If you are reading this you made it to this blogs new (temporary) home on tylerd.azurewebsites.net. The Windows Azure team recently announced new Infrastructure-as-a-Service features, including state-full Azure Websites.

The websites feature includes a gallery of CMS, ecommerce, forum, and blog applications which can be pre-installed to your persisted site. So after signing up for the preview of websites I quickly created a WordPress site, imported all my posts and within about 10 minutes I was up and running.

The sites are all hosted on IIS 7 however, the out-of-the-box WordPress site does use mySQL. The MySQL databases are hosted by cleardb, an new Azure partner providing MySQL as a service to Azure subscribers.

The sites are highly scalable. After creating the site you have two options for hosting, shared or reserved. The main difference is the website address. With Shared you need to use the azurewebsites.net domain. When you upgrade to reserved you can set your site to use any number of domain names, the next step would be to configure your DNS servers to add a CNAME record to <site>.azurewebsites.net.

My blog is on reserved, however there seems to be issues updating configurations. I plan on continuing to use the tylerdoerksen.com domain for this blog when it can be setup.

The Azure team certainly has been busy. There are a number of new features on almost every service category. In the next few posts I am going to write about these changes, starting with the Azure 1.7 SDK.

Thanks for reading and welcome to the cloud!