14 DAY TRIAL // A free and open source plugin developed by Microsoft is the latest example of PHP and Windows Azure interoperability to come from the company, after various other offerings, including a PHP software development kit for the Cloud platform. By leveraging the plugin, customers running WordPress will be able to take advantage of the storage capacity offered by the software giant’s Cloud operating system. Essentially, the plugin was designed to bridge WordPress with the Windows Azure Storage Service, enabling customers to host media content in the Cloud, Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Microsoft Sr. technical evangelist, revealed.
“The Windows Azure Storage plugin for WordPress allows developers running their own instance of WordPress to take advantage of the Windows Azure Storage services, including the Content Delivery Network (CDN) feature. It provides a consistent storage mechanism for WordPress Media in a scale-out architecture where the individual web servers don’t share a disk. Note that this scenario goes beyond WordPress and could also be very compelling any other web application where there’s a need to load balance across a number of web servers without shared disk,” Cimetiere explained.
Windows Azure Storage for WordPress is, of course, available for download free of charge, as it is an open source project hosted in the WordPress repository. Users already familiar with the WordPress blogging platform are undoubtedly also familiar with the process of installing a plugin, and will be able to deploy Windows Azure Storage for WordPress without any problems. The extension will subsequently be featured under the Installed Plugins section of the WordPress admin console. Of course, customers will need to have a Windows Azure account in order to take advantage of Microsoft’s Cloud OS.
“The plugin is a regular WordPress plugin developed in PHP, and can be deployed on any WordPress instance (running on Windows or Linux - requires at least version 2.8.0 and tested up to version 2.8.4). The plugin uses the Windows Azure SDK for PHP to handle the interactions with Windows Azure,” Cimetiere added.
Windows Azure Storage for WordPress is available for download here. PHP SDK for Windows Azure is available for download here.