Windows Azure Infrastructure (IaaS) is Ready for Prime Time!

We just got an alert from Microsoft that Azure virtual machines and networks are generally available. If you're like us you've been testing out the VM capabilities for a while, but it's now production. We just put the finishing touches on a domain and SharePoint server farm all built on Azure VM's. After stumbling through it for a couple of weeks, we now have the process down and can spin up entire environments in a matter of hours. We'll be producing a white paper shortly to show you how it's done.

Here's the announcement with a few interesting links:

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, Virtual Machines and Virtual Network, now are generally available!   Today is a major milestone for Windows Azure and all of our customers and partners. We are excited to announce that Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Windows Azure Virtual Network now are generally available. These new services make it possible for you to move your applications into the cloud as is. We also want to update you on a new price commitment we’ve made. This announcement is a significant step in our cloud computing strategy, which has been influenced directly by our discussions with customers and partners around the world. One point holds true in every one of our discussions with you - the cloud should be an enabler for innovation, and an extension of your organization’s IT fabric, not just a fancier way to describe cheap infrastructure and application hosting. This brief video explains what we mean by extension of your organization’s IT fabric.   You’ve also told us that you don’t want to have to choose either a low price or good performance; you want a low price and good performance. That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth.  This starts with reducing our GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33%.    You can find the general availability announcement and the price reduction details at Windows Azure Blog. We have great guidance on scenarios in which you can take advantage of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Learn more at our Infrastructure Services page and get going with a free trial at www.windowsazure.com today.

SharePoint Farm on Windows Azure

***Update: Microsoft Azure Infrastructure is live (no longer demo) as of April 16th, 2013***

Microsoft recently announced that you can install SharePoint on virtual machines (IaaS) on Azure.

Why would you want to do this? The main motivator is the speed at which you can bring the environment up. If you don't have a robust Hyper-V or VMware environment in house, Azure gives you an easy way to spin up servers with no trips to the data center and no ordering/provisioning hardware. Unlike the Office 365 offering, you have complete control over your SharePoint farm and guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.

What type of SharePoint environment is a candidate for Azure?

• SharePoint for Internet Sites - Move your external website to Azure and you don't need to deal with DMZ's and firewalls (or your networking co-workers).
• Developer, Test and Staging - Bring them up and blow them away as needed. With Azure PowerShell this can all be scripted.
• Hybrid Applications - You can setup a SharePoint environment that pulls or pushes data to applications in your local data center (on-premise).
• Disaster Recovery - When your local environment takes a hard nap, bring it up in Azure and then blow it away when you get it restored.

To learn all about the offering, check out the following paper from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34598

You can also find a great article detailing how to setup a basic Azure SharePoint farm with step-by-step instructions and screen shots over at PointBeyond.

You can also watch the following video from Channel 9 presented at TechEd.