First Azure Worker Role
Posted on June 1st, 2009
Here are some of my findings around Microsoft’s upcoming Azure platform. I initially thought Amazon had it in the bag with EC2 but to be honest, I’m tired of running my own servers. Google’s app hosting is ok, if you like Java or Python technologies – which I do but I thought I’d try the full Visual Studio approach :)
I’m using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. First gotcha, I wanted to run my work role and was told I had to be running VS as administrator … boo really? Wasn’t that a freaking Vista problem. This is Windows 7 RC1 people!
If you’re not running SQL Express you’ll need to reconfigure the local data storage services, which have those lovely hidden options buried in a .config file. Thanks to the link for the location. (Changing Development Storage)
Get it right and you’ll get this nice little local storage window the first time you run something:
When your role gets running, you can load up the fabric UI to actually get control of your own Azure cloud. All this without having to actually deploy to the cloud yet. Pretty neat. Remember that a role is basically like a console application in the cloud. Here is my little default application running, the output is just like a console window:
So what comes next? I’m going to try embed my Amazon Simple DB provider and S3 library into a real role and throw in some workflow for fun. Might as well push it right :) I’ll also be fetching some data from AQS. (Amazon Queue Service). I’ve read a fair bit about thread issues or at least limits on how many instances of a role can run.
Right now I believe you’re limited to 1 instance of a role which kinda sucks. You can have threads which is fine but still puts severe caps on application scale capacity.
Tags: Azure
Filed under .NET, Software |
2 Responses to “First Azure Worker Role”
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Steve Marx Says:
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:01 amThanks for taking a look at Windows Azure! FYI, you can have up to two instances of each role during the CTP. Of course, at commercial launch at the end of the year, you’ll be able to scale to whatever you want to pay for.
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typemismatch Says:
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:02 amThanks Steve, good to know – I’ll be running a few of these, each threads to about 10 short workflows so we’ll see how that runs.