Windows Azure and dynamic elasticity

Question

Is there a way do do dynamic elasticity in Windows Azure? If my workers begin to get overloaded, or queues start to get too full, or too many workers have no work to do, is there a way to dynamically add or remove workers through code or is that just done manually (requires human intervention) right now? Does anyone know of any plans to add that if its not currently available?

Answer 1

There's a Service Management API, and you can use that to scale your application (from code running in Windows Azure or from code running outside of Windows Azure).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee460799.aspx and http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=windowsazuresamples&ReleaseId=3233.

Answer 2

Lokad.Cloud open source project for Windows Azure contains distributed executor framework. Among other things it provides auto-scaling with VM provisioning feature.