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Published
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 02:24:32 GMT
This is the second in a series of posts I’m doing on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform.
In today’s post I’m going to cover how to sign-up and get started with Windows Azure using a no-obligation 3 month free trial offer. This free trial costs nothing and doesn’t obligate you to buy anything at the end of it. It provides an easy way to try out and get started with Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Website
The http://www.windowsazure.com web-site provides everything you need to get started with Windows Azure – including overview content, developer tutorials and documentation, account management, and more:
On the
www.windowsazure.com home page, as well as in the top-right hand corner of every page of the site, is a
“free trial” link. Clicking it will take you to a
sign-up page that enables you to quickly register a new account and get started with Windows Azure:
The free trial provides everything you need to get started with Windows Azure.
Three Month Free Trial Offer
We recently refreshed our Windows Azure free trial offer to make sign-up easier, ensure it is always risk/obligation free, and enable more services with it. You can click the “Sign up now” button above to register and have an active Windows Azure subscription ready to use in under 2 minutes.
What the Free Trial Provides
The free trial offer allows you to build and run applications on Windows Azure at no cost (and with no obligation to buy or pay anything at the end of the three month free trial). It includes a number of compute, database and storage services that you can use to build your applications. Some of the resources include:
I’ll cover more about what “750 small compute hours per month” means in a future post – but essentially it means that you have enough hours to continually run an application you build in a virtual server – dedicated and isolated just to you – on Windows Azure each month (there are 744 hours in a 31 day month: 24 hours x 31 days = 744).
The trial also includes a 1GB SQL Azure Database that you can store data within. SQL Azure Databases run on dedicated servers we manage and cluster (for high availability and scale-out). This means you don’t need to worry about installing, managing, or running your own database servers (which makes life easier). The trial also includes 20GB of high availability storage that you can use to store blobs, queues and non-relational tables.
What is Required to Sign-up for a Trial
When you click the “Sign up Now” button on the free-trial page you’ll walk-through a sign-up wizard that will ask you to provide three things:
- The Windows LiveID account you want to use to use to sign-in and manage your account
- A mobile phone number where we can send (via SMS) a verification code for you to enter
- A credit card
We use the last two items for proof of identity. The credit card is not billed and during the free trial you’ll have a spending limit set to $0.
Free and No Risk
Spending limits are a new feature we added to Windows Azure last month, and ensure that you never have to worry about accidentally going over the resources included in a free offer and being charged. If you end up building an application that exhausts the monthly amounts included in the free trial before the month ends, and you have a spending limit set to $0, then we will by default disable the application for the remainder of the month (leaving your data in read-only mode) until the next month starts. This ensures you are never billed anything during the free trial.
You can optionally turn off the spending limit feature if you want to go beyond what the free trial provides (and pay for the incremental resources on top of what is provided in the trial) – but by default the spending limit is on (and set to $0) when you sign-up for a free trial to ensure that you never inadvertently get charged anything. This provides a no-risk way to evaluate Windows Azure. You can learn more about the spending limit feature here.
Tracking Usage
You can easily track what resources you’ve used on Windows Azure by clicking the “Account” tab of the www.windowsazure.com web-site. This is another new feature we added to Windows Azure last month, and it allows customers (both free trial and paid) to easily see what resources they’ve used and how much it is costing them. You can download the usage data as either a CSV data file (which you can open in Excel or other tools), or visualize the usage data within the browser:
You can also use the account tab to easily change payment methods (both to setup a new credit card or to switch to invoice-based billing), create new subscriptions, as well as optionally cancel subscriptions.
What if you don’t want to use Windows Azure at the end of the trial?
There is no obligation to use Windows Azure (nor buy anything) at the end of the three month free trial. So if at the end of it you aren’t ready to buy anything (or just want to hold off a few more months) there is no obligation to pay anything. At any point during the free trial you can also click the “account” tab of the www.windowsazure.com website and explicitly cancel your subscription.
