Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog

This blog has moved to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabric/ please update your links!

AppFabric Team — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:06:00 GMT

We are combining a few of our blogs into the new AppFabric Team Blog located at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabric/.

The new blog will be a one place for you to learn about and follow technologies such as: Windows Azure AppFabric, Windows Server AppFabric, WCF, WF and other related technologies and capabilities.

Please update your links, email subscriptions and feeds to the new blog and follow us there.

The AppFabric Team.

Windows Azure AppFabric CTP May Release Available, Read The Announcement On Our New Team Blog!

AppFabric Team — Mon, 16 May 2011 12:55:00 GMT

The Windows Azure AppFabric CTP May release is available.

We are moving to a new Team Blog available on: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabric.

You can read the release announcement on the new blog.

Please update your links, email subscriptions and feeds to the new blog and follow us there.

The AppFabric Team.

Update to Windows Azure AppFabric LABS Scheduled Maintenance and Breaking Changes Notification (5/12/2011)

AppFabric Team — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:41:00 GMT

[Update]
In the planned release scheduled for 5/12/2011, we are making sure that customers will have parity between the Access Control and Caching services (currently in production) and the LABS preview environments. As result there will be some impacts as described below in the updated sections.

Due to upgrades and enhancements we are making to Windows Azure AppFabric LABS environment, scheduled for 5/12/2011, users will have NO access to the AppFabric LABS portal and services during the scheduled maintenance downtime.

When:

START: May 12, 2011, 10am PST

[Update]

END: May 12, 2011, 10pm PST

Service Bus will be impacted until May 16, 2011, 10am PST

Impact Alert:

AppFabric LABS Service Bus, Access Control and Caching services, and the portal, will be unavailable during this period.
Additional impacts are described below.

Action Required:

Access to portal, Access Control and Caching will be available after the maintenance.
Existing Access Control namespaces will be preserved.

[Update]
Existing Access Control configuration under the namespaces will not be available following the maintenance, to upgrade to parity to the production environment. Users should back up Access Control configuration in order to be able to restore following the maintenance, or transition the application over to the production environment (Access Control is not being charged for billing periods before January 1, 2012).

Existing Caching namespaces and data will not be available following the maintenance, to upgrade to parity to the production environment. Users should back up Caching configuration in order to be able to restore following the maintenance, or transition the application over to the production environment (Caching is not being charged for billing periods before August 1, 2011).

Service Bus will not be available until May 16, 2011, 10am PST.

Furthermore, Service Bus namespaces will be preserved following the maintenance, BUT existing connection points and durable queues will not be preserved.
Users should back up Service Bus configuration in order to be able to restore following the maintenance.

Thanks for working in LABS and providing us valuable feedback.
For any questions or to provide feedback please use our Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum.

Once the maintenance is over we will post more details on the blog.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

Windows Azure AppFabric LABS Scheduled Maintenance and Breaking Changes Notification (5/12/2011)

AppFabric Team — Fri, 06 May 2011 22:33:36 GMT

When:

START: May 12, 2011, 10am PST

END: May 12, 2011, 5pm PST

Service Bus will be impacted until May 16, 2011, 10am PST

Impact Alert:

AppFabric LABS Service Bus, Access Control and Caching services, and the portal, will be unavailable during this period.
Additional impacts are described below.

Action Required:

Access to portal, Access Control and Caching will be available after the maintenance window and all existing accounts/namespaces for these services will be preserved.

However, Service Bus will not be available until May 16, 2011, 10am PST.
Furthermore, Service Bus namespaces will be preserved following the maintenance, BUT existing connection points and durable queues will not be preserved.
Users should back up Service Bus configuration in order to be able to restore following the maintenance.

Thanks for working in LABS and providing us valuable feedback.
For any questions or to provide feedback please use our Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum.

Once the maintenance is over we will post more details on the blog.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

New Caching Videos And Code Samples Available

AppFabric Team — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:47:27 GMT

We have released new videos and accompanying code samples to help you learn and get started with the newly released Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service.

These videos and code samples are part of the Windows Azure AppFabric Learning Series available on CodePlex.
We will be adding more resources to the learning series from time-to-time, so be sure to save this link!

