Windows Azure Feature Voting on UserVoice

Allow several administrators to manage one AppFabric account from different Live ID's [updated]

2010-09-08T20:03:31+00:00

Lars W. Andersen said:

It is a problem operating the Azure account, when only one admin have access to it. In case of emergencies, vacation, etc. it is needed to share access to one account.

Allow several administrators to manage one AppFabric account from different Live ID's

2010-09-08T20:02:20+00:00

Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure. [updated]

2010-09-08T15:08:52+00:00

Mario G said:

My understanding, is that it's possible for Windows Azure to have smaller instances. If it's feasible that's up to Microsoft. I guess Windows Azure is maybe in sort of a Test Phase. There's around 10,000 users on Azure ( got it from a MS blog, probably more by now). With smaller instances, they would be 100,000 of users. That's a lot of customer service and IT employees. It takes time to build that kind of effective team.

Add a scheduler

2010-09-08T11:34:44+00:00

bradrover suggested:
Add a scheduler service to invoke periodic work, such as dispatching emails to a queue. Use Cron or similar text based scheduling language.

More CPU Power

2010-09-07T08:54:01+00:00

kazu suggested:
I would like to choices other than 1.6 GHz CPU.(Just like AmazonEC2)

everything should be easy and user frinedly ..

2010-09-06T17:43:40+00:00

Support Perl

2010-09-05T16:13:06+00:00

camel suggested:
Perl is very stable on Windows.( Activestate Perl , Strawberry Perl ) and now has great frameworks for cloud( Plack PSGI ,Catalyst .. )

Produce a better experince for teams of developers working on a single azure solution

2010-09-05T15:58:35+00:00

grapesfrog suggested:
Azure is currently not optimised for a development team , consolidated billing, being able to use the dev fabric other than on local host would go some way to addressing teh deficiencies

Continue Azure offering free for Developers [updated]

2010-09-05T08:19:23+00:00

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.

chintan.tyagi said:

There is no way developer community would continue to use tools or new business would adopt Azure based applications if the technology is not proven.. and at this stage providing Azure free for developer is the only way...

Open Source Azure & create a marketplace of providers with no loss of strategic control or tax. [updated]

2010-09-04T18:32:06+00:00

A marketplace of providers will require multiple providers, access to code / data and semantic interoperability. This means a common reference model. If Azure is open sourced then it can act as the common model without the providers suffering a loss of strategic control or tax. Given that cloud is about provision of commodity services (i.e. activities which are ubiquitous and well defined and hence suitable to support the volume operations needed), the value is in the service not the bits and hence creating a free market (as opposed to a controlled market) would benefit consumers.

Reillyusa said:

In a meeting I had with Winston Bumpus at a vmware EBC a couple of weeks ago, my statement was "for all of this cloud adoption to become mainstream, the basic layers have to become as standardized and widely adopted as USB". Open sourcing Azure would help that goal. There has been a massive business built on selling products that use the USB standard as the basic tenent - this is where the cloud service market could learn from.

Pay per minute instead of pay par hour [updated]

2010-09-02T20:46:36+00:00

One thing that I like the most (and most needed by my business) about cloud computing is ability to fine tune the processing power available to exactly match the demand. In this respect, I would even more interested if Azure was letting me adjust the number of instances much more aggressively, that is to say if I was charged by the minute and not by the hour. Indeed, if I have a process that take 1h15, I end-up paying for 2h while I would really prefer to pay 1h15 since I have made the effort to optimize my process so that it runs in 1h15 and not 1h55.

Dave Fellows said:

This is crucial for cost-effective on-demand computing. e.g. spin up 500 instances to do a 10hr job in 5-10 minutes. Yes, it takes at least 10 minutes to start these instances up (see my feature request about this http://bit.ly/aSxw0u), however there's still benefit in doing this.

Ability to scale up instances more quickly

2010-09-02T20:40:56+00:00

Dave Fellows suggested:
This is the ability to scale up and down services rapidly for on-demand computing. E.g. be able to add 20/100/500 instances to a service in 5 minutes.

