Are there any 3rd party companies delivering video/audio encoding services for Windows Azure?
Amazon has e.g PandaStream.
/Rune
You can now use Media Services in Azure: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/media-services/
It is not a commercial 3rd party offering but evangelist Wade demonstrates how you can use Azure with Expression Encoder. Look here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/01/using-expression-encoder-4-in-a-windows-azure-worker-role/
Related
My scenario is, we want to build mobile Apps (iOS, Android and Windows,mac) which should be able to play protected DRM content as offline play the protected content which was downloaded previously. What are our options with Windows Azure media?
I would like to use offline play back for playready enabled azure media services. Is it still possible or not? please advise.Thanks
This is possible but it is not a supported scenario for Azure Media Services. we only offer DRM solution for online streaming at the moment.
Cheers,
Mingfei Yan
Azure Media Services now supports offline playback scenarios. Offline Fairplay via Apple offline HLS is supported. AMS also provides persistent PlayReady and Widevine licenses for offline playback.
I have a WebAPI back-end for a mobile, and want to host it in Azure.
I am having a hard time figuring out the real differences between AMS and Websites.
All the articles I read about the subject talks about changes and benefits in general, and I want to understand specifically which new features AMS provides, and the benefits of hosting in AMS.
Authentication
In AMS I see the "IDENTITY" tab in azure portal. From what I understand, those 3rd party configs allow me to authenticate my users easily with google,FB etc. But this is just making the process more convenient and configurable via UI. In Websites, I can achieve the same functionality pretty easily using code from ASPNet.Identity and OWIN libraris.
Push Notifications
Again looking at AMS in the "PUSH" tab, I can see two mechanisms. The Notification Hub and 3rd party section.
The Notification Hub is nothing special to AMS, and I can get the exact same functionality when hosting in Websites.
The 3rd party section allows me to configure credentials to push services from Apple and Google (APNS,GCM...) and together with libraries in AMS namespace I can easily write code to communicate with those services.
But When hosting in Websites, in my back-end I can use open source libraries. For example, Moon-APNS to talk to APNS.
Scale
As far as I understand, both Websites and AMS allows the same scale functionality (One calls it Units and the other Instances).
Are there any big differences I missed?
Are any of the claims I made are incorrect?
It would be great if anyone could shed some light on the matter, specifically addressing all the 3 issues (Auth,Push,Scale).
That's a question I often get when I present Mobile Services at user group events.
For a .NET developer, there's nothing really special about Mobile Services since everything it offers, you can do it with a Website.
Mobile Services really shines for non .NET developers since you can have a complete mobile backend by writing scripts running on Node and Mobile Services abstract all the database and REST complexity.
I will likely get downvoted since I'll express a personal opinion but anyways: I see no obvious reasons for using Mobile Services if you're coding a .NET backend.
I think you are exactly the target customer for Azure Mobile Apps. You will get all of the power of having your own Azure Website (now rebranded as Azure Web App), with the additional convenience and client libraries of Mobile Services.
One feature of the client library that you may not have noticed is the cross-platform offline data sync capability. That's usually hard to build on your own, and we have an implementation that's conceptually consistent across all client platforms. (Plus, if you use Xamarin, you can share code between your client implementations.)
To be clear: Azure Mobile Services is NOT deprecated, and will not be until long after GA (general availability) of Azure Mobile Apps. Azure Mobile Apps is currently in preview.
The other big benefit of Mobile Services that you haven't mentioned is the client libraries for Android, iOS, Xamarin, and Cordova. If you already have a REST client library in your app and don't need to worry about multiple client platforms, then Azure Web Sites sound like a good way for you to go.
AMS by itself is built on top of Azure Websites. So you can actually implement everything in an Azure website that is available in AMS.
However, the good thing about AMS is that it allows you to quickly build the backend for a mobile app with CRUD operations, authentication/authorization and also provides client side libraries for different type of clients e.g., HTML, C#, etc. so we don't have to manually make the HTTP calls.
If you have need to implement the above functionality in Web API, it is quite an effort. Isn't it?
I would like to use a Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) with Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
I've done a little comparison between RabbitMQ and MSMQ. The first one seems to be better for my case. It is easier to work with and features as monitoring and managing need to be implemented in MSMQ unlike RabbitMQ.
But as MSMQ is a Microsoft product, I think it will be more compatible with Microsoft Azure cloud Platform than RabbitMQ.
Any link or advice will be helpful. Thank you.
Windows Azure has a built in MOM Messaging Platform that is the official successor of MSMQ named Service Bus http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/services/messaging/
I'm trying to setup a video file upload using UDP protocol onto Windows Azure Media Services. I have not found any code sample or documentation to give me a headstart. Could somebody help me on this matter and provide me some code sample or a documentation or the concept?
Thanks in advance!!
Azure Media Services is a platform as a service which uses Azure as the backend. Specifically, it uses Azure Storage. If you are using the .Net Media Services SDK to upload, then you may not notice that it is wrapping the AzStorage SDK calls for transfer. If you are using the REST directly, you will notice that any PUT calls are heading straight for your storage account. In both of these cases, all Media Services is doing it providing the SAS URLs for uploading to the backend storage.
At this time, AzStorage supports only HTTP PUT for uploads.
In addition, Azure has recently on-boarded a 3rd party solution for fast uploading, look for Aspera in the marketplace. Note that this is a tiered subscription service and may require the purchase of client-side software (same model as Amazon S3, incase your doing side-by-side comparisons).
I did a full walk-through a few months ago on my blog:
http://blog-ndrouin.azurewebsites.net/?p=561
The blog needs a bit of maintenance since the service is no longer in preview, but you'll get the idea.
Media Services is still a preview feature. UDP will only be available in the RTM release:
By the RTM release, Media Services will offer integration with partner
components to provide fast UDP (User Datagram Protocol) upload
solutions.
I´m interested to capture links, references and comments about multi-tenant architectures to deploy in the modality SaaS (Software as a Service) on the Windows Azure Platform.
One link for you is the Fabrikam shipping sample from microsoft - https://fabrikamshipping.cloudapp.net/
Source code - http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/fshipsaassource
Blog posts - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/archive/2010/10/07/new-online-demo-introducing-fabrikamshipping-saas.aspx
You can also look at our sample and book. It is similar to Fabrikam but has the content that goes along with the code that talks about all the trade offs. We will be updating our code/content in the next month to work with the new features of Windows Azure (ACS & Caching).
You can get the book on Amazon.
Here's a brand new multi-tenant sample application, Cloud Ninja, that demonstrates several facets of a multi-tenant application in Windows Azure. There's also a related blog here.
One thing you might need for your multi-tenant architecture is to have multiple SSL certificates (one for each tenant's custom domain) for a single HTTPS binding.
I'm a Microsoft Technical Evangelist and I have posted a detailed explanation and a sample "plug & play" source-code on how to do it with Azure Cloud Services with SNI at:
http://www.vic.ms/microsoft/windows-azure/multiples-ssl-certificates-on-windows-azure-cloud-services/