Archives
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Azure: New DocumentDB NoSQL Service, New Search Service, New SQL AlwaysOn VM Template, and more
Today we released a major set of updates to Microsoft Azure. Today’s updates include:
- DocumentDB: Preview of a New NoSQL Document Service for Azure
- Search: Preview of a New Search-as-a-Service offering for Azure
- Virtual Machines: Portal support for SQL Server AlwaysOn + community-driven VMs
- Web Sites: Support for Web Jobs and Web Site processes in the Preview Portal
- Azure Insights: General Availability of Microsoft Azure Monitoring Services Management Library
- API Management: Support for API Management REST APIs
All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them:
DocumentDB: Announcing a New NoSQL Document Service for Azure
I’m excited to announce the preview of our new DocumentDB service - a NoSQL document database service designed for scalable and high performance modern applications. DocumentDB is delivered as a fully managed service (meaning you don’t have to manage any infrastructure or VMs yourself) with an enterprise grade SLA.
As a NoSQL store, DocumentDB is truly schema-free. It allows you to store and query any JSON document, regardless of schema. The service provides built-in automatic indexing support – which means you can write JSON documents to the store and immediately query them using a familiar document oriented SQL query grammar. You can optionally extend the query grammar to perform service side evaluation of user defined functions (UDFs) written in server-side JavaScript as well.
DocumentDB is designed to linearly scale to meet the needs of your application. The DocumentDB service is purchased in capacity units, each offering a reservation of high performance storage and dedicated performance throughput. Capacity units can be easily added or removed via the Azure portal or REST based management API based on your scale needs. This allows you to elastically scale databases in fine grained increments with predictable performance and no application downtime simply by increasing or decreasing capacity units.
Over the last year, we have used DocumentDB internally within Microsoft for several high-profile services. We now have DocumentDB databases that are each 100s of TBs in size, each processing millions of complex DocumentDB queries per day, with predictable performance of low single digit ms latency. DocumentDB provides a great way to scale applications and solutions like this to an incredible size.
DocumentDB also enables you to tune performance further by customizing the index policies and consistency levels you want for a particular application or scenario, making it an incredibly flexible and powerful data service for your applications. For queries and read operations, DocumentDB offers four distinct consistency levels - Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, and Eventual. These consistency levels allow you to make sound tradeoffs between consistency and performance. Each consistency level is backed by a predictable performance level ensuring you can achieve reliable results for your application.
DocumentDB has made a significant bet on ubiquitous formats like JSON, HTTP and REST – which makes it easy to start taking advantage of from any Web or Mobile applications. With today’s release we are also distributing .NET, Node.js, JavaScript and Python SDKs. The service can also be accessed through RESTful HTTP interfaces and is simple to manage through the Azure preview portal.
Provisioning a DocumentDB account
To get started with DocumentDB you provision a new database account. To do this, use the new Azure Preview Portal (http://portal.azure.com), click the Azure gallery and select the Data, storage, cache + backup category, and locate the DocumentDB gallery item.
Once you select the DocumentDB item, choose the Create command to bring up the Create blade for it.
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Azure: Virtual Machine, Machine Learning, IoT Event Ingestion, Mobile, SQL, Redis, SDK Improvements
This past month we’ve released a number of great enhancements to Microsoft Azure. These include:
- Virtual Machines: Preview Portal Support as well as SharePoint Farm Creation
- Machine Learning: Public preview of the new Azure Machine Learning service
- Event Hub: Public preview of new Azure Event Ingestion Service
- Mobile Services: General Availability of .NET support, SignalR support
- Notification Hubs: Price Reductions and New Features
- SQL Database: New Geo-Restore, Geo-Replication and Auditing support
- Redis Cache: Larger Cache Sizes
- Storage: Support for Zone Redundant Storage
- SDK: Tons of great VS and SDK improvements
All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them:
Virtual Machines: Support in the new Azure Preview portal
We previewed the new Azure Preview Portal at the //Build conference earlier this year. It brings together all of your Azure resources in a single management portal, and makes it easy to build cloud applications on the Azure platform using our new Azure Resource Manager (which enables you to manage multiple Azure resources as a single application). The initial preview of the portal supported Web Sites, SQL Databases, Storage, and Visual Studio Online resources.
This past month we’ve extended the preview portal to also now support Virtual Machines. You can create standalone VMs using the portal, or group multiple VMs (and PaaS services) together into a Resource Group and manage them as a single logical entity. You can use the preview portal to get deep insights into billing and monitoring of these resources, and customize the portal to view the data however you want. If you are an existing Azure customer you can start using the new portal today: http://portal.azure.com.
Below is a screen-shot of the new portal in action. The service dashboard showing service/region health can be seen in the top-left of the portal, along with billing data about my subscriptions – both make it really easy for you to see the health and usage of your services in Azure. In the screen-shot below I have a single VM running named “scottguvstest” – and clicking the tile for it displays a “blade” of additional details about it to the right – including integrated performance monitoring usage data:
The initial “blade” for a VM provides a summary view of common metrics about it. You can click any of the titles to get even more detailed information as well.
For example, below I’ve clicked the CPU monitoring title in my VM, which brought up a Metric blade with even more details about CPU utilization over the last few days. I’ve then clicked the “Add Alert” command within it to setup an automatic alert that will trigger (and send an email to me) any time the CPU of the VM goes above 95%:
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Free ebook: Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure
Last week MS Press published a free ebook based on the Building Real-World Apps using Azure talks I gave at the NDC and TechEd conferences. The talks + book walks through a patterns-based approach to building real world cloud solutions, and help make it easier to understand how to be successful with cloud development.Videos of the Talks
You can watch a video recording of the talks I gave here:
