14 DAY TRIAL // Customers leveraging Microsoft’s Cloud platform should expect a tad of downtime later this week related to the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS environment. The Redmond company has already provided advanced notice of an upcoming update to Windows Azure AppFabric LABS, explaining that it’s necessary to cut off access for a limited period of time.
Customers should “breach for impact” on February 9, 2011 (Wednesday), the software giant informed.
“Users will have NO access to the AppFabric LABS portal and services during the scheduled maintenance down time,” revealed a member of the Windows Azure AppFabric Team.
“The AppFabric LABS environment (Service Bus, Access Control, Caching, and portal) will be unavailable during this period.”
Downtime is scheduled from February 9, 2011, 10 am PST until February 9, 2011, 6 pm PST.
Microsoft underlines that the upcoming refresh to Windows Azure AppFabric community technology preview (CTP) will not change or cause the loss of accounts or Service Namespaces. This is valid for both the Service Bus or Access Control services.
“Cache SDK and the Cache service are being refreshed in this release. There are a few breaking changes in the new SDK. As part of this service upgrade existing caches will not be migrated and existing Service Namespaces will be deleted.
“We advise customers to download the new SDK, provision new cache namespaces endpoints on the portal, recompile their applications with the new SDK and redeploy their applications,” the Windows Azure AppFabric Team representative added.
The Windows Azure platform AppFabric LABS Environment was introduced almost a year ago, in March 2010.
At that time, Microsoft explained that Windows Azure platform AppFabric LABS was designed to engage early adopters that wanted to test experimental AppFabric technologies.
Of course, the LABS environment is also a source of feedback for the software giant as Windows Azure AppFabric continues to evolve.