It’s been just over a week since Windows Azure announced the GA of Infrastructure Services, marking the beginning of a fully supported Infrastructure as a Service in Windows Azure, with SQL Server as a major component. Pre-installed SQL Server VMs are available for pay-per-hour usage in the Windows Azure gallery. Currently Enterprise, ...

Windows Azure has added Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the ability to deploy, run and manage Virtual Machines, to its growing list of services. You can create Virtual Machines from a gallery, upload them from images you create locally on Hyper-V (that's right, you can do that, even from PowerShell) and of course you can just jump right in and ...

 The SQL Server Evaluation Edition is a great way to get a fully functional and free instance of SQL Server for learning and developing solutions. The edition has a built in expiry of 6 months from the time that you install it. I often install an Eval edition on a machine to set up a test or demo, and then 6 months later it comes as ...

The SQL Pass Summit 2012, the largest yet, is in full swing. Here's a summary of the sessions this week on cloud infrastructure and SQLOS topics. Some of these were today, and you can catch the recordings. One more session takes place on Friday covering SQL Server solution patterns in Windows Azure VMs... Also, catch Thursday's ...

I deal with computing architectures by first laying out requirements, and then laying in any constraints for it's success. Only then do I bring in computing elements to apply to the system. As an example, a requirement might be ''world-side availability'' and a constraint might be ''with less than 80ms response time and full HA'' or something ...