The following videos and code samples are currently available:

Name	Link to Sample Code	Link to Video
Introduction to the Windows Azure AppFabric Cache	N/A	Click here
Windows Azure AppFabric Cache - How to Set Up and Deploy a Simple Cache	Click here	Click here
Windows Azure AppFabric Cache - Caching SQL Azure Data	Click here	Click here
Windows Azure AppFabric Cache - Caching Session State	Click here	Click here

Just as a reminder, we have a promotion period in which we will not be charging for the Caching service for billing periods prior to August 1st, 2011, so be sure to take advantage of this promotion period to start using the Caching service.

For questions and feedback on the Caching service please visit the Windows Azure Storage Forum.

If you haven’t signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric and would like to start using the Caching service, you can take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service Released!

AppFabric Team — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:45:38 GMT

Recently, at the MIX conference we announced the release of a new version of the Access Control service and the upcoming release of the Caching service.

Today we are excited to announce that the Caching service has been released as a production service.

The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage or database.

We provide 6 different cache size options for you to choose from, varying from 128MB to 4GB.

In order for you to be able to start using the service and evaluate your needs we are running a promotion period in which we will not be charging for the service for billing periods prior to August 1, 2011.

If you are signed up to one of the Windows Azure Platform Offers you might be eligible to get the 128MB cache option for free for a certain period of time depending on the specific offer. You can find more details on the Windows Azure Platform Offers page.

The service is billed on a monthly basis, based on the cache size you sign up for. You can also sign up for more than one cache and use these multiple caches in order to get a total cache size that is different or bigger than the standard cache sizes we provide.

You should read the Windows Azure AppFabric FAQ on MSDN in order to understand the pricing details and the advantages you get from the Caching service compared to alternatives.

The prices of the different cache sizes are the following:

· 128 MB cache for $45.00/month

· 256 MB cache for $55.00/month

· 512 MB cache for $75.00/month

· 1 GB cache for $110.00month

· 2 GB cache for $180.00/month

· 4 GB cache for $325.00/month

To learn more about the Caching service please use the following resources:

· Windows Azure AppFabric Caching availability announced!! blog post

· Video: Introduction to the Windows Azure AppFabric Cache

· Video: Windows Azure AppFabric Caching – How to Set-up and Deploy a Simple Cache

· Windows Azure AppFabric FAQ on MSDN

· MSDN Documentation

The service is already available in our production environment at: http://appfabric.azure.com.

For questions on the Caching service please visit the Windows Azure Storage Forum.

Take advantage of our free trial offer to get started with the Caching service and Windows Azure AppFabric. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

4/20/2011 - Updated IP addresses for AppFabric Data Centers

AppFabric Team — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Today (4/20/2011) the Windows Azure platform AppFabric has updated the IP Ranges on which the AppFabric nodes are hosted. If your firewall restricts outbound traffic, you will need to perform the additional step of opening your outbound TCP Ports and IP Addresses for these nodes. Please see the 1/28/2010 “Additional Data Centers for Windows Azure platform AppFabric” posted which was updated today to include the new set of IP Addresses.

Windows Azure platform AppFabric Team

Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control April release available now!

AppFabric Team — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 22:14:01 GMT

Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control April release has been released to production and is now generally available at http://windows.azure.com.

The new version of the Access Control service represents a major step forward from the previous production version, introducing support for web application single sign-on (SSO) scenarios using WS-Federation, federation for SOAP and REST web services using WS-Trust and OAuth, and more. In addition, a new web-based management portal and OData-based management service are now available for configuring and managing the service.

Web Single Sign Scenarios

In web SSO scenarios, out of box support is available for Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and custom WS-Federation identity provider such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0. To create the sign-in experience for these identity providers, the service now features a new JSON-based home realm discovery service that allows your web application to get your identity provider configuration from the service and display the correct sign in links.

Access Control automatically handles all protocol transitions between the different identity providers, including Open ID 2.0 for Google and Yahoo, Facebook Graph for Facebook, and WS-Federation for Windows Live ID and custom identity providers. The service then delivers a single SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, or SWT token to your web application using the WS-Federation protocol once a user has completed the sign in process. The service works with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), making it easy for your ASP.NET applications to consume SAML tokens issued from it.

For more information on web application scenarios and Access Control, see Web Applications and ACS in the MSDN documentation.

Web Service Scenarios

Access Control supports active federation with web services using the WS-Trust, OAuth WRAP, or OAuth 2.0 protocol.

