For any large website, managing traffic globally is critical to the architecture for both disaster recovery and load balancing. Here comes the Azure Traffic Manager, a geo load balancer and durability solution for your cloud solutions.

With it you can prop up large, redundant, durable, distributed applications in seconds that would rival the infrastructure of the largest websites.

The first step is to click the Virtual Network menu item.

The goal of the next step is to define what Azure deployments we’d like add to our policy, what type of load balancing we’ll use, and finally a DNS entry that we’ll use as a CNAME. We can route traffic for performance (best response time based on where user is located), failover (traffic sent to primary and only to secondary/tertiary if primary is offline), and round robin (traffic is equally distributed). In all cases, the traffic manager monitors endpoints and will not send traffic to endpoints that are offline.

That’s it, now we have our app available on *.trafficmanager.net and all we have to do is to point our domain record cname to it. Simple… definatelly

Dear Microsoft student,

Expand your existing skills and acquire new skills on Microsoft’s cloud technologies including: Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange Online, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft System Center 2012 and SQL Azure.

Microsoft has made available over 30 learning resources to enable you to explore these technologies, including: eBooks, E-learning clinics, short videos (a.k.a. learning snacks), and classroom training courses.

Many of these valuable resources are free. To name a few:

· Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (eBook)

· Introduction to SQL Server 2012 (eBook)

· Microsoft® Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Anywhere, Anytime (eBook)

· Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 (learning snack)

· SQL Server 2012: Cloud on Your Terms (learning snack)

· Introduction to Microsoft Windows Azure Platform (learning snack)

Microsoft’s cloud-based technologies are relevant to specific job roles. Start here: Microsoft Cloud Training

To understand more, check out the Microsoft Learning Cloud Brochure.

Thank you, and good luck!

Windows Azure Connect enables Windows Azure users to set up secure, IP-level network connectivity between their Windows Azure hosted services and local (on-premises) resources.

To set it up, you must first connect to the Windows Azure Management portal and enable it for your subscription.

Next you need to get the activation token.

Then open the ServiceDefinition.csdef file and import the Connect module for your roles.

<Imports>
   <Import moduleName="Connect" />
</Imports>

And set the token in the csconfig file.

<Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="your_ activation_token_guid" />

To gain access to local resources you need to install Windows Azure Connect Endpoint software that you get on https://waconnecttokenpage.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx?token=yourtoken

After Connect Endpoint is installed, it will automatically “activate” itself with the Connect service which should take around 10 to 30 seconds. Once a local machine is activated, it will appear in the Virtual Network of the Management Portal when you select the “Activated Endpoints” node or the “Groups and Roles” node.

Now you have to you can define your network connectivity policy in the Virtual Networks section of the Management Portal.

If the “Interconnected” check box is checked, then machines that belong to the group will be able to communicate with each other via Connect. If it is set to false, then machines in the group will not be able to communicate with each other.

You cant ping your roles in the cloud because their local firewall prevents it, but there is a fix for that. Just add a startup task that ads a firewall rule to the firewall.

Echo Enable ICMP
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv6 echo" dir=in action=allow enable=yes protocol=icmpv6:128,any 
exit /b 0

Connect will automatically track changes made to your Windows Azure role and maintain connectivity. If you increase the number of Windows Azure role instances, Connect will automatically connect those new role instances based on the current network policy. The REALLY bad side of it is when you redeploy the app, you will have to add your new deployment to your network policy manualy, since we currently dont have this available in management api.

Great news for SQL Azure subscribers! Microsoft announced last Tuesday significant changes to the pricing structure, resulting in 48% to 75% savings for databases larger than 1GB. Also, the 100MB database option enables customers to get started using this cloud-base relational DB engine at half of the previous price. Find out more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/02/14/announcing-reduced-pricing-on-sql-azure-and-new-100mb-database-option.aspx