Windows Azure Feature Voting on UserVoice

CDN is too expensive. What the heck! [updated]

2012-05-21T04:05:02-07:00

Seriously, how is Microsoft hoping to attract big customers to its platform? On AWS, CDN costs as little as $0.030 per GB. That's 5 times less expensive than Azure.

martin norgrove said:

or maybe they dont want big customers yet as the service is relatively new, once it beds in I bet pricing will reduce to attract bigger players.

Billing should not be there when instance are stopped

2012-05-20T22:53:18-07:00

Thirumalai suggested:
In Hosting services, billing will continue when the instances are stopped. To reduce the cost, it must be deleted instead of stopping when not required. But when the instances stopped, the VM is not running for the role and when started it is possible to create the VM again by hosting the application from storage service (so only the storage must be charged when instance stopped). Can Microsoft stop billing when the role is stopped (as AWS given).

Allow adding custom headers to Azure Queue messages to support tracking of distributed business transactions

2012-05-18T15:14:04-07:00

Noam Ben-Ami suggested:
AppDynamics, our Application Performance Monitoring software, needs to be able to add headers to Azure Queue messages, so we can track them as they are picked up and processed by worker roles. This will allow Azure users to see the full, profiled view of their business transactions as they go from role to queue and then to other roles that process them. Such insight into application performance can be invaluable for monitoring and debugging complex Azure deployments.

Windows Azure should support "reverse lookup" [updated]

2012-05-17T10:51:26-07:00

If user want to get hosted service DNS then using IP he/she can able to find DNS. As you can see in my case http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10612295/how-to-get-dns-name-from-rest-service-which-is-consumed-by-startuptask-of-azure/10622625#10622625 I would like to get details of DNS of webrole application but nslookup shows me that it doesn't exist. Using this somehow user can process on DNS and do some logic. In my case i would like to detect staging vs production using DNS without certificate & management API

Rodrigo De Castro said:

Note that there's already a suggestion on reverse DNS here:
http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34192-windows-azure-feature-voting/suggestions/1327391-reverse-dns-lookup

reverse DNS lookup [is now planned]

2012-05-17T10:50:51-07:00

When I develop e-mail related program, the server domain name should be found using reverse DNS lookup. So one of my program is not in Azure, but in my company Data Center.

reverse DNS lookup [updated]

2012-05-17T10:50:50-07:00

When I develop e-mail related program, the server domain name should be found using reverse DNS lookup. So one of my program is not in Azure, but in my company Data Center.

Rodrigo De Castro (admin) responded:

Thanks for the suggestion, this is on our roadmap and we'll update it once we have news about this feature.

Windows Azure should support "reverse lookup" [is now planned]

2012-05-17T09:16:06-07:00

Windows Azure should support "reverse lookup" [updated]

2012-05-17T09:16:06-07:00

Rodrigo De Castro (admin) responded:

Thanks for the suggestion. This feature is on our roadmap and we will update this thread once we have updates.

Why not available in my country? [is now under review]

2012-05-17T08:12:06-07:00

I tried to buy an zure plan today and suddenly after 10 minutes of registration i found a message telling me the service is not supported in your country. i live in UAE why it's not supported ? and why there is no such information about that

Why not available in my country? [updated]

2012-05-17T08:12:06-07:00

Calvin (admin) responded:

We’re actively reviewing new locations for Windows Azure sites and are working with partners to enable them to provide services in geo locations were sites aren’t otherwise planned. So please keep the feedback coming as to locations were you would like to have Windows Azure available, as this is valuable input into our expansion plans. That said, building out geo diverse hosting environments is a nontrivial task and it takes time to build the requisite site and spin up the associated infrastructure. We’re working to accelerate this process and to make it easier to navigate the requirements involved in deploying to additional locations, but the timeframe to expand to all the geographies we would like will be measured in years rather than months.

Why not available in my country? [updated]

2012-05-17T04:50:53-07:00

Anonymous said:

I thought Africa would've been the first place to implement it due to the lack of hardware in rural areas. We definitely need it in South Africa, pronto.