Summary
The above post covers how to quickly sign-up for a subscription with Windows Azure. Its easy to do – and takes less than 2 minutes to complete. Once you are signed up you can build and deploy high-scale cloud applications. In future posts we’ll look at the steps to do this, and some of the cool features and options that Windows Azure enables for you.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu
Published
Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:35:57 GMT
As some of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the last 6 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to run the teams that build ASP.NET, core pieces of .NET and VS, and a bunch of other products too).
I’m pretty excited about where we are going with Windows Azure – it is going to enable a number of great new scenarios for developers. Over the next few months I’m going to be blogging a lot more about it – and I’ll cover both what it provides as well as how you can easily take advantage of it as developers.
Learn Windows Azure Talk
Before the holidays we held a special “Learn Windows Azure” event. A recording of the keynote I gave is now available to watch online. It provides a 90 minute end-to-end look at Windows Azure, covers what it is and how it works, and walks-through a bunch of demos + code on how you can program against it. You can now watch my talk online and download the slides and samples.
Over the new few weeks and months I’ll be blogging more, and will go deeper into Windows Azure and discus both what you can do with it, as well as how to easily get started.
Hope this helps,
Scott
P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu
Published
Thu, 12 Jan 2012 05:08:00 GMT
Jan 16th Update: An audio recording of my talk can be listened to here.
This coming Monday (Jan 16th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session. The talk will be from 10am to 11:30am (Pacific Time). I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun. Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting. We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics. Any topic is fair game: technical, strategy, community, college basketball, etc.
You can learn more and register to attend the online event for free here. I’ll update this post with a download link to a recorded audio version of the talk after the event is over.
Hope to get a chance to chat with some of you there!
Scott
P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu
Published
Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:59:54 GMT
A few minutes ago Microsoft released an advance notification security bulletin announcing that we are releasing an out-of-band security update to address an ASP.NET Security Vulnerability.
Dec 29th Update: the security update (MS11-100) has now shipped and is available to install via Windows Update, the Windows Server Update Service and as a download from the Microsoft Download Center.
The security update we are releasing resolves a publicly disclosed Denial of Service issue present in all versions of ASP.NET. We’re currently unaware of any attacks on ASP.NET customers using this exploit, but we strongly encourage customers to deploy the update as soon as possible.
We are releasing the security update via Windows Update and the Windows Server Update Service. You can also manually download and install it via the Microsoft Download Center. We will release the update on Thursday, December 29th at approximately 10am Pacific Time (US and Canada). We are announcing it ahead of time to ensure that administrators know that the security update is coming, and are prepared to apply it once it is available.
More about the Security Vulnerability
On Dec 28th 2011, details were published at a security conference describing a new method to exploit hash-table data-structures used in web frameworks. Attacks targeting this type of vulnerability are generically known as “hash collision attacks”.
Hash collision attacks attempt to populate a hash-table within a server app with large numbers of items whose keys resolve to the same hash code. These key collisions can significantly slow down operations on the hash-table, and with enough elements can cause a server to spend minutes (or even hours) processing them. This can block a web server from processing requests from other users, and cause a denial of service (meaning the web site becomes unresponsive or slow).
Attacks such as these are not specific to any particular language or operating system. Presenters at the security conference discussed how to cause them using standard HTTP form posts against several different web frameworks (including ASP.NET). Because these attacks on web frameworks can create Denial of Service issues with relatively few HTTP requests, there is a high likelihood of attacks happening using this approach. We strongly encourage customers to deploy the update as soon as possible.
The security update we are releasing on Thursday, December 29th updates ASP.NET so that attackers can no longer perform these attacks. The security update does not require any code or application changes.
Learn More
You can learn more about this security vulnerability from the Microsoft Security Advisory (2659883) we have already released. We will release the security update on Windows Update, the Windows Server Update Service and the Microsoft Download Center on Thursday Dec 29th at approximately 10:00am Pacific Time (US and Canada).
Dec 29th Update: the security update (MS11-100) has now shipped and is available to install via Windows Update, the Windows Server Update Service and as a download from the Microsoft Download Center.
If you have questions about the vulnerability or have any issues applying the update, you can post questions in the Security Vulnerability forum on the www.asp.net web-site.
For all the latest information, you can also follow the MSRC team on Twitter at @MSFTSecResponse.
Hope this helps,
Scott
