Skip to main content

VM Depot - Stepping into a new era

By
From last year, Windows Azure started to support any kind of system on Virtual Machines. We can install a Linux operating system on them without any kind of problem. Also we have some images created by default, with different operating system, that can be used by anybody.
This year we have a new feature related to these images.  Windows Azure offers VM Depot. This is a place where anybody can upload his image of operation system and share with others. For example we can create and share with others an image of Ubuntu that is preconfigured to run different application like Redmine, Moodle,  Glitorious and so on.
A nice feature of this system is the rating and feedback mechanism. Each user can rate an image and give feedback. In this way people can select more easily an image for themselves. Not only this, but you can take an image, change it and share it again with others.
When you want to deploy an image of a VM machine from Windows Azure, VM Depot will generate the command line that you need to run on Cloud to install the specific image on your virtual image. Publishing your machine is simpler than deploying it. You need to set a name, description and a URL path where the VHD is published. 
You don’t need to have a Windows Azure account to be able to navigate, get the deployments script or publish a new virtual machine.
The real value of this service is for the companies that have a product that can be run on cloud also. Image that you are a software company that has a great product for online payment. Your product is developed in C++ and runs on Ubuntu. You will be able to publish an image of your VM machine for all your customers very easily. In this way your customer will have images of your server pre-configured.
Using this new service we can share and deploy images for Windows Azure very easily.
Labels:

Comments

  1. tudor_turcuJanuary 17, 2013 at 4:54 PM

    Era de asteptat ca vor oferi si ei ceva similar cu Amazon Machine Images (https://aws.amazon.com/amis)..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Radu VunvuleaJanuary 17, 2013 at 4:56 PM

      The idea is great. I'm happy to see it on Azure also :-)

      Delete
  2. IonutJanuary 17, 2013 at 5:57 PM

    The wheel was a great idea. I'm not sure about virtual machine repos :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Windows Docker Containers can make WIN32 API calls, use COM and ASP.NET WebForms

By
After the last post , I received two interesting questions related to Docker and Windows. People were interested if we do Win32 API calls from a Docker container and if there is support for COM. WIN32 Support To test calls to WIN32 API, let’s try to populate SYSTEM_INFO class. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct SYSTEM_INFO { public uint dwOemId; public uint dwPageSize; public uint lpMinimumApplicationAddress; public uint lpMaximumApplicationAddress; public uint dwActiveProcessorMask; public uint dwNumberOfProcessors; public uint dwProcessorType; public uint dwAllocationGranularity; public uint dwProcessorLevel; public uint dwProcessorRevision; } ... [DllImport("kernel32")] static extern void GetSystemInfo(ref SYSTEM_INFO pSI); ... SYSTEM_INFO pSI = new SYSTEM_INFO(
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see
8 comments
Read more

Navigating Cloud Strategy after Azure Central US Region Outage

By
 Looking back, July 19, 2024, was challenging for customers using Microsoft Azure or Windows machines. Two major outages affected customers using CrowdStrike Falcon or Microsoft Azure computation resources in the Central US. These two outages affected many people and put many businesses on pause for a few hours or even days. The overlap of these two issues was a nightmare for travellers. In addition to blue screens in the airport terminals, they could not get additional information from the airport website, airline personnel, or the support line because they were affected by the outage in the Central US region or the CrowdStrike outage.   But what happened in reality? A faulty CrowdStrike update affected Windows computers globally, from airports and healthcare to small businesses, affecting over 8.5m computers. Even if the Falson Sensor software defect was identified and a fix deployed shortly after, the recovery took longer. In parallel with CrowdStrike, Microsoft provided a too
Post a Comment
Read more