the Azure VM agent extensibility model and Azure command-line tools, and makes it easy to deploy the latest and greatest Docker Engine in Azure VMs and then deploy Docker based images within them.   Docker Support for Windows Server + Docker Hub integration with Microsoft Azure Today, I’m excited to announce that we are working with Docker, Inc to extend our support for Docker much further.  Specifically, I’m excited to announce that: 1) Microsoft and Docker are integrating the open-source Docker Engine with the next release of Windows Server.  This release of Windows Server will include new container isolation technology, and support running both .NET and other application types (Node.js, Java, C++, etc) within these containers.  Developers and organizations will be able to use Docker to create distributed, container-based applications for Windows Server that leverage the Docker ecosystem of users, applications and tools.  It will also enable a new class of distributed applications built with Docker that use Linux and Windows Server images together.   2) We will support the Docker client natively on Windows.  Developers and administrators running Windows will be able to use the same standard Docker client and interface to deploy and manage Docker based solutions with both Linux and Windows Server environments.   3) Docker for Windows Server container images will be available in the Docker Hub alongside the Docker for Linux container images available today.  This will enable developers and administrators to easily share and automate application workflows using both Windows Server and Linux Docker images. 4) We will integrate Docker Hub with the Microsoft Azure Gallery and Azure Management Portal.  This will make it trivially easy to deploy and run both Linux and Windows Server based Docker images in Microsoft Azure. 5) Microsoft is contributing code to Docker’s Open Orchestration APIs.  These APIs provide a portable way to create multi-container Docker applications that can be deployed into any datacenter or cloud provider environment. This support will allow a developer or administrator using the Docker command line client to launch either Linux or Windows Server based Docker applications directly into Microsoft Azure from his or her development machine. Exciting Opportunities Ahead At Microsoft we continue to be inspired by technologies that can dramatically improve how quickly teams can bring new solutions to market. The partnership we are announcing with Docker today will enable developers and administrators to use the best container tools available for both Linux and Windows Server based applications, and to run all of these solutions within Microsoft Azure.  We are looking forward to seeing the great applications you build with them. You can learn more about today’s announcements here and here. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Over the last few days we’ve released a number of great enhancements to Microsoft Azure.  These include: Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service Site Recovery: General Availability of Disaster Recovery to Azure using Azure Site ... [More] Recovery Management: Tags support in the Azure Preview Portal SQL DB: Public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database (available through .NET lib, Azure service templates) DocumentDB: Support for Document Explorer, Collection management and new metrics Notification Hub: Support for Baidu Push Notification Service Virtual Network: Support for static private IP support in the Azure Preview Portal Automation updates: Active Directory authentication, PowerShell script converter, runbook gallery, hourly scheduling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them: Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service I’m excited to announce the General Availability of the Azure Redis Cache. The Azure Redis Cache service provides the ability for you to use a secure/dedicated Redis cache, managed as a service by Microsoft. The Azure Redis Cache is now the recommended distributed cache solution we advocate for Azure applications. Redis Cache Unlike traditional caches which deal only with key-value pairs, Redis is popular for its support of high performance data types, on which you can perform atomic operations such as appending to a string, incrementing the value in a hash, pushing to a list, computing set intersection, union and difference, or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.  Other features include support for transactions, pub/sub, Lua scripting, keys with a limited time-to-live, and configuration settings to make Redis behave more like a traditional cache. Finally, Redis has a healthy, vibrant open source ecosystem built around it. This is reflected in the diverse set of Redis clients available across multiple languages. This allows it to be used by nearly any application, running on either Windows or Linux, that you host inside of Azure. Redis Cache Sizes and Editions The Azure Redis Cache Service is today offered in the following sizes:  250 MB, 1 GB, 2.8 GB, 6 GB, 13 GB, 26 GB, 53 GB.  We plan to support even higher-memory options in the future. Each Redis cache size option is also offered in two editions: Basic – A single cache node, without a formal SLA, recommended for use in dev/test or non-critical workloads. Standard – A multi-node, replicated cache configured in a two-node Master/Replica configuration for high-availability, and backed by an enterprise SLA. With the Standard edition, we manage replication between the two nodes and perform an automatic failover in the case of any failure of the Master node (because of either an un-planned server failure, or in the event of planned patching maintenance). This helps ensure the availability of the cache and the data stored within it.  Details on Azure Redis Cache pricing can be found on the Azure Cache pricing page.  Prices start as low as $17 a month. Create a New Redis Cache and Connect to It You can create a new instance of a Redis Cache using the Azure Preview Portal.  Simply select the New->Redis Cache item to create a new instance.  You can then use a wide variety of programming languages and corresponding client packages to connect to the Redis Cache you’ve provisioned.  You use the same Redis client packages that you’d use to connect to your own Redis instance as you do to connect to an Azure Redis Cache service.  The API + libraries are exactly the same. Below we’ll use a .NET Redis client called StackExchange.Redis to connect to our Azure Redis Cache instance. First open any Visual Studio project and add the StackExchange.Redis NuGet package to it, with the NuGet package manager.  Then, obtain the cache endpoint and key respectively from the Properties blade and the Keys blade for your cache instance within the Azure Preview Portal. Once you’ve retrieved these, create a connection instance to the cache with the code below: var connection = StackExchange.Redis.ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("contoso5.redis.cache.windows.net,ssl=true,password=..."); Once the connection is established, retrieve a reference to the Redis cache database, by calling the ConnectionMultiplexer.GetDatabase method. IDatabase cache = connection.GetDatabase(); Items can be stored in and retrieved from a cache by using the StringSet and StringGet methods (or their async counterparts – StringSetAsync and StringGetAsync). cache.StringSet("Key1", "HelloWorld"); cache.StringGet("Key1"); You have now stored and retrieved a “Hello World” string from a Redis cache instance running on Azure. For an example of an end to end application using Azure Redis Cache, please check out the MVC Movie Application blog post. Using Redis for ASP.NET Session State and Output Caching You can also take advantage of Redis to store out-of-process ASP.NET Session State as well as to share Output Cached content across web server instances.  For more details on using Redis for Session State, checkout this blog post: ASP.NET Session State for Redis.  