14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's Cloud operating system now sports geo-location capabilities. As promised in March 2009 at MIX09, the Redmond company has launched the additional geo-location functionality for Windows Azure. The feature is designed to allow Azure customers to effectively choose the location for their Cloud application. This will happen on the creation of new accounts. Azure will now display the new “affinity group” section for both storage accounts and hosted services. As the feature has just been implemented, its span is rather limited. Azure testers will have just three options to get started with: “USA – Anywhere,” “USA – Northwest,” and “USA – Southwest.” But in this manner they will have a say in where their storage is or where their hosted service will run.
“One of the reasons to choose where your storage accounts and hosted services are running is to make sure that the two are very close to each other, to make sure you have high bandwidth and low latency between your running application and the data it depends on. Using our new geo-location functionality, you can now specify an affinity between different hosted services and storage accounts. This is better than just choosing the same region, because it tells Windows Azure that you want everything in this affinity group to be as close as possible. We’ll use that information to make decisions about exactly how to lay out applications and data in the data center,” revealed a member of the Windows Azure team.
The latest Windows Azure CTP (Community Technology Preview) essentially lets testers choose the Microsoft datacenter location for their app storage or their hosted service. Azure's new geo-location functionality also connects services and apps via affinity groups. This option is designed to effectively reflect the connection between hosted services and applications/storage accounts.
“Using our new geo-location functionality, you can now specify an affinity between different hosted services and storage accounts. The idea is a smart one on a number of fronts: Performance – put your apps closer to your users and your app closer to the data it uses; Policy – it may make sense to have your data in certain locations to meet legal requirement,” stated Philippe Destoop, the enterprise architect for the Belgian and Luxembourg Developer and Platform Group of Microsoft.
Windows Azure Software Development Kit (March 2009 CTP) is available for download here.
Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP is available for download here.