Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Dev Fabric Status Colors and Meaning

What do those color indicators mean in the Azure Dev Fabric? Here's a list:

Longer explanation: If you're running your Azure apps locally out of Visual Studio, the Dev Fabric is simulating the cloud environment for you. You can open the Dev Fabric icon by right-clicking the "gears" icon in the system tray. In the Dev Fabric console display you'll see your project, your role(s) (such as WebRole) and your instances. Each instance's status is shown with a colored circle. Since some of these statuses change rather quickly you don't always have a chance to hover over them and see their tooltip explanation.


Here's how the Dev Fabric console looks when it is happy (green):



A fun thing to do is kill one or more of your instances (you can do this using the Windows Task Manager, or en masse using a tool like pskill). Not only will you see a range of status indicators in the Dev Fabric, the instances will be recreated automatically by the fabric, which is very cool to watch happen. This gives you some idea of the intelligence that's wired into the cloud fabric.

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