For details on using Redis for Output Caching, checkout this MSDN post: ASP.NET Output Cache for Redis Monitoring and Alerting Every Azure Redis cache instance has built-in monitoring support on by default. Currently you can track Cache Hits, Cache Misses, Get/Set Commands, Total Operations, Evicted Keys, Expired Keys, Used Memory, Used Bandwidth and Used CPU.  You can easily visualize these using the Azure Preview Portal: You can also create alerts on metrics or events (just click the “Add Alert” button above). For example, you could create an alert rule to notify the cache administrator when the cache is seeing evictions. This in turn might signal that the cache is running hot and needs to be scaled up with more memory. Learn more For more information about the Azure Redis Cache, please visit the following links: Azure Blog: Lap around Azure Redis Cache Channel 9 Videos: Redis Cache 101, 102, 103 Home Page : Azure Redis Cache MSDN Documentation: Azure Redis Cache Questions? : Azure Cache Forum Feature requests: Azure Cache UserVoice Site Recovery: Announcing the General Availability of Disaster Recovery to Azure I’m excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Site Recovery Service’s new Disaster Recovery to Azure functionality.  The Disaster Recovery to Azure capability enables consistent replication, protection, and recovery of on-premises VMs to Microsoft Azure. With support for both Disaster Recovery and Migration to Azure, the Azure Site Recovery service now provides a simple, reliable, and cost-effective DR solution for enabling Virtual Machine replication and recovery between on-premises private clouds across different enterprise locations, or directly to the cloud with Azure. This month’s release builds upon our recent InMage acquisition, and the integration of InMage Scout with Azure Site Recovery enables us to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment – regardless of whether it is Windows or Linux, running on physical servers or virtualized servers using Hyper-V, VMware or other virtualization solutions. Microsoft Azure is now the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world. In addition to enabling replication to and disaster recovery in Azure, the Azure Site Recovery service also enables the automated protection of VMs, remote health monitoring of them, no-impact disaster recovery plan testing, and single click orchestrated recovery - all backed by an enterprise-grade SLA. A new addition with this GA release is the ability to also invoke Azure Automation runbooks from within Azure Site Recovery Plans, enabling you to further automate your solutions. Learn More about Azure Site Recovery For more information on Azure Site Recovery, check out the recording of the Azure Site Recovery session at TechEd 2014 where we discussed the preview.  You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with the engineering team or other customers. Once you’re ready to get started with Azure Site Recovery, check out additional pricing or product information, and sign up for a free Azure trial. Beginning this month, Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery will also be available in a convenient, and economical promotion offer available for purchase via a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.  Each unit of the Azure Backup & Site Recovery annual subscription offer covers protection of a single instance to Azure with Site Recovery, as well as backup of data with Azure Backup.  You can contact your Microsoft Reseller or Microsoft representative for more information. Management: Tag Support with Resources I’m excited to announce the support of tags in the Azure management platform and in the Azure preview portal. Tags provide an easy way to organize your Azure resources and resources groups, by allowing you to tag your resources with name/value pairs to further categorize and view resources across resource groups and across subscriptions.  For example, you could use tags to identify which of your resources are used for “production” versus “dev/test” – and enable easy filtering/searching of the resources based on which tag you were interested in – regardless of which application or resource group they were in.  Using Tags To get started with the new Tag support, browse to any resource or resource group in the Azure Preview Portal and click on the Tags tile on the resource. On the Tags blade that appears, you'll see a list of any tags you've already applied. To add a new tag, simply specify a name and value and press enter. After you've added a few tags, you'll notice autocomplete options based on pre-existing tag names and values to better ensure a consistent taxonomy across your resources and to avoid common mistakes, like misspellings. You can also use our command-line tools to tag resources as well.  Below is an example of using the Azure PowerShell module to quickly tag all of the resources in your Azure subscription: Once you've tagged your resources and resource groups, you can view the full list of tags across all of your subscriptions using the Browse hub. You can also “pin” tags to your Startboard for quick access.  This provides a really easy way to quickly jump to any resource in a tag you’ve pinned:   SQL Databases: Public Preview of Elastic Scale Support I am excited to announce the public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database. Elastic Scale enables the data-tier of an application to scale out via industry-standard sharding practices, while significantly streamlining the development and management of your sharded cloud applications. The new capabilities are provided through .NET libraries and Azure service templates that are hosted in your own Azure subscription to manage your highly scalable applications. Elastic Scale implements the infrastructure aspects of sharding and thus allows you to instead focus on the business logic of your application. Elastic Scale allows developers to establish a “contract” that defines where different slices of data reside across a collection of database instances.  This enables applications to easily and automatically direct transactions to the appropriate database (shard) and perform queries that cross many or all shards using simple extensions to the ADO.NET programming model. Elastic Scale also enables coordinated data movement between shards to split or merge ranges of data among different databases and satisfy common scenarios such as pulling a busy tenant into its own shard.  We are also announcing the Federation Migration Utility which is available as part of the preview. This utility will help current SQL Database Federations customers migrate their Federations application to Elastic Scale without having to perform any data movement. Get Started with the Elastic Scale preview today, and watch our Channel 9 video to learn more. DocumentDB: Document Explorer, Collection management and new metrics Last week we released a bunch of updates to the Azure DocumentDB service experience in the Azure Preview Portal. We continue to improve the developer and management experiences so you can be more productive and build great applications on DocumentDB. These improvements include: Document Explorer: View and access JSON documents in your database account Collection management: Easily add and delete collections Database performance metrics and storage information: View performance metrics and storage consumed at a Database level Collection performance metrics and storage information: View performance metrics and storage consumed at a Collection level Support for Azure tags: Apply custom tags to DocumentDB Accounts Document Explorer Near the bottom of the DocumentDB Account, Database, and Collection blades, you’ll now find a new Developer Tools lens with a Document Explorer part. This part provides you with a read-only document explorer experience. Select a database and collection within the Document Explorer and view documents within that collection. Note that the Document Explorer will load up to the first 100 documents in the selected Collection. You can load additional documents (in batches of 100) by selecting the “Load more” option at the bottom of the Document Explorer blade. Future updates will expand Document Explorer functionality to enable document CRUD operations as well as the ability to filter documents. Collection Management The DocumentDB Database blade now allows you to quickly create a new Collection through the Add Collection command found on the top left of the Database blade. Health Metrics We’ve added a new Collection blade which exposes Collection level performance metrics and storage information. You can access this new blade by selecting a Collection from the list of Collections on the Database blade. The Database and Collection level metrics are available via the Database and Collection blades. As always, we’d love to hear from you about the DocumentDB features and experiences you would find most valuable within the Azure portal. You can submit your suggestions on the Microsoft Azure DocumentDB feedback forum. Notification Hubs: support for Baidu Cloud Push Azure Notification Hubs enable cross platform mobile push notifications for Android, iOS, Windows, Windows Phone, and Kindle devices. Thousands of customers now use Notification Hubs for instant cross platform broadcast, personalized notifications to dynamic segments of their mobile audience, or simply to reach individual customers of their mobile apps regardless which device they use.  