Microsoft to add autoscaling, alerts to Windows Azure

Tomorrow, June 27 — in Day 2 of its Build 2013 developer conference — Microsoft is on tap to talk about Windows Azure.

I'm betting two of the topics on the docket will be the additions of autoscaling and alert notifications to Microsoft's public cloud platform. I'm basing this bet on a couple of new Azure blog posts that went live for a bit and were subsequently pulled.

Here's some what I'm expecting Scott Guthrie to announce about these new features during the keynote.

On the autoscaling front, Microsoft is building automatic autoscaling into Windows Azure for cloud services, virtual machines and Azure Web sites. This capability will allow Azure to scale users' apps dynamically on their behalf, no manual intervention required.

Before this feature addition, users had to manually set the scale of their apps or use additional tooling to scale their apps.

The autoscaling will regularly adjust the number of instances in response to the load in a user's application. Initially, two different load metrics will be supported: CPU percentage and storage queue depth (for cloud services and VMs only).

Autoscale is in preview and will be free for a limited time, until it is made generally available.

These alerts provide the ability for users to be notified of active or impending issues within their apps. Users can create alert rules so that an alert is created when a condition defined in a rule is violated. Users also can select the option to send an email notification to the service administrator and co-administrators.

During the preview, each subscription will be limited to 10 alert rules.