Developers Can Test 'Denali' in Amazon Cloud -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Driverby David Ramel

Developers Can Test 'Denali' in Amazon Cloud

Microsoft and Amazon are collaborating to offer developer testing of the next version of SQL Server in the Amazon cloud, promising an easier and cheaper evaluation than you could get with a local implementation.

The marriage of Microsoft SQL Server "Denali" (now, SQL Server 2012) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud means developers only have to pay standard Amazon Web Services (AWS) rates to test the beta database software, currently in Community Technology Preview 3. AWS pricing for "standard on-demand instances" ranges from 12 cents to 96 cents per hour.

An AWS site promises easy deployment in five minutes. "With AWS, companies can utilize the Cloud to easily test the new functionality and features of 'Denali,' without having to purchase and manage hardware," the site says. "This provides customers with faster time to evaluation, without any of the complexity related to setting up and configuring a test lab for beta software."

Sounds good to me. I earlier wrote about how a beta evaluation of SQL Server nearly wrecked my system and caused hours of frustration (for me and many others) when I tried to remove it and install the free, Express version.

The Denali program is part of a broader initiative in which Microsoft has developed Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for testing of Web-based products such as WebMatrix and database-related software--basically SQL Server 2008 R2--all running on Windows Server 2008 R2. The Denali AMI was created just a couple weeks ago.

Have you tried testing any Microsoft products on the Amazon cloud? We'd love to hear about your experience. Comment here or drop me a line.

Posted by David Ramel on 10/27/2011

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.