To access a web service protected by Access Control, a web service client can obtain a bearer token from an identity provider (such as AD FS 2.0), and then exchange that token with the service for a new SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, or SWT token required to access the protected web service. Alternatively, in the cases where no identity providers are available, the client can authenticate directly with Access Control using a service identity (a credential type configured in in the service) in order to obtain the required token. A service identity credential can be a password, an X.509 certificate, or a 256-bit symmetric signing key (used to validate the signature of a self-signed SWT token presented by the client).

For more information on web service scenarios and Access Control, see Web Services and ACS in the MSDN documentation.

Management

Access Control features a web-based management portal, which makes it easy to configure core web application and web service scenarios for a selected namespace. This includes support for configuring and managing the following components:

Identity providers
Relying party applications, which represent your web applications and services
Rules and rule groups, which define what information is passed from identity providers and clients to your applications
Certificates and keys for token signing, encryption, and decryption
Service identities for web service authentication
Management credentials for accessing the portal and management service

The management portal can be launched by visiting the Service Bus, Access Control, and Caching section of the Windows Azure portal, clicking the Access Control node, selecting a service namespace, and then clicking Manage Access Control Service in the ribbon above.

In addition to the management portal, Access Control now features a redesigned management service that enables all service components to be managed using the OData protocol. For more information on the Access Control management service, see ACS Management Service in the MSDN documentation.

Getting Started

Be sure to check out the following resources for help getting started with Access Control:

If you have not signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric and would like to start using Access Control, be sure to take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

Announcing the commercial release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching and Access Control

AppFabric Team — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:36:15 GMT

Today at the MIX conference we announced the first production release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service and a release of a new version of the production Access Control service. These two AppFabric services are particularly appealing and powerful for web development.

The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage or database.

Ebbe George Haabendal Brandstrup, CTO and co-founder of Pixel Pandemic, a company developing a unique game engine technology for persistent browser based MMORPGs, which is already using the Caching service as part of their solution is quoted saying that:

“We're very happy with how Azure and the caching service is coming along.
Most often, people use a distributed cache to relieve DB load and they'll accept that data in the cache lags behind with a certain delay. In our case, we use the cache as the complete and current representation of all game and player state in our games. That puts a lot extra requirements on the reliability of the cache. Any failed communication when writing state changes must be detectable and gracefully handled in order to prevent data loss for players and with the Azure caching service we’ve been able to meet those requirements.”

The new version of the Access Control service adds all the great capabilities that provide a Single-Sign-On experience to applications by integrating with standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directories such as Active Directory®, and web identities such as Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.

Niels Hartvig, Founder of Umbraco, one of the most deployed Web Content Management Systems on the Microsoft stack, which can be integrated easily with the Access Control service through an extension, is quoted saying:

“We're excited about the very diverse integration scenarios the ACS (Access Control service) extension for Umbraco allows. The ACS Extension for Umbraco is one great example of what is possible with Windows Azure and the Microsoft Web Platform.”

At the PDC’10, we highlighted these two services as Community Technology Previews (CTPs) to get broad customer trial. After several months of listening to customer feedback during this preview period and making customer-requested enhancements, we’re now pleased to release them as production services with full SLAs.

The updated Access Control service is now live, and Caching will be released at the end of April.

Both services will have a promotion period of a few months in which customers can start using them for no charge.

To learn more about these services please use the following resources:

Caching:

Access Control:

The Access Control service is already available at our production environment at: http://appfabric.azure.com.

The Caching service is available on our previews environment at: http://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ and will be added to the production environment when released at the end of April. So be sure to login and start using the new capabilities.

If you have any questions, be sure to visit our Windows Azure Platform Forums.

For questions specifically on the Caching service visit the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum.

For questions specifically on the Access Control service visit the Security for the Windows Azure Platform section of the forums.

If you have not signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric yet, and would like to start using these services, be sure to take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

Windows Azure AppFabric Caching availability announced!!

AppFabric Team — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 04:51:55 GMT

Windows Azure AppFabric Caching will be released to production at the end of April 2011. The CTP of the Caching service has been available for trial since October 2010.

