Management for Azure matures; workflow killed from .Net Services
Microsoft today released the community technology preview of its management API for its cloud service, Windows Azure. The API allows Azure users to perform a variety of management tasks for their cloud-hosted apps, and relies on an X509 client to authenticate the user before allowing management tasks to be performed.
Specifically, the CTP of the Windows Azure Service Management API is a REST-based API. Users can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests, Microsoft says. Once the system authenticates you, the API supports the following operations: Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment. Plus it supports listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups
In more Azure news, Microsoft has changed the name of its primary Azure offering. What was once called the Azure Services Platform is now the Windows Azure platform. Blogger David Chappell notes that with the new name, came some interesting changes with the service itself, notably that some pieces of it have been deleted, such as the Workflow part of .NET Services. He outlines the ins/outs of the newly revised Azure in a freely available paper called Introducing the Windows Azure Platform.
If you are contemplating cloud services and watching Microsoft’s moves, Chappell’s paper is a good place to start.
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