Today I am excited to announce support for another mobile notifications platform, Baidu Cloud Push, which will help Notification Hubs customers reach the diverse family of Android devices in China.  Delivering push notifications to Android devices in China is no easy task, due to a diverse set of app stores and push services. Pushing notifications to an Android device via Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) does not work, as most Android devices in China are not configured to use GCM.  To help app developers reach every Android device independent of which app store they’re configured with, Azure Notification Hubs now supports sending push notifications via the Baidu Cloud Push service. To use Baidu from your Notification Hub, register your app with Baidu, and obtain the appropriate identifiers (UserId and ChannelId) for your application. Then configure your Notification Hub within the Azure Management Portal with these identifiers: For more details, follow the tutorial in English & Chinese. You can learn more about Push Notifications using Azure at the Notification Hubs dev center. Virtual Machines: Instance-Level Public IPs generally available Azure now supports the ability for you to assign public IP addresses to VMs and web or worker roles so they become directly addressable on the Internet - without having to map a virtual IP endpoint for access. With Instance-Level Public IPs, you can enable scenarios like running FTP servers in Azure and monitoring VMs directly using their IPs. For more information, please visit the Instance-Level Public IP Addresses webpage. Automation: Updates Earlier this year, we introduced preview availability of Azure Automation, a service that allows you to automate the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of your Azure resources. I am excited to announce several new features in Azure Automation: Active Directory Authentication PowerShell Script Converter Runbook Gallery Hourly Scheduling Active Directory Authentication We now offer an easier alternative to using certificates to authenticate from the Azure Automation service to your Azure environment. You can now authenticate to Azure using an Azure Active Directory organization identity which provides simple, credential-based authentication. If you do not have an Active Directory user set up already, simply create a new user and provide the user with access to manage your Azure subscription. Once you have done this, create an Automation Asset with its credentials and reference the credential in your runbook. You need to do this setup only once and can then use the stored credentials going forward, greatly simplifying the number of steps that you need to take to start automating. You can read this blog to learn more about getting set up with Active Directory Authentication. PowerShell Script Converter Azure Automation now supports importing PowerShell scripts as runbooks. When a PowerShell script is imported that does not contain a single PowerShell Workflow, Automation will attempt to convert it from PowerShell script to PowerShell Workflow, and then create a runbook from the result. This allows the vast amount of PowerShell content and knowledge that exists today to be more easily leveraged in Azure Automation, despite the fact that Automation executes PowerShell Workflow and not PowerShell. Runbook Gallery The Runbook Gallery allows you to quickly discover Automation sample, utility, and scenario runbooks from within the Azure management portal. The Runbook Gallery consists of runbooks that can be used as is or with minor modification, and runbooks that can serve as examples of how to create your own runbooks. The Runbook Gallery features content not only by Microsoft, but also by active members of the Azure community. If you have created a runbook that you think other users may benefit from, you can share it with the community on Script Center and it will show up in the Gallery. If you are interested in learning more about the Runbook Gallery, this TechNet article describes how the Gallery works in more detail and provides information on how you can contribute. You can access the Gallery from +New, and then selecting App Services > Automation > Runbook > From Gallery. In the Gallery wizard, you can browse for runbooks by selecting the category in the left hand pane and then view the description of the selected runbook in the right pane. You can then preview the code and finally import the runbook into your personal space: We will be adding the ability to expand the Gallery to include PowerShell scripts in the near future. These scripts will be converted to Workflows when they are imported to your Automation Account using the new PowerShell Script Converter. This means that you will have more content to choose from and a tool to help you get your PowerShell scripts running in Azure. Hourly Scheduling Based on popular request from our users, hourly scheduling is now available in Azure Automation. This feature allows you to schedule your runbook hourly or every X hours, making it that much easier to start runbooks at a regular frequency that is smaller than a day. Summary Today’s Microsoft Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Microsoft Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu [Less]

Over the last few days we’ve released a number of great enhancements to Microsoft Azure.  These include: Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service Site Recovery: General Availability of Disaster Recovery to Azure using Azure Site ... [More] Recovery Management: Tags support in the Azure Preview Portal SQL DB: Public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database (available through .NET lib, Azure service templates) DocumentDB: Support for Document Explorer, Collection management and new metrics Notification Hub: Support for Baidu Push Notification Service Virtual Network: Support for static private IP support in the Azure Preview Portal Automation updates: Active Directory authentication, PowerShell script converter, runbook gallery, hourly scheduling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them: Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service I’m excited to announce the General Availability of the Azure Redis Cache. The Azure Redis Cache service provides the ability for you to use a secure/dedicated Redis cache, managed as a service by Microsoft. The Azure Redis Cache is now the recommended distributed cache solution we advocate for Azure applications. Redis Cache Unlike traditional caches which deal only with key-value pairs, Redis is popular for its support of high performance data types, on which you can perform atomic operations such as appending to a string, incrementing the value in a hash, pushing to a list, computing set intersection, union and difference, or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.  