This feature will allow Windows Azure customers to more easily balance application performance across multiple geographies. Using policy management you will be able to route some traffic to a hosted service in one region, and route another portion of your application traffic to another region.

The applications of such a feature are broken down three ways:

• Performance: route traffic to one region or another based on performance
• Failover: it the Traffic Manager detects that the service is offline, it will send traffic to the next best available hosted service
• Round Robin: route traffic alternatively across the hosted services in all regions

The Windows Azure Traffic Manager is now available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP), free of charge, but it is invitation only. You’ll have to request access on the Windows Azure Portal, and invitations will be processed based on feature and operational criteria, so you’ll have to be patient.

To submit your invitation request to join the Windows Azure Traffic Manager CTP, follow the instructions below:

• Go to http://windows.azure.com
• Sign in using a valid Windows Live ID for you Windows Azure subscription
• Click on the Beta Programs tab on the left nav bar
• Select the check box for Windows Azure Traffic Manager
• Click on Apply for Access

References:

Windows Azure News from MIX’11

Windows Azure Virtual Network

If you need more than six applications in a given subscription, you can contact Windows Azure Support to request an increase. You can also create additional Windows Azure subscriptions, each of which will allow you to create up to six applications. The same information (*) is required if you want a quota increase for hosted services as for the other limits you can increase (number of role instances and number of storage accoutns for a subscription).

If you have an existing Windows Azure subscription with more than six applications, your applications will continue to run uninterrupted. However, if you delete one of the applications, you will not be able to create a new one until the total number of applications you have falls under six.

(*) Quota increase:

• If you need more than the default quota allocation, you will need to contact Microsoft Online support to initiate a credit check in order to get more resources. The same process applies to the number of role instances, storage accounts and hosted services.
• You can read more details on the Windows Azure Support page
• Direct link to call support is currently located in the top right corner of the support page. If you decide to call support to get a quota increase, have your Subscription ID readily available. To find your Subscription ID:
  • go to the Windows Azure developer portal,
  • sign in, select a project,
  • go to the Account tab,
  • the Sub ID will be displayed in the Support Info module at the bottom of the page.

[Reference: Windows Azure Team Blog]

The Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live beta has now ended. Content that was hosted on the beta is no longer available.

For Silverlight application deployment and video hosting, you may consider Windows® Azure(TM). For more information on Windows Azure and how to use it in order to host Silverlight applications, please refer to the following resources:

• Windows Azure Platform
• Hosting Silverlight applications on Windows Azure Quick Start
• Step-by-step guide to setting up, provisioning, encoding and hosting media for Windows Azure

As per my previous post about the SLS service going away now that the Windows Azure platform is available commercially, we are entering Stage 2 of the SLS grandfathering phase.

The SLS home page has been overhauled this afternoon to provide comprehensive instructions on how to retrieve your SLS content and store it in Windows Azure.

It also confirms the deadline by which this content has to be removed from SLS before it becomes unavailable: January 31st, 2010. Until that time, the SLS admin web site will remain fully functional.

In summary, for the launch countries:

Since January 5th, 2010, as a part of the Windows Azure migration to a paid service, we are no longer issuing tokens, aka invitation codes, for the Windows Azure platform. Instead, you must register at http://windowsazure.com/offers/, select the offer most suitable to your needs, and follow the steps described on the page.

Thank you for your early and continued use of Windows Azure!

Main post: http://blogs.msdn.com/david_sayed/archive/2010/01/07/hosting-videos-on-windows-azure.aspx

Current table of content:

• Provisioning Windows Azure
• Setting up Windows Azure for video storage
• Creating and publishing a video in a Silverlight player to a Windows Azure storage account (using Expression Encoder 3)
• Embedding a published video in a blog (using Windows Live Writer)
• How to retrieve content that is stored on Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live

http://blog.toddysm.com/2010/01/windows-azure-role-instance-limits-explained.html

What is the quota for storing data within Windows Azure storage?

• For a given subscription, during the CTP, each token grants you 2 storage accounts, and each storage account can contain up to 50GB of data
• For a given subscription, after the commercial launch, you will be able to create up to 5 storage accounts (cf. footnote #2), each of which can contain 100TB of data, i.e. any combination of blobs (block blobs or page blobs), containers, queues, or table data.

How is the Windows Azure storage data broken down?

Reminder: Those are the quotas after commercial launch.

