Windows Azure Scheduler

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Windows Azure Scheduler is one of the new feature additions to Windows Azure. This is a cloud based scheduler service which analogous to the Task Scheduler.

Login to you Windows Azure Management Portal, If you do not see the Scheduler tab in the left hand side either you didn’t activate it or the feature is not available in your subscription. If you haven’t activated you can activate it and continue the following; if you don’t have the access to the Scheduler in your subscription don’t worry I’ve provided the screenshots. I always include the screenshots much as possible when writing Windows Azure posts just to explain the features as they are, in case you do not have access to them.

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Click on the CREATE SCHEDULER JOB and you will get this nice Azure pop menu

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Click CUSTOM CREATE, Select your region and enter a name for your Job Collection. (Note that at the top it says ‘You are creating a Standard Job Collection’ you can change this in the scale tab)

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As of now we have Job actions for HTTP, HTTPS and Storage Queue. I used the Storage Queue action. Once you select your storage account and Queue name you should give the permissions to Scheduler Job to access the Queue storage. This can be achieved very easily by generating a Shared Access Signature (SAS) for the Queue.

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Next the you can configure the job timing schedules. It has more options; I have selected to run the job every 5 minutes till a specific date starting immediately after the job has been provisioned.

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And that’s it. This is the sample message posted by the Job in the Queue.

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

   2: <StorageQueueMessage xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"

   3:     xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

   4:   <ExecutionTag>4cf887834d7cd1466f549b2ac2fb56c8</ExecutionTag>

   5:   <ClientRequestId>d36f421b-9338-4e4f-ad89-69dd490530a1</ClientRequestId>

   6:   <ExpectedExecutionTime>2014-04-04T06:15:10</ExpectedExecutionTime>

   7:   <SchedulerJobId>msgQ</SchedulerJobId>

   8:   <SchedulerJobCollectionId>testjob</SchedulerJobCollectionId>

   9:   <Region>Southeast Asia</Region>

  10:   <Message />

  11: </StorageQueueMessage>

You can see the Message tag is empty since I didn’t put any messages. You have the complete control in editing the Job you created.

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