Windows Azure should support "reverse lookup"

2012-05-16T22:31:15-07:00

Arun Rana suggested:
If user want to get hosted service DNS then using IP he/she can able to find DNS. As you can see in my case http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10612295/how-to-get-dns-name-from-rest-service-which-is-consumed-by-startuptask-of-azure/10622625#10622625 I would like to get details of DNS of webrole application but nslookup shows me that it doesn't exist. Using this somehow user can process on DNS and do some logic. In my case i would like to detect staging vs production using DNS without certificate & management API

Provide role based access to the Azure Management Portal

2012-05-15T11:33:21-07:00

Alfred Garcia suggested:
Currently, there exist only 3 account types. Service Admin, Co-Admin and Billing Admin. They all have direct access to all hosted environments within the subscription ID through the Azure Management Portal single point of entry. This is a security issue to us as we require more granular role based access to each Azure resource via the admin portal.

Support Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) via Access-Control-Allow-Origin header

2012-05-14T12:49:23-07:00

Christopher Currie suggested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing This feature has many useful applications: * loading of JSON data without JSONP wrappers * pre-loading Image data with progress information * pre-loading Audio data on browsers that otherwise suppress audio preloading

Make a WCF Service available to public ,or cmdlets for PowerShell Remote for retrieving current pricing policy for Windows Azure

2012-05-12T07:37:12-07:00

P Velachoutakos suggested:
Make a WCF Service available to public ,or cmdlets for PowerShell Remote for retrieving current pricing policy for Windows Azure. To retrieve cost per hour for Compute , Relational Model policy between different instances (ES 1/6 of S) , Storage cost per GB ,AC etc.

Pick a DNS name for Staging [updated]

2012-05-10T01:42:23-07:00

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.

Jason said:

They could just use staging.[Choosen DNS Name].cloudapp.net instead of using a guid

Continue Azure offering free for Developers [updated]

2012-05-08T08:10:26-07:00

After February 1st 2010, it's going to be tough for developers/freelancers/hobbiest to learn, test and deploy azure applications as it's going to be billed for everything. Like Google AppEngine (http://code.google.com/appengine/whyappengine.html#norisk) Azure should provide free offering for developers with some similar limitations and if the usage goes beyond, one can enter in billing.

Roger Jennings said:

@R. B.

You began your rant with "I am a developer with HP" so I assume you are speaking on behalf of HP.

How long does HP offer their "Converged Cloud" services for free?

Is HP *not* about PROFIT?

--rj

Continue Azure offering free for Developers [updated]

2012-05-08T07:52:19-07:00

jinishans said:

I agree, even Amazon provides 1 yr free hosting for both Linux & Windows servers...!

Please give a free account to developers (without asking credit card details) extend this for develo [updated]

2012-05-08T07:51:29-07:00

Please give a free account to developers (without asking credit card details) extend this for developers worldwide (not just for US. If you still have problems you can select from your voluntary SME base or MCTS

R.B. said:

AGREED...

Continue Azure offering free for Developers [updated]

2012-05-08T07:40:40-07:00

R.B. said:

I am a developer with HP. Big Business is capping usage on everything from Cell Data, now to AZURE development. Free for several months - 90 Days - so if you can learn it in 90 days, and if you want to DOUBLE, TRIPLE, check your code before you compile and get charged for every cpu cycle you utilize - GOOD LUCK.

Microsoft is about PROFIT, not about the Customer or the Developer. It comes down to Bad Management at Microsoft. Perhaps this individual or Group that decided to charge for EVERYTHING, will eventually be let go and someone with some actual education will be promoted into the position. So many unemployed developers, Learn Azure - sounds like - oops - wait, take all your money and spend it at AZURE.COM - Right... It is unfortunate that the World Leader in software, is not an Elected Position - this team would be long gone...