• Blobs:
  • 200GB for block blobs (64KB min, 4MB max block size)
  • 64MB is the limit for a single blob before you need to use blocks
  • 1TB for page blobs
• Tables:
  • 252 user defined properties
  • Entity <= 1MB, limited to supported types or in case of binary/string <= 64KB
• Queues:
  • Messages <= 8K

The overarching quota is that you have 100TB per storage account and how you choose to use that amount is up to you in any combination of the above.

Are there any limits on the amount of transactions both entering into the data center and usage of queues / blobs?

A given storage account is meant to be able to process up to a few thousand transactions per second, and a few hundred megabytes per second, the exact limit will depend upon the application and services should benchmark their application.

This applies across everything for the storage account Tables, blobs, queues.

What is the limit on the number of deployments, roles and instances?

• CTP, before Dec. 10th, 2009:
  • Each token grants you 1 hosted service,
  • with 2 deployment slots (staging and production),
  • each of which with up to 5 roles (any combination of web and worker roles),
  • each of which with up to 2 role instances.
  • No weighed VMs. No limit on number of cores.
• CTP, after Dec. 10th, 2009:
  • Same as above, plus weighed VMs and max. 8 cores for one subscription.
  • Read more here.
• Commercial Launch, after Jan. 4th 2010:
• For a given subscription, with the default settings, you will have 6 hosted services (cf. footnote #3),
• with 2 deployment slots each (staging and production),
• each of which with up to 5 roles (any combination of web and worker roles),
• There will be no more limits on the number of role instances, but there will be a default quota of 20 cores per subscription, across all services, roles and role instances (cf. footnote #2).

 Footnotes:

(1) References:

• PDC’09 talk #1 [Brad Calder]. Windows Azure Blob and Drive Deep Dive
• PDC’09 talk #2 [Brad Calder]. Building Scalable and Reliable Applications with Windows Azure

(2) Quota increase:

• If you need more than the default quota allocation, you will need to contact Microsoft Online support to initiate a credit check in order to get more resources. The same process applies to storage accounts and hosted services. More details on the Windows Azure Support page.
• [Addendum on 1/8/2010] Direct link to call support is currently located in the top right corner of the support page. If you decide to call support to get a quota increase, have your Subscription ID readily available.

To find your Subscription ID:

• go to the Windows Azure developer portal,
• sign in, select a project,
• go to the Account tab,
• the Sub ID will be displayed in the Support Info module at the bottom of the page.

(3) Number of hosted service per subscription:

• The limit on the number of hosted services per subscription was changed on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 from 20 to 6. Read more here.

• 2 storage accounts
• 1 hosted service
  • with 2 deployment slots,
  • each with up to 5 roles (any combination of web or worker roles),
  • each with up to 2 instances,
• which meant that you had up to 20 VMs (2 * 5 * 2) to play with, and the VMs were not weighed.

As of yesterday, in preparation for the Windows Azure Commercial Launch announced at PDC'09, we are setting the default limit to 8 cores and we’ll be counting the role instances as weighted.

A regular token will now give you a limit of 8 cores, and you will be able to use those 8 cores in any combination you want for your hosted service.

The weighed core allocation per VM size is as follows:

• Small VM = 1 core
• Medium VM = 2 cores
• Large VM = 4 cores
• Extra Large = 8 cores

If your compute app is currently running with a higher number of cores than 8, you will need to decrease your app size to come into the new quota and redeploy it.

The first one, which I have been using for a while is called Cloud Storage Studio from Cerebrata Software, and I like it a lot.

It has a slick and intuitive UI from the login screen to uploading, managing and deleting content in your storage account. It is really easy to use, supports file and folder multiselect on upload, and is robust insofar as what I have used it for to-date.

I definitely recommend it.

The second one which I have just started using today, but definitely warrants a good try is CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage, from CloudBerry Lab Inc. This crew has already a long and solid history of S3 storage management tools, they have recently added Windows Azure to their line-up.

First experience is good. Login is easy, it works intuitively, the feature set is comprehensive (queue pane, side-by-side view of the cloud and the local drive, many options to tweak and settings to choose from, etc.)

I’ll use it for a while and decide whether it works out better than Cloud Storage Studio…

For completeness sake I will also mention the third one but cannot comment on it as I haven’t had a chance to use it yet. Feel free to comment on your own experience if you used it. It’s called Azure Storage Explorer from Neudesic. I actually re-used the screenshot provided by the contributor on the Codeplex page.