14 DAY TRIAL // After early adopters have had the possibility of testing a preview of the Windows Azure Autoscaling Block, dubbed WASABi, they can now download and take out for a spin the Beta development milestone of the resource.
Microsoft is offering the Windows Azure Autoscaling Block as a part of the Windows Azure Integration Pack, and the official label provides a hint as to the functionality that the block is designed to streamline.
According to the official description of the download, the Windows Azure Autoscaling Block is designed to streamline certain tasks associated with the scalability of Windows Azure hosted services and applications.
Specifically, customers leveraging the Windows Azure Autoscaling Block will be able to add and manage autoscaling capabilities for the projects their running in Microsoft’s Cloud.
Microsoft’s Grigori Melnik provided a list highlighting the evolution of the Windows Azure Autoscaling Block from preview to Beta stage:
“• The Stabilizer increases hysteresis in the block's scaling operations by preventing reactive rules from performing repeated and erratic scaling actions.
• Application throttling provides a new reactive rule action for changing a Windows Azure configuration setting for a specific role when a rule condition is satisfied.
• E-mail notifications allow for hypothetical scaling.
• Collection of role instance count values for every role defined in the service information store.
• Enhanced log messages for rules evaluation and scaling to better determine what is happening in the system.”
In addition to the changes enumerated above, customers can also take advantage of enhancements to the configuration tool, but also of new options designed to allow them to define custom actions, specify custom operands, and use new "Max" and "Growth" aggregate functions in operand definition.
Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block can be downloaded from NuGet, with Microsoft offering both the binaries and the source code for the project.