Monday, June 01, 2009
Ahh, it is the start of a glorious June and here in Washington the weather is starting to really get nice. The previous cold and rainy spring must have made the product group more productive as Windows Azure has continued adding features since the last major update at MIX.
Given that Windows Azure is a service and not a boxed product, you can expect updates and features to roll-out over the coming months. In this round-up, we have a number of features that have gone live in the last month or two.
New Feature: Geo-Location support
Starting in May, a new option was added to the portal to support geo-locating your code and data. In order to use this most effectively, the idea of an 'Affinity Group' was created. This allows you to associate various services under an umbrella label for the location.
Read more about this feature here and see a complete provisioning walk-through.
New Feature: Storage API updates
I briefly mentioned this last week, but on Thursday (5/28), new features were released to the cloud for Windows Azure storage. The long awaited batch transaction capability for tables as well as a new blob copying capability were released. Additionally, the GetBlockList API was updated to return both committed and uncommitted blocks in blob storage.
One more significant change of note is that a new versioning mechanism has been added. New features will be versioned by a new header ("x-ms-version"). This versioning header must be present to opt-in to new features. This mechanism is in place to prevent breaking changes from impacting existing clients in the future. It is recommended that you start including this header in all authenticated API calls.
Rounding out these updates were some changes to how property names are stored in table storage as well as the size for Partition and Row keys. Unicode chars and up to 1K key size are supported, respectively. Finally, the timeout values for various storage operations were updated as well.
For more details, please read the announcement.
Please note: There currently is no SDK support for these new storage features. The local developer fabric does NOT currently support these features and the StorageClient SDK sample has not been updated yet. At this point, you need to use the samples provided on Steve Marx's blog. A later SDK update will add these features officially.
Windows Azure SDK Update
The May CTP SDK update has been released to the download center. While this release does NOT support the new storage features, it does add a few new capabilities that will be of interest to the Visual Studio 2010 beta testers. Specifically:
- Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (templates, local dev fabric, etc.)
- Updated support for Visual Studio 2008 - you can now configure settings through the UI instead of munging XML files.
- Improved reliability of the local dev fabric for debugging
- Enhanced robustness and stability (aka bug fixes).
Download the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio (includes both SDK and tools).
New Windows Azure Applications and Demos
Windows Azure Management Tool (MMC)
The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure. Developed as a managed MMC, the tool allows you to create and manage both blobs and queues. Easily create and manage containers, blobs, and permissions. Add and remove queues, inspect or add messages or empty queues as well.
Bid Now Sample
Bid Now is an online auction site designed to demonstrate how you can build highly scalable consumer applications. This sample is built using Windows Azure and uses Windows Azure Storage. Auctions are processed using Windows Azure Queues and Worker Roles. Authentication is provided via Live Id.
If you know of new and interesting Windows Azure content that would be of broad interest, please let me know and I will feature it in later updates.
Relevant Blog Postings
http://blog.smarx.com/posts/sample-code-for-new-windows-azure-blob-features
http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/05/28/may-ctp-of-the-windows-azure-tools-and-sdk-now-supports-visual-studio-2010-beta-1.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009/04/30/windows-azure-geo-location-is-live.aspx
http://dunnry.com/blog/CreateAndDeployYourWindowsAzureServiceIn5Steps.aspx
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Some new features related to blob and table storage were announced on the forum today. The key features announced were:
- Transactions support for table operations (batching)
- Copy Blob API (self explanatory)
- Updated GetBlockList API now returns both committed and uncommitted block lists
There are some more details around bug fixes/changes and timeout updates as well. Refer to the announcement for more details.
The biggest impact to developers at this point is that to get these new features, you will need to include a new versioning header in your call to storage. Additionally, the StorageClient library has not been updated yet to reflect these new APIs, so you will need to wait for some examples (coming from Steve) or an update to the SDK. You can also refer to the MSDN documentation for more details on the API and roll your own in the meantime.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Step 1: Obtaining a token
Sign up through http://dev.windowsazure.com to get a token for the service. Turnaround is pretty quick, so you should have one in about a day or so. If you don't see it in a day, make sure you check your SPAM folder to ensure that the message we send you is not trapped in purgatory there.
Step 2: Redeeming the token
Navigate to the Windows Azure Portal and sign-in with the LiveID that you would like to use to manage your Windows Azure applications. Today, in the CTP, only a single LiveID can manage your Windows Azure project and we cannot reassociate the token with another LiveID once redeemed. As such, make sure you use the LiveID that you want long term to manage the solution.
The first time you login to the portal, you will be asked to associate your LiveID.
Click 'I Agree' to continue and once the association has been successful click 'Continue' again. At this point, you will be presented with an option to redeem a token. Here is where you input the token you received in Step 1.
Enter the token and click 'Next'. You will then be presented with some EULAs to peruse. Read them carefully (or don't) and then click 'Accept'. You will get another confirmation screen, so click 'Continue'.
Step 3: Create your Hosted Service
At this point, you can now create your first hosted solution. You should be on the main Project page and you should see 2 and 1 project(s) remaining for Storage Account and Hosted Services, respectively.
