Windows Azure - Open, Flexible and (Now) Fully Automated With Chef

Fully automated infrastructure has made its way to Windows Azure. With the release of Knife-Azure, Chef users can now spin up and manage Azure instances directly from the command line.

What does all this mean for you? Power. With a single command, watch Chef go to work across the full infrastructure stack, from server provisioning all the way through application deployment. From there, use Opscode Chef and its re-usable configuration templates to:

• Manage, scale and rebuild your Windows Azure environment with ease.
• Create perfect replicas of your production environment for development, testing and pre-production
• As you scale, use Chef to search across your infrastructure to dynamically configure complex services such as load balancers, monitoring services and ID management tools
• Leverage Chef as an automation framework to enable continuous delivery

For more information on how to get started, please see the following:

• Sign up for Windows Azure
• Sign up for Hosted Chef
• The Knife Plugin
• Opscode & Windows Azure Press Release

About Windows Azure

Windows Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment. Whether creating new applications or enhancing existing applications, Windows Azure lets you take your ideas to market faster and respond quickly to changes in business and your business needs.