Project Riviera is a comprehensive code sample to demonstrate how to develop multi-tenant highly-scalable line-of-business application on Windows Azure Platform.

This sample is developed by Global Partner Architecture Team in Developer & Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft in collaboration with Cumulux (a Cloud ISV partner). Riviera uses Customer Loyalty Management scenario for illustration purpose but many building blocks are applicable to range of line-of-business applications.

Click here to view a screncast of Riviera, Architecture details and other related information.

Key features of Riviera: Continue reading…

Amazon Web Services announced today a limited public beta of Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a service that makes it possible for customers to create their own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection. With this, Amazon is taking a major step in making its cloud computing services even more enterprise-friendly than they already were.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels published a detailed blog post regarding this service, in which he acknowledges that enterprises tend to find it challenging to transition applications and services to the cloud when they have often invested years of resources and tons of money setting up their own IT infrastructure (datacenters, networks, etc.). He also says ‘private clouds’, which are basically emulations of cloud computing inside private networks, are not true clouds as far as he’s concerned and that Amazon VPC adequately fills the void.

What can you do with Amazon VPC: Continue reading…

Amazon announced a significant price cut in its EC2 service offerings. The one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances will now be 30% cheaper than previously offered.

The reserved instances program essentially allows users to make a one-time payment for instances, ‘reserving’ them in order to receive discounts in subsequent hourly usage rates. The program was implemented earlier this year as an effort to reduce the cost of cloud services for frequent users, and with the announcement it appears that Amazon is looking to lure customers into long term service deals.

More from the press release:

Starting today, we have lowered the one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances by 30%. We continuously strive to be more efficient, and to pass cost savings on to you in the form of lower prices. With Linux Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, you could reduce the cost of your instance usage by up to 56% compared to an On-Demand instance. When using Reserved Instances, you pay a low, one-time fee to guarantee capacity for each instance during a 1 or 3 years period. You then have the option to run that instance whenever you want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate. You can find more information about pricing on the EC2 Detail Page and Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instances Detail Page.

The Windows Azure Platform training kit was updated with new SQL Azure content in the August release of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. Many of the existing labs and presentations were also updated, in line with recent developments of the platform.

The kit now includes: Continue reading…