Developers are increasingly turning to cloud computing for a wide array of benefits including cost, automation and ability to focus on application logic. Following the launch of Visual Studio 2013, we are excited to announce the Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release which contains a variety of key enhancements:

• Debugging on Azure Web Sites and Cloud Services: Connect Visual Studio to the Remote Debugger running in Windows Azure Web Sites or Cloud Services and get the full fidelity debugging developers have come to expect with Visual Studio 2013 on the desktop.

• Integrated Sign-in from Visual Studio: We are making it easier than ever before to get a view into all the applications and services that are running in Windows Azure. With the integrated sign-in, Visual Studio developers can get a “single pane of glass” from which they can see and manage all of their applications and services.

•  Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Preview): These libraries enable automation of Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Web Sites and Storage Accounts. This is a key feature for developers as they build and migrate more and more complex environments onto Windows Azure.

For further details on the release of this SDK, visit Scott Guthrie’s blog.

General Availability of Windows Azure Backup

Increasingly, organizations worldwide are turning to Windows Azure as an anchor for business continuity solutions. We are excited to announce the general availability of Windows Azure Backup which protects important server data offsite with automated backups to Windows Azure with the added benefit of easy data restoration.

With incremental backup, configurable data retention policies and data compression, you can increase flexibility and boost efficiency of storage backup. Learn about these powerful capabilities by visiting Windows Azure Backup.

Preview of Hyper-V Recovery Manager

Customers running business critical workloads in a private cloud need robust capabilities to replicate and recover virtual machines in the event of an outage. We are delighted to announce a new service today in preview called Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager that helps protect Systems Center 2012 private clouds by automating the replication of virtual machines.  You can find more details about the service and limited preview here.