The first production version of the windows Azure caching service and a new production version of the Access Control service have been released. The following link provides the necessary information

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazureappfabric/archive/2011/04/11/announcing-the-commercial-release-of-windows-azure-appfabric-caching-and-access-control.aspx

In conjunction the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit and the Identity Developer Training Kit have both also been updated.

The Windows Azure Platform Training Kits adds some new labs:

I’ve just finished presenting my talk on “Successfully Adopting the Cloud: TfGM Case Study”and there were a couple of questions that I said I would clarify.

1. What are the limits for the numbers of subscriptions per service bus topic. the answer is 2000. further details can be found at:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee732538.aspx

2. what are the differences between Windows Azure SQL database and SQL Server 2012. The following pages provide the details:

Supported T-SQL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336270.aspx

Partially supported T-SQL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336267.aspx

Unsupported T-SQL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336253.aspx

Guidelines and Limitations: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394102.aspx

3. Accessing the TfGM open data site requires you to register as a developer at: http://developer.tfgm.com

Thanks to everyone who attended I hope you found it useful.

When an Azure Website is created and is in production it will most likely be running in a Standard or Basic configuration. These are both sets of Virtual Machines and can be shared across your websites. In the old portal you could only scale the group of websites together but the new Azure Management portal now allows you to move your websites on to different virtual machines so that if one site is more heavily loaded than others it can be scaled out separately if required. The set of virtual machines is known as a Web Hosting Plan. If you want to move one or more of your websites to a different set of virtual machines then you will need to create a new web hosting plan for this.

In the new portal click on “Browse” in the left hand bar

This brings up the Browse Menu.

Select “Web hosting plans”

You can see that I only have 1 web hosting plan and it is currently hosting two websites. I would like to move them onto separate virtual machines so that I can scale them out independently.

To do this I need to navigate to the web site I wish to move.

The top menu needs to be expanded by clicking the 3 dots on the right of the menu bar. this then displays the web hosting plan button.

Clicking this displays the web hosting plan associated with this web site

Clicking on the new hosting plan option allows you to create a new plan

I’ve selected a standard small instance to host my website.

After clicking OK the new hosting plan will be created and the website moved to it. After a short while you should see that the hosting plan has changed in this website as well.

Note: you now have two hosting plans both of which will be a separate billing entity. I am also led to believe that if you move everything off of a hosting plan you will still be charged for it.Hosting plans can be deleted once all the websites have been moved off of it. This is done in the Web hosting plan page. right click on the plan you want to delete and select the Delete option