Make it easier for people less familiar with Windows Azure to come up-to-speed quickly. [updated]

2010-09-01T08:37:58+00:00

Dave Fellows said:

Suprised there's so many votes for this. I can't see how it could be much easier. Plus there's sooo much content on the web to get started. Agree with Steven - this time needs to be spent elsewhere.

Provide a way to schedule worker roles so they only run when needed [updated]

2010-09-01T04:07:40+00:00

If worker roles could be scheduled, like windows task scheduler then we would massively reduce the required cpu time used.

butterball said:

we need DTS/SSIS to schedule jobs!

Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure. [updated]

2010-09-01T01:05:45+00:00

Bob Dog said:

"Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure."

The best suggestion ever!

Provide multiple roles per instance [updated]

2010-08-31T19:45:43+00:00

Enables you to host more than one application on one Azure compute instance. Suitable for small departmental servers.

Jonathan Brosseau said:

This limitation in my opinion make the whole Azure solution costly and uncompetitive. So yes we want to be able to run multiple roles on 1 instance.

Provide multiple roles per instance [updated]

2010-08-31T17:40:00+00:00

Enables you to host more than one application on one Azure compute instance. Suitable for small departmental servers.

Hugo Gagnon said:

This is a must . Having to put multiple service into i Project is a very messy workaround at best. Keeping the development of different services and web application into different project is a must. But to say that each of them require it own VM is false. Linking multiple projects into 1 WebRole is a must !

Open Source Azure & create a marketplace of providers with no loss of strategic control or tax. [updated]

2010-08-31T14:34:51+00:00

Andrew Kozak said:

If Microsoft were to combine the leverage of its resources as a for-profit corporation with the power of the open-source community, Azure would dominate the nascent cloud-platform space.

Connect the queue directly to a worker role so it only runs when there are item in queue

2010-08-31T12:32:37+00:00

Open Source Azure & create a marketplace of providers with no loss of strategic control or tax. [updated]

2010-08-30T19:44:42+00:00

Ethan D. Monat said:

Open Source Azure - or it will be trampled into the pages of forgotten software history.

Enlarge the Size of SQL Azure DB up to TBs

2010-08-30T19:33:21+00:00

WarNov suggested:
I have found lots of scenarios where Azure would be just perfect if it had TB DBs

Built-in logging for low-level issues

2010-08-30T17:28:30+00:00

Christoph Wienands suggested:
Multiple times I ran into issues where roles would not properly start or where log transfer to Blob storage does not work. This is an absolute time killer because the remedy is trial-and-error, waiting for a forum answer or contacting WAZ support. I would expect that Windows Azure provides low-level "bootstrap" log information for troubleshooting right out of the box. Non-inclusive list of things I would want to see is (all based on personal experience): -Assembly binding issues, missing assemblies, assembly version mismatches. -Misconfigured diagnostic log connection strings -Which overridden role methods were called plus any exceptions that might have occurred. -Missing certificates for HTTPS endpoints. Basically, anything that prevents a role from starting and log transfer to work. The app fabric is the only place where this information is known, so in order for me to systematically troubleshoot my app, WAZ needs to provide this info. Once the role is up and log transfer works, I can take it from there.

Provide a way to put a limit on the cost of a service (per day, per month, etc.) #billing

2010-08-30T15:14:25+00:00

Allow to run code with no instance started (per page) a la Google App, charge per CPU/Bandwidth

2010-08-30T15:10:34+00:00

Open Source Azure & create a marketplace of providers with no loss of strategic control or tax.

2010-08-30T15:02:22+00:00

Simon Wardley suggested:
A marketplace of providers will require multiple providers, access to code / data and semantic interoperability. This means a common reference model. If Azure is open sourced then it can act as the common model without the providers suffering a loss of strategic control or tax. Given that cloud is about provision of commodity services (i.e. activities which are ubiquitous and well defined and hence suitable to support the volume operations needed), the value is in the service not the bits and hence creating a free market (as opposed to a controlled market) would benefit consumers.

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

2010-08-30T04:50:16+00:00

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:

Contains would also be VERY useful when trying to perform queries similar to 'Where ID in (1,5,10)' which is not possible right now.

