After migrating a couple of sites to Azure the one request I have is “I want to choose my staging environment domain name (e.g. myApp.cloudapp.net)”.

I need this for several reasons:
1. SSL – The sites we deploy have SSL certificates and I want to be able to cover my staging site with a multiple domain (UUC) certificate.

2. WCF – If I have WCF services as part of my deployment, I do not know their URL (generated GUID) until after I deploy. I would like to know the WCF URLs in advance so my configuration does not have to change each time. Right now I have to deploy my WCFs separate from my other services, get the URL, then update my other deployments to this URL and then publish these services.

3. My test users need to know the test site. Each time now I have to let them know what the URL. I explain to them it is dynamically generated, but they keep asking why. I have to tell them to ignore certificate errors which is not a good habit for users to get into.

Add autoscale and make it bold and aggressive- user can set triggers from monitoring system and after trigger is activated scale automatically change instance parameters and/or add more instances.

If you make research you can find how many people ask for this option in Heroku for example- if you add possibility for little time period for example 5 minutes minimum use time, Azure simply broke all rules and many more customers migrate to you.

What I expect - system is activated / monitoring get data every minute / and add more resource immediately, with no problem take the traffic spike and after that 25/35/55 minutes later, if last 5/10/15 minutes CPU Usage/Visitors/RAM not over X- shut down unnecessary vm`s.

All triggers for activation and shut down can be configured from your scale panel.

Currently, you cannot operate a Microsoft Exchange Server on Windows Azure. Well, you can, but don't expect to be able to send email to anyone on AOL, Comcast, and a multitude of other domains. The reason is that these providers REQUIRE that the sending IP address have a reverse lookup.

For simplicity (and a quick implementation by Microsoft), I suggest that you simply provide the option for a Reverse lookup or not. So if your VM is named myserver.cloudapp.net, then the reverse lookup on the current IP would return that name.

Is this something you can do quickly? I'm having to look at alternative solutions for my Exchange Server.

As of this writing, there are 590 suggestions in the Windows Azure Feature Voting section. There are 18 that have been closed, and as far as I can see they are ALL features that already existed when the suggestion was submitted. There are 17 marked as "planned". Of these, most are either billing changes, or were announced at PDC 2010 (2 years ago). Microsoft employees on the forums regularly refer us to this site if we need a feature, but it feels to me that this Azure development is not guided at all by user suggestions here, as Microsoft employees rarely provide updates or comments. I understand that the Azure team must be extremely busy, and I have appreciated the features that HAVE been released. However, if this site is not being taken seriously by the decision makers on the Azure team, then it should be taken down.

When you want to downscale your pool of WorkerRole instances, then the fabric will just pick one to shutdown.

However, this means it might pick an instance which is in the middle of doing a long task.

It would be better if you could somehow "hint" which one to shutdown - e.g. picking one which is currently idle.

There are several ways this could be achieved, including by the fabric asking each of the role instances whether they are "OK" about the proposed shutdown.

Obviously they might also say "no" in which case you'd have to shut one down anyway... but at least that's within the control of the developer.

See http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredevelopment/thread/05f9f368-6407-4ed9-bda9-d404ab3614a6 for some discussion.