Windows Azure AppFabric Caching is an explicit, in-memory, distributed caching service that:

Caches all types of data (CLR objects, rows, XML, binary data etc)
Provides multi-tenant caching service
Hosted on Windows Azure
Safeguards access to data using Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control service
Highly scalable, 64-bit service

This service is an extension of Windows Server AppFabric Caching to the cloud. Windows Azure AppFabric Caching (similar to Windows Server AppFabric Caching) can be used in multiple scenarios to cache different types of data:

Cache reference data
- A version of the authoritative data, refreshed periodically
- Will mostly need reads of the cache data
- Product catalog is an example of such data
Cache activity-oriented data
- Data generated as part of the application activity, typically logged back to a backend database
- Will need reads and writes of the cache data
- Session state, shopping carts are examples of such data
Cache resource-oriented data
- Authoritative data, modified by transactions
- Will need reads and writes
- Flight Inventory data is an example of such data

Using Windows Azure AppFabric Caching for the above scenarios, developers can very easily build highly performing applications and also make sure that their customers always have access to their session data.

This service is closely integrated with ASP.Net (AppFabric Caching can be used for caching ASP.Net’s SessionState as well as Output data through simple configuration changes). It also uses the AppFabric Access Control service for authentication.

Let us look at the capabilities of this service at a high level:

Simple Access APIs
- Using cache can be as simple as this example:

//create DataCacheFactory based on config file

var dcf = new DataCacheFactory();

//get the default cache

var cache = dcf.GetDefaultCache();

//Add an item called "Test" - throws if exists

cache.Add("Test", new Data {TheData = "Test" });

//Put an item called "Test2" - overwrites if exists

cache.Put("Test2", new Data { TheData = "Test2" });

//Get "Test3" - add if not in cache (cache-aside)

var test3 = cache.Get("Test3") as Data;

Multi-tenant caching service that provides in-memory, distributed caching
Low latency with the local cache
- Windows Azure AppFabric Caching will use the memory available on the local machine to cache data as well. This will enable applications to read the data with very low latency. More information on the local cache is here.
Caches any managed object
- No object size limit
- No serialization costs for local caching
Easily integrates into existing applications using Windows Server AppFabric Caching
- Same managed interfaces as Windows Server AppFabric Caching
Secured by Windows Azure Access Control service

Let us look at how users can get a cache and use it in their Windows Azure application:

Provision a cache
Windows Azure users can create a new cache namespace by going to the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal. The portal for CTP is http://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ and the portal when Caching is released to production will be https://appfabric.azure.com/.
- Once the provisioning is done and the new cache is in Active state, they can get the cache endpoint and port from the ‘client configuration’ provided in the portal.
Download the SDK – SDK for the CTP release can be downloaded from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184288 and the SDK for the production release will be available here. You can also download the SDK from the portal.
Build the application using this SDK.
Use the cache endpoint information in the application’s configuration and deploy the application on Windows Azure.

During provisioning, users can also select the size of the cache they need. There are multiple sizes available for both CTP and production release:

CTP has two size options - 128MB, 256MB

Production release will have more options - 128MB, 256MB , 512MB, 1GB, 2GB and 4GB

Users can upgrade/downgrade between these sizes at any time without incurring any downtime for the application. The usage metrics for the cache in the AppFabric portal can help users track their cache usage and identify the size that is best suited for the application’s needs.

As we discussed in this blog post today, with the close integration with ASP.Net, simple, easy to use APIs and parity with the Windows Server AppFabric Caching, we showed how users can use Windows Azure AppFabric Caching to easily build highly performant Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications.

Learn more about Windows Server AppFabric Caching here.

Learn more about Windows Azure AppFabric Caching here.

Tutorials and hands on labs for Windows Azure AppFabric Caching can be downloaded from here.

More information about Windows Azure can be found here.

Please provide feedback and let us know what you think through our Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Team.

Windows Azure AppFabric April release now available featuring a new version of the Access Control service!

AppFabric Team — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:26:00 GMT

We are excited to announce that today we released the Windows Azure AppFabric April release that includes a new version of the Access Control service.

The new version of the Access Control service includes all the great capabilities and enhancements that have been available in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the service for several months. Now you can start using these capabilities using our production service.

The new version of the service adds the following capabilities:

Federation provider and Security Token Service

Out of box federation with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook

New authorization scenarios

Delegation using OAuth 2.0

Improved developer experience

New web-based management portal
Fully programmatic management using OData
Works with Windows Identity Foundation

Additional protocol support

WS-Federation, WS-Trust, OpenID 2.0, OAuth 2.0 (Draft 13)

We will share more on this release, including new content that will help you get started with the service in the near future.