Provide an early warning system for upcoming changes to Azure so devs can evaluate upcoming changes [updated]

2012-05-07T02:41:01-07:00

Too often changes are being implemented onto the production Azure platform without the ability for devs to test / validate that the changes won't affect their production apps. Need to know what is in the pipeline, when it will be applied, and what to look for to evaluate the impact. Right now, we don't know something will affect us until our production site goes down.

Mike said:

This is critical for business planning purposes also. My business is 100% Azure reliant. Advance notice advisories of ALL planned/significant service improvements/changes would help tremendously with my planning. As Azure gets even better with more features/choices, decisions become more complex and require more lead time. Posting something like a running implementation schedule would be would be most helpful at this point. Thanks.

Allow a Role instnace count of 0 [updated]

2012-05-03T17:48:50-07:00

In many scenarios it is useful to have a role that is only run for certain periods of the day. At present this is very complex to achieve as it involved using the management API to deploy and undeploy a whole service (from Blob storage). it would be much more elegant if the role count could be set to Zero thus undeploying all instances of just that role. In this way other services in the project could use the management API to start and stop just that Role.

Alexander Gran said:

We also have an application that scales by growing a tree of instances. Having the ability to swtich an role off would mean we can enable/disable levels of the tree just by configuration, without redeployment. That would be so extremly easy.
Doesn't look any hard to do, actually.

Remote Desktop as a service

2012-05-03T15:45:22-07:00

b.vries@afas.nl suggested:
With the new azure IaaS service going public soon I would really like Microsoft to extend this offering to allow remote desktop as a service or remote application as a service using RDP. This could be licensed per concurrent connection as a local "External Connector Licensing" counterpart or a per user / device licensing mode. The trick could be to allow an “RDP gateway vm service role” which deploys multiple boxes in the same "subdomain" and allows me to scale the number of boxes in the role. There are several scenarios where this would come in handy. For us as an ISV we would use it to deliver our windows software as a SaaS solution to our customers. We are doing this with another provider now. For individual businesses it would allow them to move their software to Azure before upgrading servers / workstations. This would allow them to switch to newer os versions earlier, keeping just old software on the old os. It would also allow businesses to move to a windows 8 native apps only environment because they could move the “old” software to Azure RDP. IaaS service was announced here: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-to-enable-linux-on-its-windows-azure-cloud-in-2012/11508

Access Control for Co/Sub Administrators [updated]

2012-05-03T14:20:32-07:00

I would like to be able to restrict the number of deployments & instances that can be created by co/sub administrators. For example, I may want to delegate responsibility for staging/production deployments but want to control my costs. It's way too easy to spend money like drunken sailors on Azure.

Rob West said:

Allow-Blob-Meta-Name with dash, as in Access-Control-Allow-Origin

2012-05-03T04:47:40-07:00

Anonymous suggested:
Blob defined as CDN may need to send Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.

Why not available in my country? [updated]

2012-05-02T05:16:46-07:00

Saeed said:

Should be available in Pakistan

Azure should keep past deployments and should quickly allow you to roll back [updated]

2012-05-01T20:35:50-07:00

Azure should keep past deployments, both the record of the deployment and the package, and should quickly allow you to roll back to old deployments via the online management portal.

justink1973 said:

The only drama you have with this is if your deployment includes schema changes of the breaking kind that rolling back will cause all sorts of loss of new data you have been accumulating.

Azure can allow you to do a VIP Swap and you leave the one you swapped out live and can swap back at any time, though you do pay for an entire new instance.

Provide me with full text search on table storage [updated]

2012-05-01T18:14:18-07:00

Does what it says on the tin....really need better search capabilities over azure table storage.

Will said:

So glad to hear this is coming, but it needs to be a high priority, as in this CY. Amazon just released a full scale cloud search which is compelling to say the least. We use AWS for everything else we do, and are looking at moving our TS data to AWS DynamoDB and indexing it with AWS Cloud Search unless full text comes to Azure soon.

Azure should keep past deployments and should quickly allow you to roll back [updated]

2012-05-01T18:04:52-07:00

Azure should keep past deployments, both the record of the deployment and the package, and should quickly allow you to roll back to old deployments via the online management portal.

