http://www.meetwindowsazure.com/

new announcements coming

6/6/2012 4:58:25 PM

Yes, and it's going to be worth the time out of your day to watch, I can promise you that

6/6/2012 5:24:34 PM

Starting now

6/7/2012 4:03:23 PM

the new portal is waaaaaaaaaaay better. that silverlight version they had before was awful

looking forward to trying the sites once they get me signed up.

also, what's the deal with the 99.5% SLA. i know it's been that way for a long time, but still pretty weak imo

[Edited on June 7, 2012 at 4:59 PM. Reason : ,]

6/7/2012 4:57:14 PM

AD based cloud SSO is baller as fuck. Game changer imo

6/7/2012 5:06:30 PM

^^ It's only 99.5% for Compute connectivity.
It's 99.9% for CDN, Storage, SQL, Service Bus, Caching, Access Control and monitoring. And they have pretty aggressive crediting for falling below that mark.

And those are monthly numbers. So 99.5% SLA allows for ~3.75 hours a month of downtime. 99.9 allows for ~45 minutes a month of downtime.

Looking at the Service history over the past 5 weeks, there has been one outage in one region for one day (May 29th, North Central US, lasted for about 8 hours). That's pretty reassuring to me, especially if I'm loading across at least two regions.

6/7/2012 5:23:54 PM

My wife's company is doing the app-monitoring for it, and are quite excited about it. Definitely looks like the best offering in the space I've seen next to EC2.

6/8/2012 5:19:03 PM

It would be nice if it took less than 10+ minutes to spin up/upgrade a current hosted service.

6/8/2012 8:13:01 PM

my main problem with these offerings is no one has a real SLA yet.

6/9/2012 2:20:44 AM

^What is a "real" SLA?

^^10 minutes? It seems to take me like 30

6/9/2012 3:38:52 PM

there is no guaranteed performance measurement for just about any metric other than uptime. there is also no guarantee of capacity

6/9/2012 5:28:36 PM

Quote :

"^^10 minutes? It seems to take me like 30 "

In general it seems to take 10 to actually start, but it doesn't report back that it's up for 30 minutes.

6/9/2012 7:20:06 PM

^^ What performance measurement(s) are you looking for? And what do you mean "guarantee of capacity" ? Do you mean throughput/bandwidth?

6/10/2012 12:00:28 AM

minimum guaranteed bandwidth and point to point latency
minimum iops for my application
minimum io latency
minimum available memory bandwidth
maximum cpu wait-time
with amazon i could never get more than 100x 4cpux16gb ram instances on a consistent basis unless I paid for a dedicated instance - at which point it was cheaper to do it in house. the concept of prepaying doesnt seem to exist in azure so not sure how to achieve that with ms.

6/10/2012 8:40:57 AM

^Gotcha. The bandwidth & p2p latency guarantees I know they don't do because they are entirely at the mercy of the backbone providers. I can tell you that whatever backbone for the region is going to determine your latency.

IOPS I have wondered about myself. Seems like someone should just pop a benchmark suite on a disk image and run it to see.
Seems like you should be able to get the same thing for mem bandwidth.

CPU Wait time, what does that refer to? There should be 0 cpu wait-time, as your instances are your own and spun up and down by you.

Not sure about the instance limits, but you could verify this in a matter of an hour.

6/10/2012 3:09:54 PM

a benchmark just gives me a point in time measurement of what I'm getting, not a guarantee of it. as far as cpu wait time, you're in a cloud which is inherently multi-tenant. as such you're on a hypervisor which is overprovisioning physical hardware. cpu wait time is the measure of time your threads have to wait to get access to a physical cpu. p2p latency and bandwidth was referring to different nodes within azure. hopefully there are point to point links between the various data centers rather than relying on public internet backbones.

6/11/2012 7:13:52 AM

In talking to our MS reps, we were led to believe the data centers are interconnected across Microsoft's network, which is basically their own, private (essentially) Tier 1 network.

6/11/2012 12:26:18 PM

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/raunchy-windows-azure-dance-routine/

Quote :

"A techno-dance routine that preceded Microsoft’s Windows Azure presentation at the Norwegian Developers Conference this week featured a group of women jumping around on stage to a song that included several drug references and this line: “The words MICRO and SOFT don’t apply to my penis.”"

lol

6/12/2012 4:14:13 AM

Good to see this finally coming to Azure:

VMDepot with a ton of pre-configured VM images for different OSS stacks (Ruby, Wordpress, Joomla, etc). And amazingly the one-click publishing (aka deployment) actually worked for me.

http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index

1/10/2013 5:42:42 PM

I have a love/hate relationship with Azure. Most of my experience has to do with SQL Azure Federations which, amazingly, no one at Microsoft seems to know anything about.

[Edited on January 10, 2013 at 6:15 PM. Reason : We use it pretty heavily; I've been featured on their BizSpark blog a bunch.]

[Edited on January 10, 2013 at 6:19 PM. Reason : About two weeks ago I was ready to go thermonuclear on everyone at the company.]

1/10/2013 6:15:36 PM

Azure invoices don't line up with the Azure Pricing Calculator. There's no way to fully use the information in the former to figure out a price in the latter.

I've got something like 5 months until this matters, but it's pretty ridiculous.

Opened a support ticket at the lowest priority and it's the one they answered within 5 minutes. Open an urgent ticket and it takes 10 hours. Ugh.

[Edited on February 11, 2013 at 7:09 PM. Reason : Of course the support rep sent me 5 e-mails just to ask if she could call, so...]

2/11/2013 7:07:36 PM