Other features include support for transactions, pub/sub, Lua scripting, keys with a limited time-to-live, and configuration settings to make Redis behave more like a traditional cache. Finally, Redis has a healthy, vibrant open source ecosystem built around it. This is reflected in the diverse set of Redis clients available across multiple languages. This allows it to be used by nearly any application, running on either Windows or Linux, that you host inside of Azure. Redis Cache Sizes and Editions The Azure Redis Cache Service is today offered in the following sizes:  250 MB, 1 GB, 2.8 GB, 6 GB, 13 GB, 26 GB, 53 GB.  We plan to support even higher-memory options in the future. Each Redis cache size option is also offered in two editions: Basic – A single cache node, without a formal SLA, recommended for use in dev/test or non-critical workloads. Standard – A multi-node, replicated cache configured in a two-node Master/Replica configuration for high-availability, and backed by an enterprise SLA. With the Standard edition, we manage replication between the two nodes and perform an automatic failover in the case of any failure of the Master node (because of either an un-planned server failure, or in the event of planned patching maintenance). This helps ensure the availability of the cache and the data stored within it.  Details on Azure Redis Cache pricing can be found on the Azure Cache pricing page.  Prices start as low as $17 a month. Create a New Redis Cache and Connect to It You can create a new instance of a Redis Cache using the Azure Preview Portal.  Simply select the New->Redis Cache item to create a new instance.  You can then use a wide variety of programming languages and corresponding client packages to connect to the Redis Cache you’ve provisioned.  You use the same Redis client packages that you’d use to connect to your own Redis instance as you do to connect to an Azure Redis Cache service.  The API + libraries are exactly the same. Below we’ll use a .NET Redis client called StackExchange.Redis to connect to our Azure Redis Cache instance. First open any Visual Studio project and add the StackExchange.Redis NuGet package to it, with the NuGet package manager.  Then, obtain the cache endpoint and key respectively from the Properties blade and the Keys blade for your cache instance within the Azure Preview Portal. Once you’ve retrieved these, create a connection instance to the cache with the code below: var connection = StackExchange.Redis.ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("contoso5.redis.cache.windows.net,ssl=true,password=..."); Once the connection is established, retrieve a reference to the Redis cache database, by calling the ConnectionMultiplexer.GetDatabase method. IDatabase cache = connection.GetDatabase(); Items can be stored in and retrieved from a cache by using the StringSet and StringGet methods (or their async counterparts – StringSetAsync and StringGetAsync). cache.StringSet("Key1", "HelloWorld"); cache.StringGet("Key1"); You have now stored and retrieved a “Hello World” string from a Redis cache instance running on Azure. For an example of an end to end application using Azure Redis Cache, please check out the MVC Movie Application blog post. Using Redis for ASP.NET Session State and Output Caching You can also take advantage of Redis to store out-of-process ASP.NET Session State as well as to share Output Cached content across web server instances.  For more details on using Redis for Session State, checkout this blog post: ASP.NET Session State for Redis.  For details on using Redis for Output Caching, checkout this MSDN post: ASP.NET Output Cache for Redis Monitoring and Alerting Every Azure Redis cache instance has built-in monitoring support on by default. Currently you can track Cache Hits, Cache Misses, Get/Set Commands, Total Operations, Evicted Keys, Expired Keys, Used Memory, Used Bandwidth and Used CPU.  You can easily visualize these using the Azure Preview Portal: You can also create alerts on metrics or events (just click the “Add Alert” button above). For example, you could create an alert rule to notify the cache administrator when the cache is seeing evictions. This in turn might signal that the cache is running hot and needs to be scaled up with more memory. Learn more For more information about the Azure Redis Cache, please visit the following links: Azure Blog: Lap around Azure Redis Cache Channel 9 Videos: Redis Cache 101, 102, 103 Home Page : Azure Redis Cache MSDN Documentation: Azure Redis Cache Questions? : Azure Cache Forum Feature requests: Azure Cache UserVoice Site Recovery: Announcing the General Availability of Disaster Recovery to Azure I’m excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Site Recovery Service’s new Disaster Recovery to Azure functionality.  The Disaster Recovery to Azure capability enables consistent replication, protection, and recovery of on-premises VMs to Microsoft Azure. With support for both Disaster Recovery and Migration to Azure, the Azure Site Recovery service now provides a simple, reliable, and cost-effective DR solution for enabling Virtual Machine replication and recovery between on-premises private clouds across different enterprise locations, or directly to the cloud with Azure. This month’s release builds upon our recent InMage acquisition, and the integration of InMage Scout with Azure Site Recovery enables us to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment – regardless of whether it is Windows or Linux, running on physical servers or virtualized servers using Hyper-V, VMware or other virtualization solutions. Microsoft Azure is now the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world. In addition to enabling replication to and disaster recovery in Azure, the Azure Site Recovery service also enables the automated protection of VMs, remote health monitoring of them, no-impact disaster recovery plan testing, and single click orchestrated recovery - all backed by an enterprise-grade SLA. A new addition with this GA release is the ability to also invoke Azure Automation runbooks from within Azure Site Recovery Plans, enabling you to further automate your solutions. Learn More about Azure Site Recovery For more information on Azure Site Recovery, check out the recording of the Azure Site Recovery session at TechEd 2014 where we discussed the preview.  You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with the engineering team or other customers. Once you’re ready to get started with Azure Site Recovery, check out additional pricing or product information, and sign up for a free Azure trial. Beginning this month, Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery will also be available in a convenient, and economical promotion offer available for purchase via a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.  Each unit of the Azure Backup & Site Recovery annual subscription offer covers protection of a single instance to Azure with Site Recovery, as well as backup of data with Azure Backup.  You can contact your Microsoft Reseller or Microsoft representative for more information. Management: Tag Support with Resources I’m excited to announce the support of tags in the Azure management platform and in the Azure preview portal. Tags provide an easy way to organize your Azure resources and resources groups, by allowing you to tag your resources with name/value pairs to further categorize and view resources across resource groups and across subscriptions.  For example, you could use tags to identify which of your resources are used for “production” versus “dev/test” – and enable easy filtering/searching of the resources based on which tag you were interested in – regardless of which application or resource group they were in.  Using Tags To get started with the new Tag support, browse to any resource or resource group in the Azure Preview Portal and click on the Tags tile on the resource. On the Tags blade that appears, you'll see a list of any tags you've already applied. To add a new tag, simply specify a name and value and press enter. After you've added a few tags, you'll notice autocomplete options based on pre-existing tag names and values to better ensure a consistent taxonomy across your resources and to avoid common mistakes, like misspellings. You can also use our command-line tools to tag resources as well.  