The new version of the Access Control service will run in parallel with the previous version. Existing customers will not be automatically migrated to the new version, and the previous version remains fully supported. You will see both versions of the service in the AppFabric Management Portal.

We encourage you to try the new version of the service and will be offering the service at no charge during a promotion period ending January 1, 2012. Customers using the previous version of the service will also enjoy the promotion period.

Please use the following resources to learn more about this release:

Another change introduced in this release is in the way we calculate the monthly charge for Service Bus. From now on the computation of the daily connection charge will always assume a month of 31 days, instead of using the actual number of days in the current month. This is done in order to ensure consistency in the charges across months. You can find more details of how the Service Bus charges are calculated in our Detailed FAQs

In addition, we have deprecated the ASP.NET Management Portal as part of this release. From now on only the new Silverlight based Management Portal will be available. The new portal has the same management capabilities as the ASP.NET management portal, but with an enhanced and improved experience. All links to the Management Portal should work and direct you to the new Silverlight portal.

The updates are available at: http://appfabric.azure.com, so be sure to login and start using the new capabilities.

If you have any questions, be sure to visit our Windows Azure Platform Forums. For questions specifically on the Access Control service visit the Security for the Windows Azure Platform section of the forums.

If you have not signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric and would like to start using these great new capabilities, be sure to take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Article in MSDN Magazine

AppFabric Team — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 21:12:15 GMT

The April 2011 issue of MSDN Magazine features an article on the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service written by Karandeep Anand from the AppFabric product team, and Wade Wegner our technical evangelist.

Read the article to learn what is the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching, what it is good for, and how to get started.

Follow this link to the article: Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service.

If you want to start using the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Caching service you can sign up at: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ and get an idea of what will be released as a production service soon.

3/31/2011 - Updated IP addresses for AppFabric Data Centers

AppFabric Team — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:26:00 GMT

Today (3/31/2011) the Windows Azure platform AppFabric has updated the IP Ranges on which the AppFabric nodes are hosted. If your firewall restricts outbound traffic, you will need to perform the additional step of opening your outbound TCP Ports and IP Addresses for these nodes. Please see the 1/28/2010 “Additional Data Centers for Windows Azure platform AppFabric” posted which was updated today to include the new set of IP Addresses.

Windows Azure platform AppFabric Team

Windows Azure AppFabric Scheduled Maintenance Notification (April 7, 2011)

AppFabric Team — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:20:00 GMT

Due to upgrades and enhancements we are making to Windows Azure AppFabric, the AppFabric Portal, located at http://appfabric.azure.com, will be locked for updates for a few hours.
During that time you will not be able to create, update or delete any namespaces.

There will be no disturbance to the services themselves, nor will there be any breaking changes as result of the upgrades.

When:

START: April 7, 2011, 9 am PST

END: April 7, 2011, 9 pm PST

Impact Alert:

You will not be able to create, update or delete any namespaces in the AppFabric Portal.

Action Required:

None

If you experience any issues or have any questions please visit our Windows Azure Platform Forums.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this might cause.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

Introduction to Windows Azure AppFabric blog posts series – Part 5: Scale-out Application Infrastructure

Itai Raz - Microsoft — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:18:00 GMT

In the previous posts in this series we covered the challenges that Windows Azure AppFabric is trying to solve, and started discussing the Middleware Services in the post regarding Service Bus and Access Control, the post regarding Caching, and the post regarding Building Composite Applications.

In this post we will discuss how the AppFabric Application Infrastructure is optimized for cloud-scale services and middle-tier components, which enables you to get the benefits of cloud computing. These benefits include: horizontal scale-out, high-availability, and multi-tenancy.

Scale-out Application Infrastructure

As noted above, we already covered the AppFabric Middleware Services, and the support you get for developing and running Composite Applications. As illustrated by the image below, the next crucial AppFabric component that enables all these great capabilities is the AppFabric Container.

The AppFabric Container is an infrastructure run-time component. It enables services and components running on top of it to get all of the great benefits that a cloud-based environment provides.

Services that can run on top of the container include the AppFabric Middleware Services mentioned in previous posts, other middle-tier components provided by Microsoft, and components that you create.

Let's discuss the main capabilities that the AppFabric Container provides.

