Windows Azure Management Portal with Service Bus, Media Services and Virtual Machine Monitoring

Microsoft has recently released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal which includes service bus management and monitoring, support for managing co-administrators, media services monitoring, storage container creation and access control. Moreover, the portal provides support for import and export of SQL Server databases including enhancements for virtual machine and notifications for cloud service status.

The service bus management allows you to create and manage service bus namespaces, queues, topics, relays and subscriptions. With the help of the portal, you can add co-administrators, which allows you to share management of your Windows Azure services with other users. However, a co-administrator cannot change or view billing details about the account and also don't have powers to remove service administrator from a subscription.
 
The new portal enables developers to import and export SQL Server databases using BACPAC file format, which makes it easy to copy and migrate databases between on-premise and cloud environments.

You can easily delete a virtual machine disk by selecting DELETE DISK option from within the management portal. Moreover, you will have an option to either delete the associated .VHD file or retain a copy of .VHD file in storage for future use.

The Windows Azure portal provides instant notifications on the top of the dashboard regarding the health status of various role instances and update automatically as and when the status of the role changes from time to time.

The Windows Azure media service provides an ability to create media processing jobs in your Windows Azure media services account. For instance, you can encode media files using the service and the portal enables you to monitor not only the number of encoding jobs that are queued up for processing but also those which are active and failed encoding jobs. Moreover, you can visualize the monitoring data for a specific period of time from within the media services dashboard.

The new Windows Azure portal enables you to create storage containers. For this purpose, you need to select a storage account, navigate to the CONTAINERS tab and click the ADD CONTAINER option.

The Windows Azure product team has scheduled to release further enhancements by the end of October with support for Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 Framework.