Provide a production version of the fabric that can run on premise

2010-08-27T23:19:16+00:00

Jason H suggested:
Just like the dev fabric however enable this as a production feature within IIS 7+. This means develoeprs will be able to create solutions within the Azure project templates and framework but run on a local machine. This will allow companies that want to start small and within their own boundaries/infrastrucure to easily migrate from onpremise to the Azure cloud with ease as no project structure changes would be required (or very little) Plus, this approach would also allow for the switching of on premise to cloud and vice versa in case of outages. Build in this "swap" function within IIS or someother MS tool.

MSMQ Azure [updated]

2010-08-27T05:59:21+00:00

Azure Queues are nice, but having a transactional and durable queues with guaranteed only-once delivery would be a big helper. Loosing inherent scalability is OK (just like it works out with the SQL Azure). Suggestion in detail is here: http://abdullin.com/journal/2010/5/21/windows-azure-most-wanted-msmq-azure.html

Jonathan said:

A reliable, reasonably-scaled de-duplicating queue is a requirement for our application.

MSMQ Azure [updated]

2010-08-27T05:58:26+00:00

Jonathan said:

A reliable, reasonably-scaled de-duplicating queue is a requirement for our application.

MSMQ Azure [updated]

2010-08-27T05:58:06+00:00

Jonathan said:

A reliable, reasonably-scaled de-duplicating queue is a requirement for our application.

I want Azure to cook my lunch

2010-08-26T20:55:34+00:00

assign other LiveIDs to admin roles

2010-08-26T17:03:39+00:00

offbeatmammal suggested:
If I administer a number of projects I don't want to share my LiveID (and this give access to every project) with individual developers working on the project. I would like to be able to define specific LiveIDs with access rights for individual projects eg a specific user can deploy to staging, but not production on ProjectA but on ProjectB they can do both and on ProjectC they have no visibility. This is important for distributed teams, for large organisations (what happens when the CTO is on leave?!) and general flexibility I've not delved into what AppEngine does but Azure should be better than that as a baseline!

Add an atomic Increment operator on table storage. See MongoDB for example.

2010-08-26T14:46:38+00:00

bradrover suggested:
It's hard to create pre-aggregated counters in table storage when using multiple workers. For example, a page hit counter will have wrong counts if incremented by pulling work from a queue and updating an entity representing the page using multiple workers.

Event Bus [updated]

2010-08-26T14:19:45+00:00

Event Bus with events for storage manipulation (e.g. queue insert) in order to avoid poling.

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon said:

You can read about the suggestion in more details on: http://vincentlauzon.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/event-bus-in-windows-azure/

Event Bus

2010-08-26T14:19:15+00:00

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon suggested:
Event Bus with events for storage manipulation (e.g. queue insert) in order to avoid poling.

Make raw logs available for CDN traffic

2010-08-26T08:46:32+00:00

Richard Parker suggested:
If raw logs were made available and posted to blob storage, developers could use them for sub-billing our customers for their usage of the CDN.

Provide a way to schedule worker roles so they only run when needed [updated]

2010-08-25T23:39:53+00:00

If worker roles could be scheduled, like windows task scheduler then we would massively reduce the required cpu time used.

Dave Bacher said:

Seems like it would be relatively easy to write a service that crossed .NET Terrarium (download an assembly and run it in an already warm instance) and crontab (schedule jobs to run at a particular time).

While it would be better if Microsoft did it, someone could write a service that allowed you to zip a control file and a .NET assembly. The control file would indicate the desired 4 hour block to schedule it in, and would also contain any necessary API URL's and keys.

The service would fire up at the start of a four hour block, and download 16 jobs to do. It would run each job, in turn, and if the job took longer than 15 minutes, it would be terminated.

Then you sell that service to the 315 people asking for this at some reasonable price.

(note: you could also sell the remaining hours on a compute-hour basis using a similar approach..)

Dynamic IIS Compression Support (Real solution)

2010-08-24T09:37:31+00:00

pekkah suggested:
Currently there is no way to configure what is compressed. (Well you can change the ApplicationHost.config if you host the IIS Web Core under Worker role). This is really needed to compress WCF messages (application/soap etc.)

Works on the DevFabric should WORK in the Cloud.... [updated]

2010-08-24T09:01:31+00:00

pekkah said:

In .NET framework 4 most of the "standard" configuration was moved to machine.config. Azure OS does not have them in machine.config. I run into annoying problem with web role getting stuck to busy in cloud and the cause was the web.config not referencing all the needed sections even though it was running happily on dev fabric.

