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Yesterday, Microsoft announced the first community technology preview of SQL Azure Database, a cloud-based relational database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. With SQL Azure Database, you can easily provision and deploy relational database solutions to the cloud, and take advantage of globally distributed data centers that provides enterprise-class availability, scalability, and security with the benefits of built-in data protection, self-healing and disaster recovery.
To register for the free trial, visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/dataservices/default.aspx.
To learn more about SQL Azure, visit http://www.microsoft.com/azure/sql.mspx.
Additionally, see the updated SQL Azure content in the August release of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit.
SQL Azure documentation on MSDN is also a great learning resource.
More information at the SQL Azure Team Blog here.
Today, at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform including service level agreements and support programs.
The Windows Azure platform, which includes a cloud services operating system – Windows Azure, a Web-based relational database in Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services), as well as connectivity and interoperability services with .NET Services. Today, we announced a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume. Here is a summary of that pricing:
Windows Azure:
- Compute @ $0.12 / hour
- Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
- Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K
SQL Azure:
- Web Edition – Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
- Business Edition – Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99
.NET Services:
- Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB.
Additionally, the Windows Azure blog outlined an enterprise-class guarantee backed by a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability:
“For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action. For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.”
Today, we also announced that Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developers Conference 2009, which goes on between November 17 and 19, 2009.
PDC has arrived, and with it, we unveiled our cloud services platform (in CTP – Community Technology Preview) to the world! Windows Azure.
The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities.
The Windows Azure compute service is based, of course, on the Windows platform. For the CTP, Microsoft allows Windows Azure to run only applications built on the .NET Framework. However, we have also announced plans to support unmanaged code as well, i.e., applications that aren’t built on the .NET Framework, on Windows Azure in 2009. For example, Windows Azure will support third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.
As you can see from the diagram, there are several building block services in the Windows Azure Services Platform. These include Live Services, .NET Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, and Dynamics CRM Services.
Here are some resources for more detail about Windows Azure:
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) – You can watch video of the sessions and keynotes.
