Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure Announced

One of the questions I always got when presented Windows Azure “..is there a way to auto scale our windows azure based services?” with the answer being that unfortunately one will have to build its own custom logic for that at least till Wasabi is released.

Well the wait is over, the final release of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is now available, according to the blog post, “Announcing the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure with Autoscaling, Transient Fault Handling and more”, which posted last Friday to Microsoft Senior Program Manager Grigori Melnik’s “Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond” blog.

According to the blog post, this release includes a comprehensive set of technical content, including:

• Two new application blocks:
  • Autoscaling Application Block (“Wasabi”) to help you to automatically scale both web and worker roles in Windows Azure by dynamically provisioning/decommissioning roles or throttling.
  • Transient Fault Handling Application Block (“Topaz”) to help you make your Windows Azure application more resilient to transient errors when you are using these cloud services: SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Windows Azure Caching, and Windows Azure Service Bus.
• One new configuration source:
  • Blob configuration source to load configuration information from a blob in your Azure Storage account so that you can modify it without having to redeploy your application to Windows Azure.
• Windows PowerShell cmdlets to browse and manipulate the Autoscaling Application Block settings directly from Windows PowerShell.
• Protected configuration provider to allow you to encrypt sections of your configuration files in Windows Azure.
• Updated database creation scripts so that you can migrate your code using the database trace listeners of the Logging Application Block and the Caching Application Block.
• A substantial collection of experience guidance help you ramp up quickly, including:
  • Reference documentation
  • Developer’s guide
  • Tailspin Surveys sample application (reference implementation)
  • On-premises sample application for hosting the Autoscaling Application Block and exploratory testing (included with source under (install location)/WindowsAzure/Autoscaling/Hosts/ConsoleAutoscaler)
  • Planning worksheet for Wasabi to help you understand the interactions between different timing values governing the overall autoscaling regime.

The recommended way to obtain the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is as NuGet packages. You can also download self-extracting zip files with binaries, sources (including tests) and the reference implementation from MSDN. The configuration tool is available as a Visual Studio extension package (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Rejoice …