Below is an example of using the Azure PowerShell module to quickly tag all of the resources in your Azure subscription: Once you've tagged your resources and resource groups, you can view the full list of tags across all of your subscriptions using the Browse hub. You can also “pin” tags to your Startboard for quick access.  This provides a really easy way to quickly jump to any resource in a tag you’ve pinned:   SQL Databases: Public Preview of Elastic Scale Support I am excited to announce the public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database. Elastic Scale enables the data-tier of an application to scale out via industry-standard sharding practices, while significantly streamlining the development and management of your sharded cloud applications. The new capabilities are provided through .NET libraries and Azure service templates that are hosted in your own Azure subscription to manage your highly scalable applications. Elastic Scale implements the infrastructure aspects of sharding and thus allows you to instead focus on the business logic of your application. Elastic Scale allows developers to establish a “contract” that defines where different slices of data reside across a collection of database instances.  This enables applications to easily and automatically direct transactions to the appropriate database (shard) and perform queries that cross many or all shards using simple extensions to the ADO.NET programming model. Elastic Scale also enables coordinated data movement between shards to split or merge ranges of data among different databases and satisfy common scenarios such as pulling a busy tenant into its own shard.  We are also announcing the Federation Migration Utility which is available as part of the preview. This utility will help current SQL Database Federations customers migrate their Federations application to Elastic Scale without having to perform any data movement. Get Started with the Elastic Scale preview today, and watch our Channel 9 video to learn more. DocumentDB: Document Explorer, Collection management and new metrics Last week we released a bunch of updates to the Azure DocumentDB service experience in the Azure Preview Portal. We continue to improve the developer and management experiences so you can be more productive and build great applications on DocumentDB. These improvements include: Document Explorer: View and access JSON documents in your database account Collection management: Easily add and delete collections Database performance metrics and storage information: View performance metrics and storage consumed at a Database level Collection performance metrics and storage information: View performance metrics and storage consumed at a Collection level Support for Azure tags: Apply custom tags to DocumentDB Accounts Document Explorer Near the bottom of the DocumentDB Account, Database, and Collection blades, you’ll now find a new Developer Tools lens with a Document Explorer part. This part provides you with a read-only document explorer experience. Select a database and collection within the Document Explorer and view documents within that collection. Note that the Document Explorer will load up to the first 100 documents in the selected Collection. You can load additional documents (in batches of 100) by selecting the “Load more” option at the bottom of the Document Explorer blade. Future updates will expand Document Explorer functionality to enable document CRUD operations as well as the ability to filter documents. Collection Management The DocumentDB Database blade now allows you to quickly create a new Collection through the Add Collection command found on the top left of the Database blade. Health Metrics We’ve added a new Collection blade which exposes Collection level performance metrics and storage information. You can access this new blade by selecting a Collection from the list of Collections on the Database blade. The Database and Collection level metrics are available via the Database and Collection blades. As always, we’d love to hear from you about the DocumentDB features and experiences you would find most valuable within the Azure portal. You can submit your suggestions on the Microsoft Azure DocumentDB feedback forum. Notification Hubs: support for Baidu Cloud Push Azure Notification Hubs enable cross platform mobile push notifications for Android, iOS, Windows, Windows Phone, and Kindle devices. Thousands of customers now use Notification Hubs for instant cross platform broadcast, personalized notifications to dynamic segments of their mobile audience, or simply to reach individual customers of their mobile apps regardless which device they use.  Today I am excited to announce support for another mobile notifications platform, Baidu Cloud Push, which will help Notification Hubs customers reach the diverse family of Android devices in China.  Delivering push notifications to Android devices in China is no easy task, due to a diverse set of app stores and push services. Pushing notifications to an Android device via Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) does not work, as most Android devices in China are not configured to use GCM.  To help app developers reach every Android device independent of which app store they’re configured with, Azure Notification Hubs now supports sending push notifications via the Baidu Cloud Push service. To use Baidu from your Notification Hub, register your app with Baidu, and obtain the appropriate identifiers (UserId and ChannelId) for your application. Then configure your Notification Hub within the Azure Management Portal with these identifiers: For more details, follow the tutorial in English & Chinese. You can learn more about Push Notifications using Azure at the Notification Hubs dev center. Virtual Machines: Instance-Level Public IPs generally available Azure now supports the ability for you to assign public IP addresses to VMs and web or worker roles so they become directly addressable on the Internet - without having to map a virtual IP endpoint for access. With Instance-Level Public IPs, you can enable scenarios like running FTP servers in Azure and monitoring VMs directly using their IPs. For more information, please visit the Instance-Level Public IP Addresses webpage. Automation: Updates Earlier this year, we introduced preview availability of Azure Automation, a service that allows you to automate the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of your Azure resources. I am excited to announce several new features in Azure Automation: Active Directory Authentication PowerShell Script Converter Runbook Gallery Hourly Scheduling Active Directory Authentication We now offer an easier alternative to using certificates to authenticate from the Azure Automation service to your Azure environment. You can now authenticate to Azure using an Azure Active Directory organization identity which provides simple, credential-based authentication. If you do not have an Active Directory user set up already, simply create a new user and provide the user with access to manage your Azure subscription. Once you have done this, create an Automation Asset with its credentials and reference the credential in your runbook. You need to do this setup only once and can then use the stored credentials going forward, greatly simplifying the number of steps that you need to take to start automating. You can read this blog to learn more about getting set up with Active Directory Authentication. PowerShell Script Converter Azure Automation now supports importing PowerShell scripts as runbooks. When a PowerShell script is imported that does not contain a single PowerShell Workflow, Automation will attempt to convert it from PowerShell script to PowerShell Workflow, and then create a runbook from the result. This allows the vast amount of PowerShell content and knowledge that exists today to be more easily leveraged in Azure Automation, despite the fact that Automation executes PowerShell Workflow and not PowerShell. Runbook Gallery The Runbook Gallery allows you to quickly discover Automation sample, utility, and