microsoft azure and silverlight

Question

I am interested in developing a site similar to youtube. I want to have a site that users upload videos.

I imagine technically the website would upload the video to the azure cloud. Where the file will automatically be encoded to silverlight and hosted.

Can azure host my site, take care of encoding and host the videos all programmatically?

And can azure host the rest of the website pages that are not part of the app like a (homepage or about us page) and have a domain name or do i need a web host?

thanks

Answer 1

Azure can do the lot.

You'll probably want to use Azure Blob Storage for the initial upload, then use queues and the worker role functionality to do the encoding and other processing. Then you can store the resulting file back in Blob storage, and have an index either in Azure Tables or SQL Azure, depending on the architecture of the rest of the application.

And yes, an Azure Web role can quite happily host static content, standard dynamic ASPX pages, and a whole lot more (and can do it all on your own domain).

I suggest you grab the Windows Azure SDK (from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/) and take a look through the documentation. Your example scenario is pretty simple actually, and working through the samples should give you all the information you need.

Good luck!

Answer 2

• Azure can host your site indeed. However don't forget that the costs will probably be a minimum ~ $80-90 per month even without any load. If your website gets traffic this amount will increase
• However you will have to implement video encoding yourself (or better yet find libraries to do it), Azure is purely a host.