Support to deploy Java, PHP sites on azure

2010-08-24T02:17:56+00:00

Vinayak suggested:
Out of the box support to deploy servlets/php websites would be gr8 and open up an even large market to Azure

Modify developer env to impose all restrictions that are imposed in azure cloud.

2010-08-24T02:04:17+00:00

Vinayak suggested:
The local dev environment should be able to impose all the restrictions (for eg mixing of dll's with x84,AnyCUP, x64), sometime dll's are found when running locally but missing when deployed on cloud. All these fixes will save a lot of development time.

Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure. [updated]

2010-08-20T21:12:53+00:00

Ross Sponholtz said:

Two simple suggestions:
1) "fractional" cpus. If I have a small application, I don't need a whole CPU sitting out there for me. I may only need 50%, or even 25%, presumably with a comparable reduction in cost. I can have a fraction of a CPU for my VM under Hyper-V right now. Why not under Windows Azure?

2) multiple applications per web role, and multiple apps on a worker role. We can do this on Windows Server, why not on Azure? Right now, I can put all my .NET code into one big application, but thats going to be a mess.

Provide multiple roles per instance [updated]

2010-08-20T20:08:19+00:00

Enables you to host more than one application on one Azure compute instance. Suitable for small departmental servers.

CuriousGeorge said:

While I like the ideas in the "Azure Compute Small Business Edition" discussed below (and think it should be implemented) I really feel strongly that allowing multiple roles (of any combination) within a single VM is a must. As some have noted Azure is charging us for a full VM at market rates but doesn't give us much freedom to fully utilize that VM. By allowing us to host multiple roles within a VM we can better make use of the available compute power.

For example in my case I'd like to host a single web site that gets fairly low usage and a set of 3 or 4 low volume web services all in a single VM. Then as any of them gain traction I could parcel out one or more roles into separate VM's.

This gives me flexibility and allows me to manage cost. The current 1role to 1VM limitation is a significant roadblock for me.

Make it less expensive to run my very small service on Windows Azure. [updated]

2010-08-20T08:29:06+00:00

Jeremy Howard said:

A minimum of $1000/year is too high for testing a new product, which may or may not turn out to be successful. Azure's pricing model is only useful for migrating existing projects, which already have a known demand.

The "specials" are also useless, since they run out in 12 months' time - why would I develop on a platform for which the economics are only beneficial for 12 months? If I'm going to invest in a platform, it needs to scale down to a startup level, and provide good value for the entire lifetime of the product.

After spending the last couple of days investigating Azure, I've now realised I have to use a different platform, since as an entrepreneur I need something where I can put up lots of little apps and see which ones work. At $1000/year/app, that's not an option with Azure.

Dynamic IIS Compression Support that works on custom MimeTypes (i.e. WCF)

2010-08-20T03:00:08+00:00

Marek suggested:
Azure Guest 1.2 supports this but only via Hosted Web Core which is hacky.

Make Join on the Table storage [updated]

2010-08-19T04:45:06+00:00

Allow join feature on table storage.

Pramod Singh said:

This feature help a lot to make the application...

Make Join on the Table storage

2010-08-19T04:44:10+00:00

Pramod Singh suggested:
Allow join feature on table storage.

Windows Azure should support classic ASP

2010-08-17T04:15:46+00:00

tippu afsar suggested:
Hi In my opinion Windows Azure should support classic ASP Web applications too.

Create a Web App Gallery for Azure

2010-08-13T10:38:00+00:00

Paul suggested:
A similar offering to the MS Web App Gallery, but for Azure. A well-promoted channel for developers to showcase their wares will encourage them to port existing .net apps to Azure, or create new apps. The availability of such apps will be critical to driving mass market take-up of cloud computing..

Should allow deleting Azure table multiple rows based on condition like timestamp as during SELECT [updated]

2010-08-13T09:24:31+00:00

Anup Karade said:

As during select we can specify filter in the REST call, same should be allowed in the Delete so that its no longer depends on partition and row key. Helpful while deleting old data say, month or year old data.