James Newton-King said:

I don't see what DR has to do with this and you haven't described what backup would do so how can I say?

I'll give you a scenario:

I have a happily running production deployment. After testing first in staging I move a new deployment into production and delete the old one.
A week later an urgent bug is found in the new deployment. I want a simple and quick way to roll back to the old version. A simple way to do this would be if Azure kept a history of past deployments and the packages. Then I could simply go back into the online management portal and roll back to an old version as simply as I can currently switch production/staging instances.

Azure should keep past deployments and should quickly allow you to roll back [is now under review]

2012-05-01T17:53:08-07:00

Azure should keep past deployments, both the record of the deployment and the package, and should quickly allow you to roll back to old deployments via the online management portal.

Azure should keep past deployments and should quickly allow you to roll back [updated]

2012-05-01T17:53:08-07:00

Azure should keep past deployments, both the record of the deployment and the package, and should quickly allow you to roll back to old deployments via the online management portal.

Calvin (admin) responded:

Would a backup or DR solution meet your needs for this?

Azure should keep past deployments and should quickly allow you to roll back

2012-05-01T17:16:22-07:00

James Newton-King suggested:
Azure should keep past deployments, both the record of the deployment and the package, and should quickly allow you to roll back to old deployments via the online management portal.

Access to CDN over SSL / HTTPS [updated]

2012-04-27T03:55:21-07:00

Currently the Azure Storage CDN feature doesn't support SSL, especially SSL using a custom domain. It would be awesome to be able to make use of the CDN feature with an SSL / HTTPS secured website.

Henri Cook said:

Would be great if this was further up the list! It makes our website look a bit unprofessional when it can't reference a company-owned sub domain

Add TableStorage LINQ query support for Select, Count and Contains [updated]

2012-04-26T21:10:22-07:00

Critical functions such as Select, Count and Contains are not currently available when querying TableStorage data. If I only want a total number of rows that match a certain criteria I have no choice but to retrieve the data, count it and throw it away. Adding support for Select would also help with heavy queries by only returning the data selected from a query. Contains would be useful for searching. Using the Compare function is annoying.

Jason said:

Still waiting for this feature guys! It's been over 2 years now. :) I'm specifically waiting for the ability to perform Counts.

Support of OPTIONS verb for Azure Storage Services, so that any browser can query using java script

2012-04-25T21:10:39-07:00

Anonymous suggested:
We are trying to use Azure storage services Javascript library to send the Rest call to blob storage.<o:p></o:p> But, its works with the IE but, in Chrome and FireFox , we are getting 405 : HTTP verb is not supported error.<o:p></o:p> where Requesting method it shows as " OPTIONS ". <o:p></o:p> Hence, I didn't find anywhere that Azure storage services, support this Verb "OPTIONS" .or any work around we can do to make it work ?<o:p></o:p>

Improve the experience of deploying my application to Windows Azure. [updated]

2012-04-25T07:12:49-07:00

Mike Olson said:

I don't know what you've been doing Microsoft, but deploy times (at least for me) have come down drastically in the last couple months. A month ago it was down to 6-8 minutes. The last two days I've been deploying in 4 minutes. As always, faster is better, and I don't really know what the lower bound is, but I really appreciate the improvements so far. As others have said, the diagnostics of this process could still be improved.

Add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin http header to the response from https://datamarket.accesscontrol.windows.net/v2/OAuth2-13

2012-04-25T07:06:26-07:00

Ian Chivers suggested:
This will allow IE to use the XDomainRequest object to call the data market.

Allow a Role instnace count of 0 [updated]

2012-04-24T16:37:32-07:00

Chris Auld said:

Hi Calvin. Thanks heaps for the update. The load-balancer based workaround doesn't really solve the problem because a key goal of this is cost management; we'd still be paying for the Hot standby. The goal is to shut it down and undeploy so as to not be billed for it.

