What's new in Windows Azure? New SDKs and toolkits for Visual Studio give us new functionality, refactored APIs, and performance improvements for working with the cloud.

1. This presentation incorporates some content and demos from Microsoft
Azure Services Platform
What’s New in Azure
April 2009

2. Agenda
• Recap of Azure timeline, events, news
• What’s new in SQL Data Services
• What’s New in Windows Azure
• Demo: Full Trust
• Demo: Native Code
• What’s New in Live Services
• Demo: Mesh Application

3. Azure Timeline – Past, Present,
Future
Azure
SDS Changes
Platform
Announced
Announced
March
January Go
October
CTP
CTP Live?
CTP
2008 2009
10/08 01/09 03/09 11/09
PDC MIX PDC
Outage!
22 hrs

4. Azure Outage Report
(Microsoft)
• What Happened? During a routine operating system upgrade on Friday (March 13th), the deployment
service within Windows Azure began to slow down due to networking issues. This caused a large number
of servers to time out and fail.
• Once these servers failed, our monitoring system alerted the team. At the same time, the Fabric
Controller automatically initiated steps to recover affected applications by moving them to different
servers. The Fabric Controller is designed to be very cautious about taking broad recovery steps, so it
began recovery a few applications at a time. Because this serial process was taking much too long, we
decided to pursue a parallel update process, which successfully restored all applications.
• What Was Affected? Any application running only a single instance went down when its server went
down. Very few applications running multiple instances went down, although some were degraded due to
one instance being down.
• In addition, the ability to perform management tasks from the web portal appeared unavailable for many
applications due to the Fabric Controller being backed up with work during the serialized recovery process.
• How Will We Prevent This in the Future? We have learned a lot from this experience. We are addressing
the network issues and we will be refining and tuning our recovery algorithm to ensure that it can handle
malfunctions quickly and gracefully.
• For continued availability during upgrades, we recommend that application owners deploy their
application with multiple instances of each role. We'll make two the default in our project templates and
samples. We will not count the second instance against quota limits, so CTP participants can feel
comfortable running two instances of each application role.

5. New CTPs/Announcements for
Live, SDS, Azure

6. What’s new in SQL Data
Services
• Big change of direction for SDS announced in March
• Microsoft has decided to give us a full relational database
in the cloud
• SDS will be the SQL Server you are familiar with –
Tables, T-SQL, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, Indexes
• Very few limitations/differences from Enterprise SQL Server
• Most .ADO.NET Code, ODBC-based code and Stored
Procedures should just work
• Current ACE model will eventually be deprecated
• No CTP out yet to play with
• This is very good news

7. Windows Azure March CTP
• Support for developing Managed Full Trust applications.
• Support for Native Code via PInvokes and spawning native
processes.
• Support for developing FastCGI applications, including support for
rewrite rules via URL Rewrite Module.
• Improved support for the integration of development storage with
Visual Studio, including enhanced performance and support for SQL
Server (only local instance).
• Combined installer includes the Windows Azure SDK
• Addressed top customer bugs.
• Native Code Debugging.
• Update Notification of future releases.
• FastCGI template

8. Native Code
• Lets you run unmanaged code in your Azure-
hosted applications
• No longer limits development to .NET
languages
• Roles can:
– Call a native library with P/Invoke
– Spawn a sub-process
– Use FastCGI

9. Full Trust
• Previously, hosted Azure apps only ran in partial trust
• Limitation – couldn’t use some .NET libraries
• Limitation – couldn’t run native code
• Limitation – couldn’t read the local machine registry
• Limitation – couldn’t spawn processes
• Limitation – some parts of Azure couldn’t be combined
(for example, couldn’t use .NET Service’s Service Bus
from an Azure-hosted application)
• Can now select partial trust or full trust for a role
• Opens up a broader set of possibilities for cloud apps

10. Native Code & Full Trust -
Enabling
• Setting in cloud project .csdef file
• Set enableNativeCodeExecution=“true”
attribute for WebRole or WorkerRole element

11. FastCGI
• A web role can now use the IIS FastCGI module
• FastCGI allows developers to deploy and run web
applications written with 3rd-party programming
languages such as PHP.
• This provides developers using non-Microsoft
languages the ability to take advantage of
scalability on Windows Azure
• Gives developers more flexibility
• One more step toward openness

12. DEMO: FULL TRUST (http://AzureMonitor.CodePlex.com)
AZURE APPLICATION MONITOR

13. About the Full Trust Demo
• “Azure Application Monitor”
(azuremonitor.codeplex.com)
• Captures hosted Azure application web and
worker role process statistics to cloud
storage, can be viewed with a desktop tool
• Proves how many instances are running, gets you
physical details such as machine names
• Needs to access System.Diagnostics.Process
which requires full trust
• Not possible to do this before March CTP

14. DEMO: NATIVE CODE (Windows Azure SDK)
NATIVE CODE + FASTCGI DEMO

15. About the Native Code / FastCGI
Demo
• “FastCGI” Windows Azure SDK Sample
• Demonstrates a Native Code Azure App
• Demonstrates FastCGI support

16. Live Services April CTP
• Can run Production and Developer mesh clients on the same
machine (previously not possible). Side-by-side instructions online.
• Support for Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8
• Single installer for the Live Framework SDK and the Live Framework
Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Resource Scripts are now supported in Silverlight applications and
with the local Live Operating Environment
• Public availability of the SDK and Tools on the Microsoft.com
Download Center.
• Improved stability in the client and the cloud Live Operating
Environment.
• Design and performance improvements to the API toolkits
• Simplified workflow for setting up an account and a Live Framework
project on the Azure Developer Portal.

17. DEMO: LIVE SERVICES MESH WEB APPLICATION (Live Services SDK)
HELLO MESH

18. About the Hello Mesh Demo
• “Hello, Mesh” Live Framework SDK Sample
• Portable, synchronizable web application
• Silverlight app created in Visual Studio
• Packaged to a zip file and deployed to portal
• Can be run from Live Desktop via browser
• Can be run locally on computers/devices
connected to your mesh

19. Summary: What’s new in Azure
• SQL Data Services Announcement
• Windows Azure March 2009 CTP
Full Trust, Native Code, FastCGI support
• Live Services April 2009 CTP
Primarily Optimization & Usability
Improvements

20. Resources
• Azure Portal
http://www.Azure.com
• Azure User Group Site
http://www.AzureUserGroup.com
• Azure Blogs
http://www.AzureFeeds.com