Click 'Hosted Services' and provide a Project label and description.
Click 'Next' and provide a globally unique name that will be the basis for your public URL. Click 'Check Availability' and ensure that the name hasn't been taken. Next, you will need to create an Affinity Group in order to later get your storage account co-located with your hosted service.
Click the 'Yes' radio button and the option to create a new Affinity Group. Give the Affinity Group a name and select a region where you would like this Affinity Group located. Click 'Create' to finish the process.
Step 4: Create your Storage account
Click the 'New Project' link near the left corner of the portal and this time, select the Storage Account option.
Similar to before, give a project label and description and click Next.
Enter a globally unique name for your storage account and click 'Check Availability'. Since performance is best when the data is near the compute, you should make sure that you opt to have your storage co-located with your service. We can do this with the Affinity Group we created earlier. Click the 'Yes' radio button and use the existing Affinity group. Click 'Create' to finish.
At this time, you should note that your endpoints have been created for your storage account and two access keys are provided for you to use for authentication.
Step 5: Deploying an application.
At this point, I will skip past the minor detail of actually building an application for this tutorial and assume you have one (or you choose to use one from the SDK). For Visual Studio users, you would want to right click your project and select 'Publish' to generate the service package you need to upload. Alternatively, you can use the cspack.exe tool to create your package.
Using either method you will eventually have two files: the actual service package (cspkg) and a configuration file (cscfg).
From the portal, select the hosted service project you just created in Step 3 and click the 'Deploy' button.
Browse to the cspkg location and upload both the package and the configuration settings file (cscfg). Click 'Deploy'.
Over the next minute or so, you will see that your package is deploying. Hold tight and you will see it come back with the status of "Allocated". At this point, click the 'Configure' button**.
In order to use your storage account you created in Step 4, you will need to update this information from the local development fabric settings to your storage account settings. An easy way to get this is to right click your Storage Account project link in the left hand navigation tabs and open it in a new tab. With the storage settings in one tab and the configuration in another, you can easily switch between the two and cut & paste what you need.
Inside the XML configuration, replace the 'AccountName' setting with your storage account name. If you are confused, teh account name is the one that is part of the unique global URL, i.e. <youraccountname>.blob.core.windows.net. Enter the 'AccountSharedKey' using the primary access key found on the storage project page (in your new tab). Update the endpoints from the loop-back addresses to the cloud settings: https://blob.core.windows.net, https://queue.core.windows.net, https://table.core.windows.net respectively. Note that the endpoints here do not include your account name and we are using https. Set the 'allowInsecureRemoteEndpoints' to either false or just delete that XML element.
Finally, update the 'Instances' element to 2 (the limit in the CTP today). It is strongly recommended that you run at least 2 instances at all times. This ensures that you always have at least one instance running at all times if something fails or we need to do updates (we update by fault zones and your instances are automatically placed across fault zones). Click 'Save' and you will see that your package is listed as 'Package is updating'.
When your package is back in the 'Allocated' state (a min later or so), click the 'Run' button. Your service will then go to the 'Initializing' state and you will need to wait a few mins while it gets your instances up and running. Eventually, your app will have a 'Started' status. Congratulations, your app is deployed in the Staging environment.
Once deployed to staging, you should click the staging hyperlink for your app (the one with the GUID in the DNS name) and test your app. If you get a hostname not found error, wait a few more seconds and try again - it is likely that you are waiting for DNS to update and propagate your GUID hostname. When you are comfortable, click the big circular button in between the two environments (it has two arrows on it) and promote your application to the 'production' URL.
Congratulations, you have deployed your first app in Windows Azure.
** Note, this part of the process might be optional for you. If you have already configured your developer environment to run against cloud storage or you are not using the StorageClient sample at all, you might not need to do this as the uploaded configuration file will already include the appropriate cloud settings. Of course, if you are not using these options, you are already likely a savvy user and this tutorial is unnecessary for you.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Finally! I have been using some great plugins for VMC that gave me Netflix streaming support. However, for the last few weeks all of my computers have been unable to use Netflix streaming because of DRM issues with the older (non-Silverlight) mechanism. I didn't want to upgrade my account to use the Silverlight capability until someone got it working on VMC. Now, I finally can. I can't wait to try it out - it's the main reason I have Netflix.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Available immediately from Code Gallery, download the Windows Azure MMC. The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure.
Developed as a managed MMC, the tool allows you to create and manage both blobs and queues. Easily create and manage containers, blobs, and permissions. Add and remove queues, inspect or add messages or empty queues as well..
Features
- Manage multiple storage accounts
- Easily switch between remote and local storage services
- Manage your blobs
- Create containers and manage permissions
- Upload files or even entire folders
- Read metadata or preview the blob contents
- Manage your queues
- Create new queues
- Monitor queues
- Read (peek) messages
- Post new messages to the queue
- Purge queues
Known Issues
The current release does not work with Windows 7 due to a bug in the underlying PowerShell version. All other OS versions should be unaffected. We will get this fixed as soon as possible.
