With this post, I would like to list a few links that helps answering several customer requests that I have received recently.

1) AZURE SLAs:

You can find them here. Related to this topic, you may also be interested in

• reading the terms of use
• accessing the support portal, from which you can
  • access the Service Dashboard with infomation about the status of the Azure Services in the different datacenters worldwide
    • NB: you can also subscribe to this information in form of an RSS or you can monitor your applications directly with System Center and the Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack which is today available for download as a Release Candidate (more info also here)
  • report an issue you are experiencing with the services
    • Windows Azure issue
    • SQL Azure issue
    • AppFabric issue

2) AZURE SECURITY:

Please allow me to re-link you to a few posts within this blog:

• #Security Guidelines for #SQL #Azure
• Azure Security papers summary
• #Cloud #Security – #Crypto Services and Data Security in Windows #Azure

3) AZURE PATTERNS AND PRACTICES:

•  Developing Applications for the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform
• I also recommend to take a look at the CS01 Building High Performance Web Apps with Azure video of Matthew Kerner’s session at PDC2010

4) WHAT’S NEW

(recurring question that fortunately we can always answer differently, considering the amount of innovation regularly brought to Azure…)

• Most recent release: Windows Azure SDK 1.3.
  • An overview of the features can be found here.
  • The new tools can be dowloaded from Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
• The PDC web site contains plenty of session’s videos dedicated to azure: Here, a list of the sessions.
• The official blogs are always a good source of information:
  • Windows Azure Blog
  • SQL Azure Blog
• For AppFabric, I normally use an aggregator: http://blogs.msdn.com/tags/azure+appfabric/

5) IaaS, WM ROLE, ???

In the recent past, this was definitely a recurring question. One of the most encountered misunderstanding is that VM role is Microsoft new IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offer. This is not the case. Here, you can find a nice overview of the Azure Roles, and this blog entry written by Planky nicely explains the VM Role and what it is good for.

If you are in Switzerland and need more specific information, please do not hesitate to contact me under stefano.malle@microsoft.com.