14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is gearing up to release an update to the Windows Azure AppFabric Community Technology Preview (CTP) in mid-December 2010, and is telling customers that they are bound to experience some downtime when the refresh is introduced. The upcoming update to the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS environment will be rolled out next week, on December 15, 2010.
Obviously, the software giant will cut access to the AppFabric LABS portal and services on December 15, during what the company calls scheduled maintenance down time.
“START: December 15, 2010, 10 am PST. END: December 15, 2010, 6 pm PST. Impact Alert: The AppFabric LABS environment (Service Bus, Access Control, Caching, and portal) will be unavailable during this period,” a member of the SQL Services team stated.
According to the Redmond company, only after the refresh will be introduced in full, will the existing accounts and Service Namespaces be available again.
“However, ACS Identity Providers, Relying Party Applications, Rule Groups, Certificates, Keys, Service Identities and Management Credentials will NOT be persisted and restored after the maintenance.
“The user will be responsible for both backing up and restoring any ACS entities they care to reuse after the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS December Release,” the SQL Services team member stated.
“Cache users will see the web.config snippet on their provisioned cache page change automatically as part of this release. We advise Cache customers to redeploy their application after applying the new snippet from the provisioned cache page to their application.”
There are additional details related to the update to Windows Azure AppFabric CTP, but they will only be made public after the December 15th update.
For those not familiar with the technology, Windows Azure AppFabric is designed as a cloud middleware platform. In this regard AppFabric is set up to deliver Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities, supporting the developing, deploying and managing applications on Windows Azure.
AppFabric sits on top of SQL Server and Windows Azure and offers customers a Service Bus, Access Control, Caching, Integration and Composite App capabilities.