I tweeted this earlier (really never thought I would say that.). Anyhow, a first release of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure has been released on CodePlex. Right now, it works with blobs and helps with the authentication pieces, but if you look on the roadmap you will see both queue support and table support coming down the road this year.
This is a great resource to use if you are a PHP developer looking to host your app in Windows Azure and leverage the native capabilities of the service (i.e. namely storage).
PHP Azure Project Site
Monday, May 04, 2009
I use AdBlock Plus and I use NoScript from Firefox (when I am not running IE8). I selectively enable ads on sites where I care about the advertising (usually technical sites). I absolutely loathe the ads I see on most mainstream sites (usually some idiotic dancing baby/man/woman/thing hawking predatory loans), so I don't feel bad in the slightest about blocking them. That might seem strange given that I run ads on my blog site. However, I honestly don't care if folks block them. My ads happen to be targeted at technical folks so they should be largely relevant to the vast majority of my visitors. Given that a huge proportion of my visits are via RSS readers, most folks never even see the ads anyway.
Over the last few months I have noticed that NoScript has been updating basically every time I open and close the browser. I thought, "wow, these guys must have found new and interesting exploits almost daily". Nope, turns out it was a spat between the author of NoScript and the maintainers of AdBlock Plus.
It seems clear to me that NoScript was in the wrong on this one. People who have enabled AdBlock Plus want it because they don't want to see ads. It really doesn't matter if NoScript likes it or not. It is not their settings to mess with. Respect your users's choice - end of story. It also doesn't bode well for the security architecture of Firefox that these things can mess with each other, but that is another story.
Monday, April 27, 2009
I was trying to troubleshoot a bug in my worker role in Windows Azure the other day. To do this, I have a very cool tool (soon to be released) that lets me peek messages. The problem was that I couldn't get ahold of any messages, it was like they were disappearing right from under my nose. I would see them in the count, but couldn't get a single one to open. I was thinking that I must have a bug in the tool.
Suddenly, the flash of insight came: something was actually popping the messages. While I remembered to shut down my local development fabric, I forgot all about the version I had running in the cloud in the staging environment. Since I have been developing against cloud storage, it is actually a shared environment now. My staging workers were popping the messages, trying to process them and failing (it was an older version). More frustrating, the messages were eventually showing up again, but getting picked up before I could see them in the tool.
So, what is the lesson here: when staging, use a different account than your development accounts. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons we have the cscfg file: don't forget about it.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Or, put another way: why don't we just use the web.config file? This question was recently posed to me and I thought I would share an answer more broadly since it is a fairly common question.
First, the web.config is part of the deployed package that gets loaded into a diff disk that in turn is started for you app. Remember, we are using Hypervisor VM technology to run your code. This would mean any change to this file would require a new diff disk and a restart. We don't update the actual diff disk (that would be hard with many instances) without a redeploy.
Second, the web.config is special only because IIS knows to look for it and restart when it changes. If you did that with a standard app.config (think worker roles) that doesn't work. We want a mechanism that works for any type of role.
Finally, we have both staging and production. If you wanted to hold different settings (like a different storage account for test vs. production), you would need to hold these values outside the diff disk again or you would not be able to promote between environments.
The cscfg file is 'special' and is held outside the diff disk so it can be updated. The fabric code (RoleManager and its ilk) know when this file is updated, so it will trigger the app restart for you. There is some short period of time between when you update this file and when the fabric notices. Only the RoleManager and fabric are aware of this file - notice that you can't get to the values reading it from disk for instance.
And that is why in a nutshell, we have the cscfg file and we don't use web.config or app.config files.
All that being said, I don't want to give you the impression that you can't use web.config application settings in Windows Azure - you definitely can. However, any update to the web.config file will require a redeploy, so just keep that in mind and choose the cscfg file when you can.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Are you looking for more information about Azure Services (Windows Azure, SQL Services, .NET Services, etc.)? How about some demos and presentations? What about a great little MMC tool to manage all your .NET Services? Great news - it's here:
Azure Services Training Kit - April Update
Today we released an updated version of the Azure Services Training Kit. The first Azure Services Training Kit was released during the week of PDC and it contained all of the PDC hands-on labs. Since then, the Azure Services Evangelism team has been creating new content covering new features in the platform.
The Azure Services Training Kit April update now includes the following content covering Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services:
· 11 hands-on labs - including new hands-on labs for PHP and Native Code on Windows Azure.
· 18 demo scripts - These demo scripts are designed to provide detailed walkthroughs of key features so that someone can easily give a demo of a service
· 9 presentations - the presentations used for our 3 day training workshops including speaker notes.
The training kit is available as an installable package on the Microsoft Download Center. You can download it from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130354
Azure Services Management Tools - April Update
The Azure Services Management Tools include an MMC SnapIn and Windows PowerShell cmdlets that enable a user to configure and manage several Azure Services including .NET Access Control Services, and the .NET Workflow Service. These tools can be helpful when developing and testing applications that use Azure Services. For instance, using these tools you can view and change .NET Access Control Rules, and deploy and view workflows.
You can download the latest management tools from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AzureManagementTools.