Composition Runtime

The Composition Runtime enables managing the full lifecycle of application components including: loading, unloading, starting, and stopping. It also supports configurations such as auto-start and on-demand activation of components. You can configure these at development time, but you can also use the AppFabric Management Portal to manage components' runtime state, set components' runtime properties, and control components' lifecycle. Instead of having to develop these capabilities on your own, you get them out-of-the-box from the Container, and you are able to easily set and configure them.

Multi-tenancy and Sandboxing

One of the basic concepts of cloud computing is optimizing the use of all available resources in a highly elastic way, so that resource usage is maximized and load and resilience is distributed across the available resources. To make this happen, you need to support many tenants in a highly dense way and ensure that no tenant interferes with another. In addition, this has to be handled in an automated manner, based on the requirements of the application. Once again, the Container is engineered to provide these capabilities so you can maximize the use of the underlying resources through multi-tenancy while providing sandboxing of the different tenants.

State Management

When designing applications, it is complicated to implement state management and scale-out in conjunction. In order to be able to scale-out your applications, you end up moving your state management to a different application tier, such as the database. This allows stateless components to be more easily scaled-out; however, this really just moves the bottleneck of state management to a different tier.
What if components and state could reside together and still be able to scale horizontally? This way they could scale-out together, saving the developer the need to worry about complexities of external state management and other infrastructure capabilities. The Container provides state management capabilities that enable you to scale-out your application without having to externalize your components' state.

Scale-out and High Availability

With state management capabilities provided out-of-the-box, you would next like to optimize your application performance and provide high availability. You want your application to automatically scale according to the application load. The Container provides these abilities. It takes care of transparently replicating application components so there are no single points of failure. It can also automatically spin-up new instances of components as the application load increases and then spin them down as the application load decreases.

Dynamic Address Resolution and Routing

When you run in a fabric-based environment such as the cloud, components can be placed, replaced, and reconfigured dynamically by the environment in order to provide the application with optimal scale and availability. With all of these moving parts, it is critical to keep track of them and work out where they are and how to invoke them. The Container plays a key role in managing all of this logic for you and automatically and efficiently routes requests to the target services and components, saving you the need to worry about changes occurring in the environment.

As you can see, the concepts and capabilities discussed above are key for you to be able to get the advantages of a cloud based environment. If you really want to optimize your application to get these benefits, and had to implement all of these capabilities on your own, it would cost you a lot of time and require you to implement some pretty complicated concepts. This is just another example how AppFabric, and specifically the AppFabric Container, can make the life of the developer a lot easier and more productive when building applications, by providing these capabilities out-of-the-box.

A first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the features discussed in this post will be released in a few months, so you will be able to start testing them soon.

As a reminder, you can start using our CTP services in our LABS/Preview environment at: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/. Just sign up and get started.

Other places to learn more on Windows Azure AppFabric are:

Windows Azure AppFabric website and specifically the Popular Videos under the Featured Content section
Windows Azure AppFabric developers MSDN website

Be sure to start enjoying the benefits of Windows Azure AppFabric with our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and start using it today!

Finally, please leave your comments and questions in the comments section below.

Itai Raz, Product Manager

Windows Azure AppFabric Scheduled Maintenance Notification (March 31, 2011)

AppFabric Team — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 05:41:00 GMT

There will be no disturbance to the services themselves, nor will there be any breaking changes as result of the upgrades.

When:

START: March 31, 2011, 9 am PST

END: March 31, 2011, 9 pm PST

Impact Alert:

You will not be able to create, update or delete any namespaces in the AppFabric Portal.

Action Required:

None

If you experience any issues or have any questions please visit our Windows Azure Platform Forums.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this might cause.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

How to use the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control service to federate identities in a Windows Azure ASP.NET Application

AppFabric Team — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:52:50 GMT

Alik Levin, from the Access Control service content and documentation team, has written these great step-by-step instructions on how you can use the service for federated authentication using Windows Live ID and Google accounts in your Windows Azure ASP.NET application.

Read the step-by-step instructions, and find a number of great resources related to the Access Control service in these posts:

The capabilities of the Access Control service mentioned in these instructions will be added to the production service soon. In the meanwhile they are available for you to check-out in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) service in our LABS/Previews environment.

In order to use the CTP service just sign up here: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/

To use the production service you can sign up to our free trial offer, just click on the image below and get started!