scenario runbooks from within the Azure management portal. The Runbook Gallery consists of runbooks that can be used as is or with minor modification, and runbooks that can serve as examples of how to create your own runbooks. The Runbook Gallery features content not only by Microsoft, but also by active members of the Azure community. If you have created a runbook that you think other users may benefit from, you can share it with the community on Script Center and it will show up in the Gallery. If you are interested in learning more about the Runbook Gallery, this TechNet article describes how the Gallery works in more detail and provides information on how you can contribute. You can access the Gallery from +New, and then selecting App Services > Automation > Runbook > From Gallery. In the Gallery wizard, you can browse for runbooks by selecting the category in the left hand pane and then view the description of the selected runbook in the right pane. You can then preview the code and finally import the runbook into your personal space: We will be adding the ability to expand the Gallery to include PowerShell scripts in the near future. These scripts will be converted to Workflows when they are imported to your Automation Account using the new PowerShell Script Converter. This means that you will have more content to choose from and a tool to help you get your PowerShell scripts running in Azure. Hourly Scheduling Based on popular request from our users, hourly scheduling is now available in Azure Automation. This feature allows you to schedule your runbook hourly or every X hours, making it that much easier to start runbooks at a regular frequency that is smaller than a day. Summary Today’s Microsoft Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Microsoft Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu [Less]

Over the last few days we’ve released a number of great enhancements to Microsoft Azure.  These include: Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service Site Recovery: General Availability of Disaster Recovery to Azure using Azure Site ... [More] Recovery Management: Tags support in the Azure Preview Portal SQL DB: Public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database (available through .NET lib, Azure service templates) DocumentDB: Support for Document Explorer, Collection management and new metrics Notification Hub: Support for Baidu Push Notification Service Virtual Network: Support for static private IP support in the Azure Preview Portal Automation updates: Active Directory authentication, PowerShell script converter, runbook gallery, hourly scheduling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them: Redis Cache: General Availability of Redis Cache Service I’m excited to announce the General Availability of the Azure Redis Cache. The Azure Redis Cache service provides the ability for you to use a secure/dedicated Redis cache, managed as a service by Microsoft. The Azure Redis Cache is now the recommended distributed cache solution we advocate for Azure applications. Redis Cache Unlike traditional caches which deal only with key-value pairs, Redis is popular for its support of high performance data types, on which you can perform atomic operations such as appending to a string, incrementing the value in a hash, pushing to a list, computing set intersection, union and difference, or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.  Other features include support for transactions, pub/sub, Lua scripting, keys with a limited time-to-live, and configuration settings to make Redis behave more like a traditional cache. Finally, Redis has a healthy, vibrant open source ecosystem built around it. This is reflected in the diverse set of Redis clients available across multiple languages. This allows it to be used by nearly any application, running on either Windows or Linux, that you host inside of Azure. Redis Cache Sizes and Editions The Azure Redis Cache Service is today offered in the following sizes:  250 MB, 1 GB, 2.8 GB, 6 GB, 13 GB, 26 GB, 53 GB.  We plan to support even higher-memory options in the future. Each Redis cache size option is also offered in two editions: Basic – A single cache node, without a formal SLA, recommended for use in dev/test or non-critical workloads. Standard – A multi-node, replicated cache configured in a two-node Master/Replica configuration for high-availability, and backed by an enterprise SLA. With the Standard edition, we manage replication between the two nodes and perform an automatic failover in the case of any failure of the Master node (because of either an un-planned server failure, or in the event of planned patching maintenance). This helps ensure the availability of the cache and the data stored within it.  Details on Azure Redis Cache pricing can be found on the Azure Cache pricing page.  Prices start as low as $17 a month. Create a New Redis Cache and Connect to It You can create a new instance of a Redis Cache using the Azure Preview Portal.  Simply select the New->Redis Cache item to create a new instance.  You can then use a wide variety of programming languages and corresponding client packages to connect to the Redis Cache you’ve provisioned.  You use the same Redis client packages that you’d use to connect to your own Redis instance as you do to connect to an Azure Redis Cache service.  The API + libraries are exactly the same. Below we’ll use a .NET Redis client called StackExchange.Redis to connect to our Azure Redis Cache instance. First open any Visual Studio project and add the StackExchange.Redis NuGet package to it, with the NuGet package manager.  Then, obtain the cache endpoint and key respectively from the Properties blade and the Keys blade for your cache instance within the Azure Preview Portal. Once you’ve retrieved these, create a connection instance to the cache with the code below: var connection = StackExchange.Redis.ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("contoso5.redis.cache.windows.net,ssl=true,password=..."); Once the connection is established, retrieve a reference to the Redis cache database, by calling the ConnectionMultiplexer.GetDatabase method. IDatabase cache = connection.GetDatabase(); Items can be stored in and retrieved from a cache by using the StringSet and StringGet methods (or their async counterparts – StringSetAsync and StringGetAsync). cache.StringSet("Key1", "HelloWorld"); cache.StringGet("Key1"); You have now stored and retrieved a “Hello World” string from a Redis cache instance running on Azure. For an example of an end to end application using Azure Redis Cache, please check out the MVC Movie Application blog post. Using Redis for ASP.NET Session State and Output Caching You can also take advantage of Redis to store out-of-process ASP.NET Session State as well as to share Output Cached content across web server instances.  For more details on using Redis for Session State, checkout this blog post: ASP.NET Session State for Redis.  For details on using Redis for Output Caching, checkout this MSDN post: ASP.NET Output Cache for Redis Monitoring and Alerting Every Azure Redis cache instance has built-in monitoring support on by default. Currently you can track Cache Hits, Cache Misses, Get/Set Commands, Total Operations, Evicted Keys, Expired Keys, Used Memory, Used Bandwidth and Used CPU.  You can easily visualize these using the Azure Preview Portal: You can also create alerts on metrics or events (just click the “Add Alert” button above). For example, you could create an alert rule to notify the cache administrator when the cache is seeing evictions. This in turn might signal that the cache is running hot and needs to be scaled up with more memory. Learn more For more information about the Azure Redis Cache, please visit the following links: Azure Blog: Lap around Azure Redis Cache Channel 9 Videos: Redis Cache 101, 102, 103 Home Page : Azure Redis Cache MSDN Documentation: Azure Redis Cache Questions? : Azure Cache Forum Feature requests: Azure Cache UserVoice Site Recovery: Announcing the General Availability of Disaster Recovery to Azure I’m excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Site Recovery Service’s new Disaster Recovery to Azure functionality.  