There’s a a lot of new innovation happening with elastic cloud services based on IIS. Many of these services are taking advantage of new IIS extensions like Web Farm Framework and Application Request Routing.
For example check out these new free preview offers listed at http://www.iis.net/previewoffers.
Each of these offers has the ability to dynamically scale your applications from 1 to multiple servers, dramatically increasing the throughput and responsiveness of your site.
Adding capacity is as easy as moving a slider. The effects are instantaneous.
Here’s an example of the increased requests per second I experienced by adding additional web workers to my application during a load test.
In addition to dynamic scale each of these offers also provides complete integration with the Windows Web App Gallery and WebMatrix for a seamless development experience.
Once registered you’ll immediately be able to start creating new web applications. You can create applications directly from the live Windows Web App Gallery feed integrated into the management panel or from tools like WebMatrix.
You don’t need to worry about which ASP.Net framework version or MVC version is running on the server or if the application is using PHP and MySQL or SQL Server. They all just work.
Within a few keystrokes you can have a fully functional site.
The sites you create on these trial offers are all using host names off the primary domain. For example if you created a site name BradsBlog at MyCloudIsAwesome.net, the url would be BradsBlog.MyCloudIsAwesome.net.
Once a site is created you can easily view the number of requests hitting your site and resources used.
You can access your sites using popular development tools like WebMatrix and Visual Web Developer Express or with FTP clients like FileZilla.
For example to access your sites via FTP use the following connection information:
Host: publish.host.com
User: site.host.com\user@host.com
Password: *****
For WebMatrix and Visual Web Developer Express the first thing you’ll need to do is to create an empty or blank site. When you create a new site you’ll have to opportunity to also create a new SQL Server or MySQL database to go with your site.
From the “Site Details” screen you’ll be able to download the publishing profile used by WebMatrix and Visual Web Developer Express. These profile files have all the connection information needed for your new site, including the database connection string.
Once downloaded you can easily import the profile into WebMatrix for Visual Studio for publishing both application files and data to the cloud.
The publishing process in WebMatrix validates compatibility and proceeds to preview of the changes that will be published to the cloud.
One theme that is consistent across these scenarios is that it just works.
We’re in the early stages of working with our partners to help develop elastic cloud offers like these. If you’d like to be an early adopter feel free to contact me directly at bradleyb@microsoft.com
Do check out the offers listed at http://www.iis.net/previewoffers and stay tuned for more to come….