Wely's Cloud Journey...

I was super excited to hear the announcement by Microsoft at PDC2010 regarding the Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, we would be able to connect cloud instances (VMs on the cloud) with on-premise machine through logical virtual network. This really solves many scenarios that we are facing today, such as:

• Connecting on-premise SQL Server database from Windows Azure instances.
• Using on-premise SMTP gateway from Windows Azure instances.
• Windows Azure instance domain-joined to corporate Active Directory
• Remote Administration and troubleshooting on Windows Azure Role.

The following figure illustrates how the Windows Azure Connect works.

In order to enable Windows Azure Connect, the following is the steps that we would need to do. A detail step-by-step post will be followed on subsequent post.

• Enabling Windows Azure Connect at the Windows Azure Developer Portal.
• A tiny “Windows Azure Connect” engine will be installed on our on-premise application.
• A role group then must be created in order select which of the Windows Azure Roles and on-premise will be included.
• Your on-premise machine name will be shown on the developer portal when it’s successfully connected.
• Then the machines on that group regardless cloud or on-premise would be able to ping each other

I will show you the “how-to” on the subsequent post, stay tune here..

As we know that, Windows Azure is actually massive data centers that maintained by Microsoft. At the time this article is written, Windows Azure Platform data center are distributed in 6 sub-region over the world, namely:

1. South Central US
2. North Central US
3. North Europe
4. West Europe
5. Southeast Asia
6. East Asia

Although committed as high availability service, at certain case data center are unavailable (such as: performance degradation or service interruption) due to maintenance or operational matters.

There’re many services provided by Windows Azure including Compute instance, Storage, SQL Azure, etc. We can check the status of each sub-region through this Windows Azure service dashboard.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/support/status/servicedashboard.aspx

As we notice that, we could also subscribe the health of each service through RSS so that we would be able to track its status.