The Disaster Recovery to Azure capability enables consistent replication, protection, and recovery of on-premises VMs to Microsoft Azure. With support for both Disaster Recovery and Migration to Azure, the Azure Site Recovery service now provides a simple, reliable, and cost-effective DR solution for enabling Virtual Machine replication and recovery between on-premises private clouds across different enterprise locations, or directly to the cloud with Azure. This month’s release builds upon our recent InMage acquisition, and the integration of InMage Scout with Azure Site Recovery enables us to provide hybrid cloud business continuity solutions for any customer IT environment – regardless of whether it is Windows or Linux, running on physical servers or virtualized servers using Hyper-V, VMware or other virtualization solutions. Microsoft Azure is now the ideal destination for disaster recovery for virtually every enterprise server in the world. In addition to enabling replication to and disaster recovery in Azure, the Azure Site Recovery service also enables the automated protection of VMs, remote health monitoring of them, no-impact disaster recovery plan testing, and single click orchestrated recovery - all backed by an enterprise-grade SLA. A new addition with this GA release is the ability to also invoke Azure Automation runbooks from within Azure Site Recovery Plans, enabling you to further automate your solutions. Learn More about Azure Site Recovery For more information on Azure Site Recovery, check out the recording of the Azure Site Recovery session at TechEd 2014 where we discussed the preview.  You can also visit the Azure Site Recovery forum on MSDN for additional information and to engage with the engineering team or other customers. Once you’re ready to get started with Azure Site Recovery, check out additional pricing or product information, and sign up for a free Azure trial. Beginning this month, Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery will also be available in a convenient, and economical promotion offer available for purchase via a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.  Each unit of the Azure Backup & Site Recovery annual subscription offer covers protection of a single instance to Azure with Site Recovery, as well as backup of data with Azure Backup.  You can contact your Microsoft Reseller or Microsoft representative for more information. Management: Tag Support with Resources I’m excited to announce the support of tags in the Azure management platform and in the Azure preview portal. Tags provide an easy way to organize your Azure resources and resources groups, by allowing you to tag your resources with name/value pairs to further categorize and view resources across resource groups and across subscriptions.  For example, you could use tags to identify which of your resources are used for “production” versus “dev/test” – and enable easy filtering/searching of the resources based on which tag you were interested in – regardless of which application or resource group they were in.  Using Tags To get started with the new Tag support, browse to any resource or resource group in the Azure Preview Portal and click on the Tags tile on the resource. On the Tags blade that appears, you'll see a list of any tags you've already applied. To add a new tag, simply specify a name and value and press enter. After you've added a few tags, you'll notice autocomplete options based on pre-existing tag names and values to better ensure a consistent taxonomy across your resources and to avoid common mistakes, like misspellings. You can also use our command-line tools to tag resources as well.  Below is an example of using the Azure PowerShell module to quickly tag all of the resources in your Azure subscription: Once you've tagged your resources and resource groups, you can view the full list of tags across all of your subscriptions using the Browse hub. You can also “pin” tags to your Startboard for quick access.  This provides a really easy way to quickly jump to any resource in a tag you’ve pinned:   SQL Databases: Public Preview of Elastic Scale Support I am excited to announce the public preview of Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database. Elastic Scale enables the data-tier of an application to scale out via industry-standard sharding practices, while significantly streamlining the development and management of your sharded cloud applications. The new capabilities are provided through .NET libraries and Azure service templates that are hosted in your own Azure subscription to manage your highly scalable applications. Elastic Scale implements the infrastructure aspects of sharding and thus allows you to instead focus on the business logic of your application. Elastic Scale allows developers to establish a “contract” that defines where different slices of data reside across a collection of database instances.  This enables applications to easily and automatically direct transactions to the appropriate database (shard) and perform queries that cross many or all shards using simple extensions to the ADO.NET programming model. Elastic Scale also enables coordinated data movement between shards to split or merge ranges of data among different databases and satisfy common scenarios such as pulling a busy tenant into its own shard.  We are also announcing the Federation Migration Utility which is available as part of the preview. This utility will help current SQL Database Federations customers migrate their Federations application to Elastic Scale without having to perform any data movement. Get Started with the Elastic Scale preview today, and watch our Channel 9 video to learn more. DocumentDB: Document Explorer, Collection management and new metrics Last week we released a bunch of updates to the Azure DocumentDB service experience in the Azure Preview Portal. We continue to improve the developer and management experiences so you can be more productive and build great applications on DocumentDB. These improvements include: Document Explorer: View and access JSON documents in your database account Collection management: Easily add and delete collections Database performance metrics and storage information: View performance metrics and storage consumed at a Database level Collection performance metrics and storage information: View performance metrics and storage consumed at a Collection level Support for Azure tags: Apply custom tags to DocumentDB Accounts Document Explorer Near the bottom of the DocumentDB Account, Database, and Collection blades, you’ll now find a new Developer Tools lens with a Document Explorer part. This part provides you with a read-only document explorer experience. Select a database and collection within the Document Explorer and view documents within that collection. Note that the Document Explorer will load up to the first 100 documents in the selected Collection. You can load additional documents (in batches of 100) by selecting the “Load more” option at the bottom of the Document Explorer blade. Future updates will expand Document Explorer functionality to enable document CRUD operations as well as the ability to filter documents. Collection Management The DocumentDB Database blade now allows you to quickly create a new Collection through the Add Collection command found on the top left of the Database blade. Health Metrics We’ve added a new Collection blade which exposes Collection level performance metrics and storage information. You can access this new blade by selecting a Collection from the list of Collections on the Database blade. The Database and Collection level metrics are available via the Database and Collection blades. As always, we’d love to hear from you about the DocumentDB features and experiences you would find most valuable within the Azure portal. You can submit your suggestions on the Microsoft Azure DocumentDB feedback forum. Notification Hubs: support for Baidu Cloud Push Azure Notification Hubs enable cross platform mobile push notifications for Android, iOS, Windows, Windows Phone, and Kindle devices. Thousands of customers now use Notification Hubs for instant cross platform broadcast, personalized notifications to dynamic segments of their mobile audience, or simply to reach individual customers of their mobile apps regardless which device they use.  