It took a little longer than I was expecting it, but here it is. During its annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft introduced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance,designed for service providers, large enterprises and governments and provides a proven cloud platform that delivers breakthrough datacenter efficiency through innovative power, cooling and automation technologies.

The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware.

There are some big-name early adopters of the appliance: Dell, eBay, HP and Fujitsu.

Microsoft announced the Release Candidate of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal 2.0, as well as the Microsoft Management and Virtualization Solution Incentive and the Private Cloud Deployment Kit, which offers financial rewards and guidance to partners as they build virtualization and private cloud solutions.

More details here. FAQ here:

The Patterns & Practices team have just released the first part of the Windows Azure Architecture guide.

This book is the first volume in a planned series about the Windows® Azure™ platform and focuses on a migration scenario. It introduces a fictitious company named Adatum which step-by-step modifies its expense tracking and reimbursement system, aExpense, so that it can be deployed to Windows Azure. Each chapter explores different considerations: authentication and authorization, data access, session management, deployment, development life cycle and cost analysis.

You can view the guide here.

RDS now generates an SSL certificate for each DB Instance. If you need a certificate for an existing instance youll need to reboot it using the AWS Management Console, the RDS command-line tools, or the RDS APIs.

Here are a few interesting things things to keep in mind:

• SSL encrypts the data transferred ‘over the wire’ between your DB Instance and your application. It does not protect data ‘at rest.’ If you want to do this, youll need to encrypt and decrypt the data on your own.
• SSL encryption and decryption is a compute-intensive task and as such it will increase the load on your DB Instance. You should monitor your database performance using the CloudWatch metrics in the AWS Management Console (pictured at right), and scale up to a more powerful instance type if necessary.
• The SSL support is provided for encryption purposes and should not be relied upon to authenticate the DB Instance itself.
• You can configure your database to accept only SSL connections by using the GRANT command with the REQUIRE SSL option. You can do this on a per-user basis so you could, for example, require SSL requests only from users connecting from a non-EC2 host.

You can learn more about this new feature in the RDS Documentation on Database Instances and in the forum post.

As businesses seek to cost-effectively consume IT services, interest is growing in moving computation and storage from on-premise equipment to Internet-based systems, often referred to as “the cloud.”

This new document from Microsoft focuses on the security challenges and recommended approaches to design and develop more secure applications for Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. Microsoft Security Engineering Center (MSEC) and Microsoft’s Online Services Security & Compliance (OSSC) team have partnered with the Windows Azure team to build on the same security principles and processes that Microsoft has developed through years of experience managing security risks in traditional development and operating environments.

You can download the paper here.

The Windows Azure CDN enhances end user performance and reliability by placing copies of data, at various points in a network, so that they are distributed closer to the user. The Windows Azure CDN today delivers many Microsoft products – such as Windows Update, Zune videos, and Bing Maps - which customers know and use every day. By adding the CDN to Windows Azure capabilities, this large-scale network is available to all Windows Azure customers.

To date, this service has been available at no charge. Today, the pricing was announced for the Windows Azure CDN for all billing periods that begin after June 30, 2010. The following three billing meters and rates will apply for the CDN:

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks.

Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period.

Starting today, there is a new tab in the AWS Management Console for the Amazon Relational Database Service.

You can now easily create, manage, and scale DB Instances:

The book by Sriram Krishnan “Programming Windows Azure” is now available on Amazon. Sriram Krishnan is a Program Manager on the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. At Windows Azure, he ran the feature teams which built the service management APIs, geo-capabilities and several back-end infrastructure pieces. He is a prolific speaker and has delivered talks at several conferences including PDC and MIX.

The book’s first half focuses on how to write and host application code on Windows Azure, while the second half explains all of the options you have for storing and accessing data on the platform with high scalability and reliability. Lots of code samples and screenshots are available to help you along the way.

Not everything about Windows Azure is covered in this book, and it is impossible for one book to cover it all. It is a must read however, for any Windows Azure developer. It is one of those must have books.

Steve Marx has a blog post and an example on how to send email in Windows Azure. Sending email directly from Windows Azure presents some challenges, because you don’t have a dedicated IP address, and it’s quite likely that spammers will use Windows Azure to send spam. Once that happens, spam blacklists will quickly flag the IP range of Windows Azure data centers as sources of spam. That means your legitimate email will stop getting through.

The best solution to these challenges is to not send email directly from Windows Azure. Instead, relay all email through a third-party SMTP service with strict anti-spam rules and dedicated IP addresses.

See article here, get code here.

CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. You can now enable logging for an Amazon CloudFront Streaming distribution Once enabled for a particular distribution, CloudFront logs all accesses to a designated Amazon S3 bucket. The information in the log files will let you know which of your streaming media files are the most popular and will also let you see which CloudFront Edge Location was used to stream the information.

Each log entry contains the following information:

In case you missed it, Microsoft released SQL Azure FAQ, providing an architectural overview of SQL Azure Database, and describing how you can use SQL Azure to augment your existing on-premises data infrastructure or as your complete database solution. Some of the questions answered in the document:

• How do I connect to SQL Azure?
• I am unable to connect to SQL Azure. How can I troubleshoot this problem?
• Where can I find sample connection strings for SQL Azure?
• Are there any hands-on labs or demos available for moving data between on-premise SQL Server and SQL Azure?
• How do I configure SQL Azure Firewall settings?
• How can I grant my Web Role access to SQL Azure?

(more after the jump)