Live from //build/: Windows Azure Mobile Services and Web Sites GA, Autoscale Preview and new Virtual Machines Images

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Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Azure Web Sites are now generally available, offering a rich set of services for building what we call “Modern Applications.” Modern applications are invariably web based and accessible by a broad spectrum of mobile devices. Microsoft Open Technologies has taken an active part in these releases, contributing its expertise in bridging Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies and building the Android SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services and the Android Notification Hubs SDK.

Windows Azure Mobile Services

Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it fast and easy to build connected applications that scale and reach every user on every device. The Windows Azure team not only provides SDKs for building native Windows Store, Windows Phone, Android, iOS and HTML5 apps, but also open sources the Windows Azure Mobile Services SDKs on GitHub and offers a REST API developers can use to reach additional client platforms. Server-side extensibility allows apps to consume other Windows Azure services like blob and table storage and third party services like SendGrid and Pusher, as well as connect to on-premises systems.

Windows Azure Web Sites

Windows Azure Web Sites is the fastest way to build, scale and manage business- and enterprise-grade Web applications. It is flexible and provides support for multiple languages, frameworks and databases. It has the features needed for business-class web presence like SSL and authentication via Windows Azure Active Directory. Web agencies can create socially connected applications and automatically scale them as their campaigns grow. Visual Studio users will find that Windows Azure Web Sites provides the best-in-class experience for cloud development and deployment.

Additional Service Updates

Additional services are also coming to Windows Azure in preview, along with new Windows Azure Virtual Machines images (SQL Server 2014 and Windows Server 2012 R2) and enhancements to Windows Azure Active Directory.

Auto scale, alerts and monitoring are now available in preview. These services allow you to monitor the health and availability of your applications, receive notifications when your service availability changes, perform action-based events, and automatically scale to match current demands.

Last but not least, in today’s keynote, Satya Nadella gave a sneak peek into future enhancements to Windows Azure Active Directory. Windows Azure is working with third parties like Box and others so they can take advantage of Windows Azure Active Directory to enable a single sign-on (SSO) experience for their users. If a higher level of security is needed, you can leverage Active Authentication to give you multifactor authentication.

Learn more

To learn more on these announcement, visit the Windows Azure blog. You can also stream today’s //build/ keynote on channel 9.