The Windows Azure platform provides powerful RESTful APIs to manage your service deployments. The power of these APIs can easily be tapped into with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. Below we have assembled a series of articles that will introduce you to the basics of using the APIs to manage your own deployments.

Introduction of the "Deal of the Day" - A PHP scaling sample application

To give you an opportunity to see a sample application working, we've decided to deploy a live version on Windows Azure to let you test it for real and give the chance to win actual fun prizes! (prizes are a limited time offer, and sorry for our friends outside of USA, but prizes can be shipped only to a US address)

Wanna play? Just go this way: http://dealoftheday.cloudapp.net/
Looking for the code, just get it on GitHub here: http://bit.ly/iPddwx

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Scaling PHP Applications on Windows Azure Part I: Performance Metrics
In part I, this tutorial, we will learn how to connect to the Service Management API and how to gather the metrics pertinent to our application. At specified intervals the Web Roles will update the Performance Metrics Storage Table with our metrics.

Scaling PHP Applications on Windows Azure Part II: Role Management
In this article I will show you how to create a certificate for your Windows Azure account, connect to the Service Management API, and update role instance counts on a per role name basis.

Scaling PHP Applications on Windows Azure Part III: Performance Monitor
In this article I will show you how to build the performance monitor portion of this project. The performance monitor will be a PHP script that monitors the resource usage of a Windows Azure deployment and scales in or out according to need.

Scaling PHP Applications on Windows Azure Part IV: Using worker roles for automated scaling
In this article I will show you how to roll all the code we previously created to monitor and scale our Windows Azure deployment into a worker role. This worker role will sit behind our web role constantly monitoring the performance metrics of the application running in or web role. When scaling thresholds are met the worker role will handle automatically adding and removing instances.