Last week on April 27th I presented in Global Windows Azure Bootcamp – Hyderabad on Windows Azure Web Sites. In this article I am going share my points on Windows Azure Web Sites, for more information visit Windows Azure Site.
Currently Windows Azure provides 3 different options for hosting applications on cloud.
- Virtual Machines
- Cloud Services
- Web Sites
Web Sites is the higher level of abstraction, most simplest way to host applications on Windows Azure. If we use Windows Azure Web Sites we need not worry about under laying operating system, frameworks, web server, just focus on our application & data.
In this series I am going to discuss about all the aspects of Web Sites on Windows Azure.
Starting with Windows Azure Web Sites:
We can start with 10 Web Sites for free, create new sites in seconds & easily manage and scale your sites. Azure Web Sites provides automatic load balancing and shared storage across instances, scale out or up to reserved instances for improved performance.
There are three different scale choices on Windows Azure Web Sites:
- Free : Multi-tenant, Daily quo limits
- Shared : Multi-tenant, No quota limits
- Reserved : Dedicated VMs, No quota limits
Both free and shared are the same architecture. The only difference is that free has quota limits where as with shared you can use and pay for as much resources as you choose, means you can increase the number of instances of site in shared mode.
With reserved you isolate your application to your own virtual machines that you can use and pay for whatever resources you choose, means you can choose a dedicated VM of different sizes (small, medium, large) & multiple instances of dedicated VM to host your application on reserved mode.
Run everything on Windows Azure Web Sites:
- We can use Windows Azure Web Sites to host ASP.NET, Classic ASP, PHP & Node.js applications
- You can also host any custom FastCGI handler
- You can use open source apps (WordPress, Drupal, Orchard etc.… ) in azure gallery
- Out of the box it provides the support for SQL Azure & MySQL databases
- We can use Visual Studio, WebMatrix or any Web development tool on any platform (Windows, Linus, OSX) for development
Go Live with Windows Azure Web Sites:
- Azure Web Sites supports rapid deployment for quick iterations
- Supports integrated source control with Team Foundation Server (TFS), CodePlex, GitHub, Dropbox, Bitbucket, Any public external repository (Git/Mercurial) & Local Git repository
- Provides built-in monitoring of perf and usage data
- Provides quick access to request logs, failed requests diagnostics and diagnostics
This is the quick overview of Windows Azure Web Sites, in the next series of articles I am going to discuss about following topics (links will be updated soon):
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