Weekly Roundup: Windows Azure gets More Features

Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week.

To start with, Microsoft has added a number of new features to Windows Azure over the last week. The new features include HDInsight sevice, support for Dropbox and Mercurial repositories, and a few updates to Mobile Services.

• HDInsight: Windows Azure HDInsight Service is a standard preview service on the Windows Azure Portal, which allows users to quickly deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Windows Azure. Customers can use Hadoop-based big data analytics in the cloud and pay for only the storage and compute they use.
• Support for Dropbox & Mercurial repositories: Windows Azure now supports site and app deployment from Dropbox to any website. It allows users to simply copy files to Dropbox folder and press a button to deploy via Azure Management Portal. Windows Azure also supports Mercurial repositories when setting up continuous deployment of websites from CodePlex or Bitbucket repositories.
• Updates to Mobile Services: Updates include adding of HTML5/JS client library to the current suite of SDKs for Windows Store, Windows Phone 8 and iOS. Next, a preview drops of portable client libraries, which allows Windows Phone 7.5 apps to use Windows Azure Mobile Services as a backend.

Google has shared a small open source project called Tailbone that lets developers read and write to the Google App Engine Datastore using JavaScript. In order to make App Engine a bit more accessible for people who aren’t familiar with server-side coding.

IaaS leader Amazon has added EBS-optimised support to four additional EC2 instance types. Users can now request dedicated throughput between EC2 instances and EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes at launch time. Eucalyptus announced the beta test version of euca2ools that allows eustore to automatically fetch, upload, and register bootable EMS image in Eucalyptus cloud.

Big Data provider Hortonworks has announced the release of new version of the Sandbox. This new version contains Apache Ambari. They have also included the video content from Hadoop Essentials course and lecture material on the use cases of Apache Hive, Apache Pig, and Apache HCatalog.

These are the latest happenings from the cloud world. Stay tuned until next week for more!

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in