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Freemiumtools.com

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business cloud freemiumtools saas sideproject software technology

A while ago I put together a website that explains popular cloud services in an introductory manner with the aim of letting people read about some of the tools that are out there and decide if they can use them for their business (or life). The content isn’t for the tech savvy, but hopefully it’s still helpful to people on the learning curve. So if you’re interested in finding out more about cloud tools and software for productivity and general business, why not check outfreemiumtools.com.…

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Azure website - how to change web hosting plan

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azure cloud hosting microsoft powershell website

In Windows Azure Websites Microsoft have introduced a concept called a web hosting plan. This allows you to control a group of websites all at once and makes for changing their hosting settings easier. The problem is, they haven’t yet introduced a way through the Portal to change theweb hosting plan for a website.  So if you’ve got a bunch of free websites and want to promote one of them to shared hosting, you’ll find that changing one changes them all – because hosting options are now configu…

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Quick and dirty Azure SQL database backup

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azure backup cloud databases restore sql web development

Before I made a deployment of updated code to www.australianandroidapps.com yesterday I wanted to make a point-in-time backup of the database that runs the site in case I needed to rollback the changes. I then realised I’d never done this before. I found that you have two options: Copy – which is neat and simple and creates a copy of your database on the same server Export The Export option has a few more steps but also lets you download the file and restore locally if you want to. Ideal for gra…

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Pop-up labs in Windows Azure

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azure cloud iaas microsoft technology

I recently came across these two excellent videos about the concept of a pop-up lab in Windows Azure using the IaaS approach of provisioning your own virtual machines. The “pop-up” part of this is that the lab is built, then turned off and de-allocated while not in use. Scripts are used to turn the lab back on, returning your lab environment in about 7 minutes.  There’s been some changes to Azure billing now that make these videos a bit out of date, but the good news is it just simplifies thing…

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TechEd - Building Robust Windows Azure Applications with P&P Guidance

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azure cloud cloud computing microsoft teched technology

This session was presented byMahesh Krishnan from Readify (@MaheshKrishnan) and focused on building robust Windows Azure apps, but in particular the benefits of elasticity. To me one of the most appealing things about cloud based apps is the ability to scale up / down as needed to meet demand, so this session was a good choice. In addition to that Mahesh showed us the application block from the enterprise library for dealing with transient errors.  Scalability Here is a pretty comprehensive au…

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