Windows Azure New Open Web site + mobile Services

This morning we released a batch of important updates for Windows Azure. These updates include:
• Website: Fully open SLA based Windows Azure Web site
• Mobile Services: Fully open SLA-based Windows Azure Mobile Services
• Auto scale: New auto balance support sites, cloud services and virtual machines
• Alerts/notifications: New Email alerts support all computing services (Web sites, mobile services, cloud services, and virtual machines)
MSDN: No credit card information required for new user registration

About the Web: The new open Windows Azure Web site

I am extremely excited to announce the newly released Windows Azure Web site. Hosting a Web site on Windows Azure Web site is ideal for building customer interaction solutions and providing network application business. Today's full listing means that we will cancel the Preview tab for the Windows Azure Free layer and the standard layer (previously called the retention layer) Web site. This means that we provide:
99.9% monthly SLA (Service level agreement) standard layer
24x7 24x7 Microsoft Support (Scope of program from developer program to Enterprise advanced support)

The free layer runs in a shared computing environment and supports up to 10 sites. While the free layer does not use SLAs, it can still be developed and tested quickly, and allows you 0 of the cost to achieve your creative mind.

The standard layer, which is called the "retention layer" during the preview, runs on a dedicated virtual machine instance of each user, with high performance, strong isolation, and high scalability, enabling you to set up up to 500 different sites. When you use the standard layer, you can easily extend the Windows Azure Management Portal scale as needed. You can adjust the size of the virtual machine instance, from a small instance (single core, 1.75GB RAM), to a midsize instance (dual core, 3.5GB RAM), or a large instance (quad, 7GB RAM). You can choose to run 1 to 10 standard instances so that you can easily extend your web backend to 40 cores of CPUs and 70GB of RAM:

Today's release also includes the provision of general availability support for SSL certificate bindings for custom domains when the network runs using the standard layer. Customers will be able to take advantage of the certificates they have purchased for custom domains and use SNI or ip-based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address. SSL certificates can be used for a single site or wildcard mapping across multiple sites (using SSL certificates, we charge an extra fee, but fees are charged per certificate instead of per site, which means you pay once, no matter how many websites, can use it).

Today's release also includes the following new features:

Auto Balance Support

Today's version of Windows Azure adds a preview support for automatic balancing sites. This allows you to set up automatic balancing rules based on the instances you have activated-allowing you to automatically shrink (save money) when the CPU threshold is below your definition, and automatically expand quickly as traffic increases. See more details below.

64-bit and 32-bit mode support

Now you can choose to run the standard layer instance in 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously only in 32-bit mode). This allows you to handle more memory in a separate Web application.

Memory dumps

Memory dumps are useful for problem diagnostics and debugging programs. Using the rest API, you can get a memory to dump your site, and then you can use the Visual Studio debugger, WinDbg, and other tools to debug the problem.

Independent balance Site

Before today's release, as long as you adjust any of the sites in a sub area, all the site's proportions will be made together or large or small adjustments. So, if you want to keep your site on the free layer, you may have to keep your proof-of-concept or test site in a separate subregion. This will no longer be necessary. Windows Azure Web site can now mix different levels in the same geographical subregion. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your Web sites in the western United States to the standard layer when you need a standard layer of functionality, scalability, and SLAs.

All the detailed quotes on the Windows Azure Web site can be found here, and note that the "Share-level" Windows Azure Web site is still in preview mode (continues to be purchased with a preview discount).

About Mobile Services: Newly released Windows Azure Mobile Services

I am extremely excited to announce the full listing of Windows Azure Mobile services. Mobile services are perfect for building extensible Windows 8.x,windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and Html/javascript applications.

Customer

Since the release of the first preview last September, we've seen a huge advantage over Windows Azure Mobile services, and now more than 20,000 customers are moving the back end of production to run on it. These range from startups, such as Yatterbox, to college students who use mobile services to complete applications in their spare time, such as Sly Fox, to the media giants that have found new ways to provide content, such as Verdens Gang, and telecom operators, such as TalkTalk Business, that provide the information they need in a minute. In today's build keynote address, we demonstrated how TalkTalk business uses Windows Azure Mobile services to deliver services that can get customer outage and billing information regardless of where their customers are.

Our Partners

Two weeks ago, when I posted the source code control and custom API features in my blog, we enabled new scenarios, one of which was to provide a more flexible way of working with Third-party services. In the following blog, examples and tutorials come from our partners, including the very good way you can use extensible mobile services to help you build rich modern applications:
New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the performance of iOS and Android applications connected to the End-to-end services of mobile services.
SendGrid canceled email from the mobile service, saving time and money while providing a reliable way to deliver information to your inbox.
Twilio Web Services in the cloud provide a telephony infrastructure that you can use to integrate telephony, SMS and IP voice communication with mobile services into your mobile applications.
Xamarin provides value-added mobile services to make it easy to connect mobile applications across platforms.
pusher allows you to quickly and securely add scalable, real-time communication capabilities to mobile service-based networks and mobile applications.