Pie in the Sky (October 28, 2011)
As usual, this week’s work led Larry and me to a varied assortment of reading topics…everything from a comparison of cloud offerings to changes in Node.js v0.06. Be sure not to miss the announcement about lowered Windows Azure storage costs…
- Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Android Series - Part 2 - What are some high level cloud offerings? I found the comparison of cloud options in this post to be very interesting.
- What is a fault domain? This forum post has a great explanation of what a fault domain is (and of what an upgrade domain is).
- Windows Azure- What is an upgrade domain? Upgrade domains explained.
- Command Query Separation on Windows Azure: Nathan Totten describes the command-query-separation pattern in the context of an example application. Although the code for the application is C#, the concepts are applicable in any language.
- Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Wade Wegner talks about the latest release of this toolkit.
- How to block IP addresses in a Windows Azure Web role: This post provides a startup script that enables the IP and Domain Restrictions role service in IIS so that you can then specify what IP addresses you want blocked in your web.config file.
- Open Source in the Cloud - WordPress on Azure: My take on Web not War presentation (VIDEO): Morten Rand-Hendriksen talks about WordPress on Windows Azure and why he's so excited about hosting WordPress Networks on a Microsoft platform.
- Microsoft lowers storage cost for blob and table storage in Windows Azure: Tiered pricing for storage in Windows Azure.
- Rails is Not Your Application: Separating your application logic from the Rails framework. You're 'application' becomes a service that is called by Rails.
- Build Scalable Mobile Applications for iOS, Android and Windows Phone: Toolkits for building mobile applications for Android, iOS and WP7 that take advantage of Windows Azure.
- Cyberduck: There are a couple of Azure Storage Explorers, including one for the Mac for a while. This one handles not only Windows Azure Blob storage, but also Amazon S3, Google Storage, Rackspace, etc. It even handles old school stores like FTP and WebDAV. It's also available for Windows; bonus!
- Packaging an Executable as a Windows Azure Application From the Command Line: Steve Marx has skeleton project that creates a Windows Azure deployment package that uses the new ProgramEntryPoint feature to launch an application (mongoose.exe in the example code.) It should be fairly simple to modify this to launch things like Ruby or Node.js applications. Can be packaged and deployed from the command line using the Windows Azure SDK.
- API changes between v0.4 and v0.6 (Node.js): Node v0.6 is coming, might want to check the changes and see if you need to update your existing code.
Have a great weekend.
-Brian