Some may know that I went along to the Azure DevCamp in Sydney yesterday.

I have some plans for Azure, and hadn’t really had a chance to have a play with it before yesterday… Well.. I was impressed, and had a lot of fun!

The new portal is pretty schmick! And makes it easy to create:

• Websites
• Cloud Services
• Storage
• SQL DB's

Best thing is that, during preview, it is free for 90 days - with a 30% discount on certain functions within the preview time.

My favourite Azure feature was...

Websites

Currently you can have free testing websites. After the preview, you will be allowed 10 free websites, as long as they end in .azurewebsites.net which is ok if you want a staging/testing area.

Unfortunately, the shared instances do not allow you to bring your own domain, but with a reserved instance, you can use a CNAME record on your DNS to redirect your TLD to the hosted site.

Hopefully Microsoft will lift this restriction and allow us to pay for a shared instance with our own domains (12 cents per hour isn’t justifiable for many, unless you host multiple websites on there). Until then, it’s 8 cents per hour (Calculator) during the preview.

My favourite part was…

Winning an XBox 360!

Part of the Conference involved a “Windows Azure Challenge” set up by Andrew Coates (@coatsy) from Microsoft here in Sydney. Which apparently I won the first leg of… Just goes to show that anyone can do Azure!

I know I need a haircut… And it was a cold 8 degrees in Sydney - hence the Arctic exposure suit!). Thanks to Paul from CodeRed for the pic.

Next...

Sign up for a 90 day free trial (You need a credit card, but Microsoft promise that they won’t charge you unless you say you want to pay!)

Check out the presenters sites for more info:

• Andrew Coates / @coatsy
• Ori Amiga (Not much from him)
• Nick Harris / @cloudhead

Have fun! More to come as I dive into the rabbit warren…