Questions about Microsoft Azure

Question

I am a web developer that are working on several web applications. For my projects (running in a production environment), I always strive good performance.

So, I have started to look into Microsoft Azure. I have deployed some test-apps and they all work fine. They all run a lot quicker than on my regular shared hosting environment.

My questions are:

1. What should be ran at Azure? Are you suppose to deploy your whole web app (along with images, scripts etc) or are you just suppose to deploy services? (such as WCF)

2. It says "Data transfers within a sub region are free.", but what is a sub region?

3. CNAME works, but is it possible to use A-records of a domain to Azure?

Answer 1

1. For web sites that are just jQuery slabs calling web services Azure is very easy to adopt. Azure can store any type of file, so for traditional web sites follow this guide

2. Azure process to Azure process, or Azure SQL etc. May included other non Azure services within the same Microsoft network area. Basically they are saying LAN access if free, whoopee

3. What would you point you A-Name too? Azure is virtual

Answer 2

Hello Mickel,

Here are the answers I can give you:

1. It depends on what you want and what kind of (web)application you want to build for Windows Azure. If you're going for fast performance, perhaps it is faster to deploy everything to the cloud (but face the financial costs)

2. A sub-regio is North-Europe, another one is West-Europe. So data transfering inside North-Europe will be free of charges. But if you have data transfering between North- and West-European hosted application/services you pay for this. Note: North- and West-Europe form 1 region

3. Sorry, can't give an answer to this one

Answer 3

Azure is definitely geared to handle more than just hosting web services.

Putting all your web site's static content in Azure storage should enable you to take advantage of the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, which basically replicates your static content out to geo-local caches at the edge of the cloud to reduce network load on your Windows Azure web roles and improves the responsiveness of your web app for your end users scattered around the world.

Read more about the Windows Azure CDN here: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network.aspx