The benefits for MSDN subscribers have now doubled the initial Windows Azure benefits by extending the offer from eight months to 16 months.
Premium, Ultimate, and BizSpark subscribers get 750/hours per month of compute time, 10 GB storage, and a million transactions per month. Also included are AppFabric, Data Transfer, and three SQL Server instances.
Today we are providing access to a beta release of Windows Azure Drive (announced as XDrive at PDC 2009).
Customers have told us that they want to take their already running Windows applications and run them in the cloud using the standard Windows NTFS APIs, and make sure that the data is durable. With Windows Azure Drive, your Windows Azure applications running in the cloud can use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This can significantly ease the migration of existing Windows applications to the cloud, enabling customers a more seamless migration experience while simultaneously reducing the amount of time it takes to move their applications from your own Windows environment to a Windows Azure environment. The Windows Azure application can read from or write to a drive letter (e.g., X:\) that represents a durable NTFS volume for storing and accessing data. The durable drive is implemented as a Windows Azure Page Blob containing an NTFS-formatted Virtual Hard Drive (VHD).
Link – http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2010/02/02/beta-release-of-windows-azure-drive.aspx
Today marks an important step towards our goal of enabling you, our customers and partners, to build and grow your businesses on the Windows Azure platform. We are pleased to announce that starting today you can upgrade your Community Technology Preview (CTP) accounts of the Windows® Azure™ platform (i.e., Windows Azure, SQL Azure and/or Windows Azure platform AppFabric) to paid commercial subscriptions. If you upgrade your CTP accounts during the month of January, 2010, all Windows Azure platform usage incurred during this month will be at no charge. You will also have full visibility during this month to your Windows Azure platform usage. Billing and SLAs for all commercial accounts will begin on February 1st, 2010.
at PDC09 in Los Angeles this week and got a great opportunity to get a guided tour of a piece of the Windows Azure Cloud from Patrick Yantz, a Cloud Architect with Data Center Services. You may think it’s a Cloud Container, but it’s not!
Join me on this very technical 15 minute deep dive inside the making of the hardware behind the Windows Azure Cloud.
Hanselminutes on 9 – Guided Tour inside the Windows Azure Cloud with Patrick Yantz Scott Hanselm