Allow a Role instnace count of 0 [is now planned]

2012-04-24T09:42:09-07:00

Allow a Role instnace count of 0 [updated]

2012-04-24T09:42:09-07:00

Calvin (admin) responded:

This is on roadmap but ETA isn’t until post Fall 2012. More votes for this feature might help move it up though timing depends on some other factors as well. Mark Berman on the planning team suggested a workaround that involved removing the instance from the front-end load-balancer i.e. so that it doesn’t respond to any requests? RDFE has an API that allows you to stop sending requests to an instance. The idea being that you can have n number of instances in hot standby waiting. This is of course a workaround, but it might address some of the short term need while we wait on the feature.

Allow a Role instnace count of 0 [updated]

2012-04-23T22:55:39-07:00

Anton Staykov said:

Totally agree with Chris! I do have a live customer, where I am doing exactly like this - deploy for the time of processing. Then delete. Then deploy again ...

provide ability to share Virtual Machine Images across subscriptions

2012-04-23T12:49:15-07:00

Kayode suggested:
This would save a lot of time for users that manage multiple subscriptions as it can take a very long time to upload images. This is already supported in Amazon AWS. It would be great if you could share VM images across regions as well.

Have pre-built base images for Windows (and probably other OS) in Azure, to speedup the process of setting up a VM role. [is now planned]

2012-04-23T12:14:36-07:00

Right now, creating a new base image, configuring and uploading it is a VERY time consuming (and error prone) process. Please provide pre-built images that we can upload and use immediately or customize. It would be awesome to have them available inside the Azure management portal so we don't need to download/upload them, just reference what we need and presto.

Have pre-built base images for Windows (and probably other OS) in Azure, to speedup the process of setting up a VM role. [updated]

2012-04-23T12:14:36-07:00

Calvin (admin) responded:

This is alreayd in plan. More details to come as we get closer to the next VMRole release.

Have pre-built base images for Windows (and probably other OS) in Azure, to speedup the process of setting up a VM role.

2012-04-23T12:07:14-07:00

Andrés G Vettori suggested:
Right now, creating a new base image, configuring and uploading it is a VERY time consuming (and error prone) process. Please provide pre-built images that we can upload and use immediately or customize. It would be awesome to have them available inside the Azure management portal so we don't need to download/upload them, just reference what we need and presto.

Add TableStorage LINQ query support for Select, Count and Contains [updated]

2012-04-20T16:03:12-07:00

Marc Kuperstein said:

I thought I heard that Count() was planned. Am I looking at the correct item?

Support multiple hosted services in a single data center with Traffic Manager perf policy [updated]

2012-04-20T14:03:31-07:00

Currently when using a Performance Policy with Traffic manager it does not intelligently support multiple hosted services within a single data center, instead it sends all traffic to the first hosted service. I have a scenario where this falls down. We have built a service that is associated with its own storage account and has two scaling flex points. The first is to simply add more compute instances to the hosted service. But eventually it could outgrow the scaling capabilities of a single storage account. So our second scaling flex point is to add more hosted services that each are identical except that they use different storage accounts. I want to use a performance policy with Traffic Manager because our service is geo-distributed. But if one region gets really hot I want to be able to add more hosted services in a single data center. I think having the Traffic Manager simply use a round robin approach for all hosted services within a single datacenter is a reasonable approach.

Rodrigo De Castro said:

For more information on the topic, please see related MSDN post:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazureconnectivity/thread/f60ceef7-9b1f-4f47-88f2-7ed0898d677f

Support multiple hosted services in a single data center with Traffic Manager perf policy [is now under review]

2012-04-20T14:02:40-07:00

Support multiple hosted services in a single data center with Traffic Manager perf policy [updated]

2012-04-20T14:02:40-07:00

Rodrigo De Castro (admin) responded:

Thanks for your message. I filed a work item to evaluate this item and will update this item once we have a decision on this feature.

Provide me with full text search on table storage [updated]

2012-04-20T08:53:11-07:00

Does what it says on the tin....really need better search capabilities over azure table storage.

Calvin said:

Table storage will be getting full text search as well.