Introduction to Windows Azure AppFabric blog posts series – Part 4: Building Composite Applications

Itai Raz - Microsoft — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:11:00 GMT

In the previous posts in this series we covered the challenges that Windows Azure AppFabric is trying to solve, and started discussing the Middleware Services in this post regarding Service Bus and Access Control, and this post regarding Caching. In the current post we will discuss how AppFabric addresses the challenges developers and IT Pros face when Building Composite Applications and how the Composite App service plays a key role in that.

Building Composite Applications

As noted in the first blog post, multi-tier applications, and applications that consist of multiple components and services which also integrate with other external systems, are difficult to deploy, manage and monitor. You are required to deploy, configure, manage and monitor each part of the application individually, and you lack the ability to treat your application a single logical entity.

Here is how Windows Azure AppFabric addresses these challenges.

The Composition Model

To get the ability to automatically deploy and configure your composite applications, and later get the ability to manage and monitor your application as a single logical entity, you first need to define which components and services make up your composite application, and what the relationships between them are. This is done using the Composition Model, which is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework.

Tooling Support

You can choose to define your application model in code, but when using Visual Studio to develop your application, you also get visual design time capabilities. In Visual Studio you can drag-and-drop the different components that make up your application, define the relationships between the components, and configure the components as well as the relationships between them.

The image below shows an example of what the design time experience of defining your application model within Visual Studio looks like:

In addition to the development tools experience, you also get runtime tooling support through the AppFabric Portal. Through the portal you get capabilities to make runtime configuration changes, as well as get monitoring capabilities and reporting, which are discussed in the Composite App service section below.

Composite App service

By defining your application model, you are now able to get a lot of added value capabilities when deploying and running your application.

You can automatically deploy your end-to-end application to Windows Azure AppFabric from within Visual Studio, or you can create an application package that can be uploaded to the Windows Azure AppFabric Portal.

No matter how you choose to deploy your application, the Composite App service takes care of automatically provisioning, deploying and configuring all of the different components, so you can just start running your application. This reduces a lot of complexity and manual steps required from developers and IT Pros today.

In addition, the service enables you to define component level as well as the end-to-end application level performance requirements, monitoring, and reports. You are also able to more easily troubleshoot and optimize the application as a whole.

Another important capability of the Composite App service is to enable you to run Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) as well as Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) services on Windows Azure AppFabric.

These are two very important technologies that you should use when building service oriented and composite applications. The Composite App service enables you to use these technologies as part of your cloud application, and to use them as components that are part of your composite application.

So, as we showed in this post, Windows Azure AppFabric makes it a lot easier for you to develop, deploy, run, manage, and monitor your composite applications. The image below illustrates how you are able to include the different AppFabric Middleware Services, as well as data stores and other applications, including applications that reside on-premises, as part of you composite application:

A first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the features discussed in this post will be released in a few months, so you will be able to start testing them soon.

To learn more about the capabilities of AppFabric that enable Building Composite Applications, please watch the following video: Composing Applications with AppFabric Services | Speaker: Karandeep Anand.

Also make sure to familiarize yourself with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), these technologies already provide great capabilities for building service oriented and composite applications on-premises today, and will be available soon on Windows Azure AppFabric in the cloud.

As a reminder, you can start using our CTP services in our LABS/Preview environment at: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/. Just sign up and get started.

Other places to learn more on Windows Azure AppFabric are:

Windows Azure AppFabric website and specifically the Popular Videos under the Featured Content section.
Windows Azure AppFabric developers MSDN website

Be sure to start enjoying the benefits of Windows Azure AppFabric with our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and start using it today!

Finally, please leave your comments and questions in the comments section below.

Itai Raz, Product Manager

New and Improved Windows Azure AppFabric Silverlight Portal Released!

AppFabric Team — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:08:00 GMT

Today we released the new and improved Windows Azure AppFabric Silverlight-based portal experience.

The new Silverlight-based portal provides the same great experience as the Windows Azure and SQL Azure Silverlight portals.

The new Silverlight portal has the same capabilities as the old portal with an improved Silverlight experience.

We will have both the old and the new portals available in parallel for a while, but we will remove the old portal in the near future.

The possible error message that we announced in this blog post will not occur in the new portal, but might still occur in the old portal.

If you already opted in to use the new Silverlight-based portal for Windows Azure or SQL Azure, the next time you open the portal via this url: http://windows.azure.com, you will automatically see the new Silverlight AppFabric portal.

If you use this url: http://appfabric.azure.com to open the AppFabric portal, you will be directed to the old portal. You can continue using the old portal until it is removed, but you will now see a banner at the top of the page with a message and a link directing you to a page at which you can opt-in to use the new Silverlight portal as your default view.

