In the world of cloud hosted computing platforms it is fair to say that Amazon have taken the lead with their Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC). The newest contender to their crown comes from Microsoft. The Azure infrastructure provides a global backbone suitable for building, deploying and managing applications and services.
As a test of the suitability of Azure for these types of deployments I chose to deploy and build a new WordPress instance from scratch. This seemed a reasonable, albeit fairly simplistic, way of testing each part of the processes in turn:
Implementing a new computing instance
Installing a standard piece of open source software
While Azure as a platform supports many more technologies including XML, ASP.NET and Node.js the standard WordPress combination of PHP and MySQL provides a test that will cover a large percentage of implementations.
Sign Up
The sign up process for Azure is reasonably simple for those with one of the many incarnations of a Live account. (If not creating a new account at outlook.com is fairly painless.)
Once logged in the sign up requires verification delivered via either a texted code of a phone call followed by payment details. Payment is only required where usage exceeds the fairly generous trial limits.
Shortly after you find yourself confronted with the management portal.
Azure Management
Azure instances fall into four general themes:
Compute: including web services and virtual machines
Creating a new instance of one of these is as simple as following the options. For this test I chose to create a new web service form the app gallery. This is a continually expanding set of pre-cast applications such as ASP.NET, Drupal and Joomla. Creating my new WordPress site is easy.
Choose WordPress and click next
Give the database a name
Keep the default “Create new MySQL database” option
Choose the region where the database is to be stored. For those of us in Europe that have to comply with data protection legislation this step should be given some serious thought
Press the tick and off you go
The new web site is then created and made available. (I’ve skipped over the WordPress setup.)
I’m sad to report that that’s it. The new instance is made available and is ready to go right here
In some ways I would have preferred a longer, more tortuous set-up. As an IT guy I can always charge more for obfuscation but in this case that won’t be possible. The only thing that remains is to try the other facilities.
Up until now, if you wanted to send content from a website directly to your Kindle for later reading, you had to install a browser extension. Now, however, you don’t necessarily have to if the site in question has implemented Amazon’s new “Send to Kindle” button. Made just for web publishers and WordPressbloggers, you can already see it on The Washington Post, TIME and Boing Boingwebsites. Publishers can design how they want the button to look to a certain degree via limited customization of the font, color, size and theme. Like all the other Send to Kindle shortcuts, all readers need to do is select the article they want to ship over, hit the button and they’ll see it on their favorite Kindle reader, be it the app or the device.
