Active Directory and backups in the cloud, site tracking and other Windows Azure updates

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    The Windows Azure platform is once again pleased with the updates. This time we are pleased to announce the public availability of the Windows Azure Active Directory service, the announcement of the new Windows Azure Backup service, new tracing functionality for Web Sites and the update of other services.

    Details of all the updates are presented on Scott Guthrie's blog at the following link . Below you will find brief descriptions of the presented novelties.

    Active Directory in the cloud


    Now, Windows Azure customers have access to the full-featured Active Directory cloud service , which allows them to solve the tasks of single user authorization for multiple services (Single Sign On), maintain a single user directory, synchronize directory data with Active Directory in the enterprise, and so on. Windows Azure Active Directory is a full-fledged directory implementation in the cloud. At the same time, the platform supports popular open standards for providing federations: SAML 2.0, OData, WS-FED. Over the next few days, support for other popular standards will be added: OAuth 2.0 / OpenID The Windows Azure blog details the release of the new platform and the stages of preliminary testing. In particular, the following data are given there:

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    • Windows Azure Active Directory is already widely used to provide authentication of Microsoft products such as Office365, Dynamics CRM online, Windows Intune, and Windows Azure itself;
    • The service serves solutions located in 14 Microsoft data centers around the world;
    • over the past 90 days, the service has processed more than 65 billion authentication requests, maintaining reliability at over 99.97%;
    • since the launch of the service, more than 2.9 million business representatives have used the service, which have completed more than 265 billion authentication requests.

    In addition, with the public release of Windows Azure Active Directory, the Windows Azure Active Directory Graph service , which offers programmatic directory access via the REST API, has also become publicly available . Read more about Directory Graph here .

    Detailed documentation and guides on using Windows Azure Active Directory can be found here . Information on supported protocols can be found at this link . Further documentation can be found here .

    New Windows Azure Backup Service


    Along with other news, a new service in the Windows Azure family - Backup is also presented. This service offers the possibility of organizing a secure infrastructure for saving Windows Server backups in the cloud.

    Windows Azure Backup supports backups of information from systems based on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012 , Windows Server 2012 Essentials and System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 SP1 to the Windows Azure cloud.

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    Windows Azure Backup storage is quick and easy to create and extremely simple to set up. Incremental backups are supported, which saves traffic and storage space and can be restored to a selected point from multiple versions. Policies and all standard Windows Server backup tools for organizing data compression and encryption are supported.

    While the service is in preview, to access it, you must send a request to the following link . Confirmation arrives within one to two days.

    More information can be obtained from the following manuals:


    Improved monitoring and diagnostics of Windows Azure Web Sites


    In this wave of announcements of Windows Azure, significant improvements are also presented in the monitoring and diagnostic system of solutions based on Windows Azure Web Sites.

    In particular, the functions of tracing and saving information in log files with subsequent access via FTP have been added. In addition, a real-time streaming option has been proposed for receiving portioned data as it arrives. New functions integrate perfectly with the existing functionality of platform and library tracing like .NET and others. The tracing function is supported on all platforms of Windows, Mac and Linux. Details can be found on Scott Hanselman's blog at the following link .

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    Other innovations in Windows Azure


    Along with major updates, the smaller new products are introduced in the Windows Azure platform with this release:

    • Windows Azure HDIsight (Hadoop) - added a dashboard with the ability to monitor diagnostic metrics in real time, just like in other Windows Azure services;
    • Operation logs - now the name of the user who made changes to the services in the specified subscription is also entered in the operation logs;
    • Windows Azure Media Services - expanded set of predefined presets for encoding video formats;
    • Windows Azure Virtual Machines - the default size for the OS disk in new VMs has been increased, the ability to specify a username when creating a VM has been added.

    Another piece of news was the increase in the base of Linux virtual machine images for the Windows Azure community of VMDepot to 200 titles.

    Expect more news on the Windows Azure platform soon.

    useful links


    Below you will find links to resources that will help you use the Microsoft cloud platform:


    And if you are already developing on Windows Azure or want to find developers of your service, visit the appprofessionals.ru service .

    We will be happy to answer your questions at azurerus@microsoft.com .

    And look forward to seeing you in the Windows Azure Community on Facebook . Here you will find experts (do not forget to ask them questions), photos and a lot of news.

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