Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 25, 2009
Amazon is adding a new feature which significantly improves the flexibility of EC2’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshot facility. You now have the ability to share your snapshots with other EC2 customers using a new set of fine-grained access controls. You can keep the snapshot to yourself (the default), share it with a list of EC2 customers, or share it publicly.
The Amazon Elastic Block Store lets you create block storage volumes in sizes ranging from 1 GB to 1 TB. You can create empty volumes or you can pre-populate them using one of our Public Data Sets. Once created, you attach each volume to an EC2 instance and then reference it like any other file system. The new volumes are ready in seconds. Last week I created a 180 GB volume from a Public Data Set, attached it to my instance, and started examining it, all in about 15 seconds. Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 19, 2009
Really, you can’t make these things up!
Update: check out local station report on the incident for up-to-date details …
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 19, 2009
Microsoft released a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help you manage your deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. This is a REST-based API which users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services. You can find the documentation (along with the rest of the Windows Azure documentation) here.
This is a REST-based API which uses X509 client certificates for authentication. Users can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests.
The following operations are currently supported:
- Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.
- Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups
There is a small tool called csmanage.exe to help you interact with this API and manage your deployments. You can find csmanage here along with our other samples.
How do I get started? Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 09, 2009
SQL Azure Migration Wizard helps you migrate your local SQL Server 2005 / 2008 databases into SQL Azure. The wizard walks you through the selection of your SQL objects, creates SQL scripts suitable for SQL Azure, and allows you to edit / deploy to SQL Azure.
The SQL Azure Migration Wizard (SQLAzureMW) will let you identify a SQL Server 2005 / 2008 database that you want to migrate to SQL Azure or select an existing SQL file that has the commands you want to execute against SQL Azure.
If your source is a SQL Server database, SQLAzureMW will walk you through the different object types (i.e. Tables, Stored Procedures, Views, etc.) and let you decide which ones you want analyzed / scripted. You will be given two options: Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 08, 2009
Check out Charles Torre talking with George Moore (21 year MS veteran) about the what is behind the billing of Azure. Watch the interview on Channel 9 here.
21 year Microsoft veteran and Software Architect George Moore is involved in defining and implementing an effective strategy for taking Windows Azure from technology preview to enterprise business ready. Specifically, George is responsible for all integration of all Azure services (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services) to other systems at Microsoft. This includes the billing system integration across all Azure services, the business owner portal, and the developer portal for all Azure services… Continue reading…
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on September 02, 2009
With over 70 thousand new applications for the iPhone & iPod Touch on the iTunes AppStore, it is no doubt that Apple hit the mark there. With the tremendous success of this new emerging developers platform it is becoming really hard for end users to find the application that they want to install in their devices. We need a solution to enable a more smooth App discovery process, because finding for application inside iTunes is really terrible and slow.
This is what uquery.com is doing to help all the iPhone fanatics to easily find new applications. Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 02, 2009
Until this week, using the Windows Azure CTP meant signing up and then waiting a couple of days for an invitation code to arrive by email. No more. You can now register for access and receive an invitation code right there on the spot. No email, no waiting, no excuses.
Go register now and build something cool!
(Via Steve Marx.)
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 01, 2009
CTP2 of ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 release is now available for download here. ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2 is the second tech preview release of the next version of ADO.NET Data Services. This release (v1.5) will target the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 & Silverlight 3 platforms and provide new client and server side features for data service developers. In addition, the features included in this release (v1.5) will be part of the .NET Framework 4 release.
This release includes updates to the features that were in the CTP1 release of ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 plus a few additional new features and a number of bug fixes. The features included in this CTP are: Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 01, 2009
The AWS Management Console now has complete support for Amazon CloudWatch. You can enable CloudWatch for any or all of your EC2 instances using the console and data will be available in a moment or two. You can select one or more running EC2 instances to see the CloudWatch data in graphical form. You can observe CPU utilization, disk reads, disk writes, and network traffic (both in and out). If you select more than one EC2 instance, the console will automatically display aggregated values.You can also get a larger and more detailed view of the data.
Here are some pictures of the console in action: Continue reading…