You can learn more about how to use Windows Azure AppFabric, including the management aspects of the portal, in our Windows Azure AppFabric SDK Documentation.

As always, please share your feedback with us and raise any questions you have in our Windows Azure Platform forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/windowsazureplatform

We hope you enjoy the new and improved Silverlight experience!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

Recent changes might cause Windows Azure AppFabric Portal error message for a few days

AppFabric Team — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:24:00 GMT

In a few days, we’ll be deploying an updated Windows Azure AppFabric portal to correspond to recent changes in our environment. In the interim, users of the AppFabric portal located at http://appfabric.azure.com may experience the following issue:

When creating a new service namespace, the namespace appears as “Activating” for several seconds and then appears as “Active”.

If you click on the namespace link you may be redirected to an error page.

If you wait 2-5 minutes, the problem should go away and you should be able to view your namespace information.

We will launch the new portal which will resolve these errors in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

3/1/2011 - Updated IP addresses for AppFabric Data Centers

AppFabric Team — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:54:00 GMT

Today (1/3/2011) the Windows Azure AppFabric has updated the IP Ranges on which the AppFabric nodes are hosted. If your firewall restricts outbound traffic, you will need to perform the additional step of opening your outbound TCP Ports and IP Addresses for these nodes. Please see the 1/28/2010 “ Additional Data Centers for Windows Azure platform AppFabric” posted which was updated today to include the new set of IP Addresses.

The addition is under United States (North/Central). Value added: 157.55.136.0/21

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

Access Control Service updated in Labs

AppFabric Team — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:14:00 GMT

The Windows Azure AppFabric LABS release of Access Control Service received an update today that impacts users who are using ACS management service. For more details, see the ACS release notes on Codeplex.

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

How BEDIN Shop Systems has been utilizing the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus as part of their aKite “Connected Retail” solution

AppFabric Team — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:22:00 GMT

Yesterday during the “Cloud Computing in Retail Breakfast” at the Euroshop Retail Design Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, Microsoft partner BEDIN Shop Systems made an announcement regarding their retail industry software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions powered by the Windows Azure platform.

BEDIN Shop Systems announced that their Windows Azure-based aKite® Vers.2.0 software services suite has gained significant customer acceptance since its introduction on July 11, 2010 at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) as European retailers have increasingly realized the benefits of cloud computing. New customers include mobile phone distribution chains in Italy, Italian retailers Briocenter, Bruel and luxury brand Jennifer Tattanelli.

One of the interesting capabilities of their solution is aDI , aKite® Document Interchange, a software service based on the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus that greatly simplifies integration with legacy ERPs and other on-premises systems such as aKite® DWH, a Microsoft SQL Server for custom business intelligency (BI) updated in near-real-time from all stores. The solution uses the Service Bus capabilities to connect to on-premises assets in a secure manner without having to open the on-premises firewall.

For more details about BEDIN’s announcement, view their press release.

You can also start enjoying the benefits of cloud computing and the Windows Azure platform using our free trial offers. Just click on the link below and get started!

February 2011 Releases of the Identity Training Kit & the MSDN Online Identity Training Course

AppFabric Team — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:20:43 GMT

Read this blog post by Vittorio Bertocci, one of our Windows Azure AppFabric evangelists, regarding the most recent updates to the Identity Developer Training Kit and the first release of the MSDN-hosted Identity Developer Training Course.

If you are already using the Access Control service, or would like to get started, these would be very useful resources.

You can start using our CTP services in our LABS/Preview environment at: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ to get a feel for the features and enhancements that are going to be released soon. Just sign up and get started.

You can also start using our production services free of charge using our free trial offers. Just click on the image below.

Windows Azure AppFabric CTP- Scheduled Maintenance Notification (February 28, 2011)

AppFabric Team — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 02:12:00 GMT

The next maintenance to the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS environment is scheduled for February 28, 2011 (Monday). Users will have NO access to the AppFabric LABS portal and services during the scheduled maintenance down time.

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

When:

START: February 28, 2011, 10 am PST

END: February 28, 2011, 4 pm PST

Impact Alert:

The AppFabric LABS environment (Service Bus, Access Control, Caching, and Portal) will be unavailable during this period. Additional impacts are described below.

Action Required:

None

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team