Today I am excited to announce support for another mobile notifications platform, Baidu Cloud Push, which will help Notification Hubs customers reach the diverse family of Android devices in China.  Delivering push notifications to Android devices in China is no easy task, due to a diverse set of app stores and push services. Pushing notifications to an Android device via Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) does not work, as most Android devices in China are not configured to use GCM.  To help app developers reach every Android device independent of which app store they’re configured with, Azure Notification Hubs now supports sending push notifications via the Baidu Cloud Push service. To use Baidu from your Notification Hub, register your app with Baidu, and obtain the appropriate identifiers (UserId and ChannelId) for your application. Then configure your Notification Hub within the Azure Management Portal with these identifiers: For more details, follow the tutorial in English & Chinese. You can learn more about Push Notifications using Azure at the Notification Hubs dev center. Virtual Machines: Instance-Level Public IPs generally available Azure now supports the ability for you to assign public IP addresses to VMs and web or worker roles so they become directly addressable on the Internet - without having to map a virtual IP endpoint for access. With Instance-Level Public IPs, you can enable scenarios like running FTP servers in Azure and monitoring VMs directly using their IPs. For more information, please visit the Instance-Level Public IP Addresses webpage. Automation: Updates Earlier this year, we introduced preview availability of Azure Automation, a service that allows you to automate the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of your Azure resources. I am excited to announce several new features in Azure Automation: Active Directory Authentication PowerShell Script Converter Runbook Gallery Hourly Scheduling Active Directory Authentication We now offer an easier alternative to using certificates to authenticate from the Azure Automation service to your Azure environment. You can now authenticate to Azure using an Azure Active Directory organization identity which provides simple, credential-based authentication. If you do not have an Active Directory user set up already, simply create a new user and provide the user with access to manage your Azure subscription. Once you have done this, create an Automation Asset with its credentials and reference the credential in your runbook. You need to do this setup only once and can then use the stored credentials going forward, greatly simplifying the number of steps that you need to take to start automating. You can read this blog to learn more about getting set up with Active Directory Authentication. PowerShell Script Converter Azure Automation now supports importing PowerShell scripts as runbooks. When a PowerShell script is imported that does not contain a single PowerShell Workflow, Automation will attempt to convert it from PowerShell script to PowerShell Workflow, and then create a runbook from the result. This allows the vast amount of PowerShell content and knowledge that exists today to be more easily leveraged in Azure Automation, despite the fact that Automation executes PowerShell Workflow and not PowerShell. Runbook Gallery The Runbook Gallery allows you to quickly discover Automation sample, utility, and scenario runbooks from within the Azure management portal. The Runbook Gallery consists of runbooks that can be used as is or with minor modification, and runbooks that can serve as examples of how to create your own runbooks. The Runbook Gallery features content not only by Microsoft, but also by active members of the Azure community. If you have created a runbook that you think other users may benefit from, you can share it with the community on Script Center and it will show up in the Gallery. If you are interested in learning more about the Runbook Gallery, this TechNet article describes how the Gallery works in more detail and provides information on how you can contribute. You can access the Gallery from +New, and then selecting App Services > Automation > Runbook > From Gallery. In the Gallery wizard, you can browse for runbooks by selecting the category in the left hand pane and then view the description of the selected runbook in the right pane. You can then preview the code and finally import the runbook into your personal space: We will be adding the ability to expand the Gallery to include PowerShell scripts in the near future. These scripts will be converted to Workflows when they are imported to your Automation Account using the new PowerShell Script Converter. This means that you will have more content to choose from and a tool to help you get your PowerShell scripts running in Azure. Hourly Scheduling Based on popular request from our users, hourly scheduling is now available in Azure Automation. This feature allows you to schedule your runbook hourly or every X hours, making it that much easier to start runbooks at a regular frequency that is smaller than a day. Summary Today’s Microsoft Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Microsoft Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu [Less]

Today I’m excited to announce that we just released a new set of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure. These VM sizes are now available to be used immediately by every Azure customer. The new D-Series of VMs can be used with both Azure Virtual Machines and ... [More] Azure Cloud Services.  In addition to offering faster vCPUs (approximately 60% faster than our A series) and more memory (up to 112 GB), the new VM sizes also all have a local SSD disk (up to 800 GB) to enable much faster IO reads and writes. The new VM sizes available today include the following: General Purpose D-Series VMs Name vCores Memory (GB) Local SSD Disk (GB) Standard_D1 1 3.5 50 Standard_D2 2 7 100 Standard_D3 4 14 200 Standard_D4 8 28 400   High Memory D-Series VMs Name vCores Memory (GB) Local SSD Disk (GB) Standard_D11 2 14 100 Standard_D12 4 28 200 Standard_D13 8 56 400 Standard_D14 16 112 800 For pricing information, please see Virtual Machine Pricing Details. Local SSD Disk and SQL Server Buffer Pool Extensions A temporary drive on the VMs (D:\ on Windows, /mnt or /mnt/resource on Linux) is mapped to the local SSDs exposed on the D-Service VMs, and provides a really good option for replicated storage workloads, like MongoDB, or for significantly increasing the performance of SQL Server 2014 by enabling its unique Buffer Pool Extensions (BPE) feature. SQL Server 2014’s Buffer Pool Extensions allows you to extend the SQL Engine Buffer Pool with the memory of local SSD disks to significantly improve the performance of SQL workloads. The Buffer Pool is a global memory resource used to cache data pages for much faster read operations.  Without any code changes in your application, you can enable the buffer pool support with the SSDs of the D-Series VMs using a simple T-SQL query with just four lines: ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION SET BUFFER POOL EXTENSION ON SIZE = <size> [ KB | MB | GB ] FILENAME = 'D:\SSDCACHE\EXAMPLE.BPE' No code changes are required in your application, and all write operations will continue to be durably persisted in VM drives persisted in Azure Storage. More details on configuring and using BPE can be found here. Start Using the D-Series VMs Today You can start using the new D-Series VM sizes immediately.  They can be easily created and used via both the current Azure Management Portal as well as Preview Portal, as well as from the Azure management command-line/scripts/APIs. To learn more about the D-Series please read this post which has even more details about them, as well as check out the Azure documentation center. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]