The
ACS Management Portal provides limited functionality for creating and
managing service namespaces and AC resources for service namespaces. A
service namespace defines the namespace for your AC resources. Because
of the limited functionality available in the portal as of the PDC 2009
release, you can only use the portal to create service namespaces, view
management keys, and view URIs for your service namespace. You can also
perform all these tasks programmatically through the Management service
API. Figure 1 shows the Management Portal interface for an already-created account.
In Figure 7-7,
the home page for my AppFabric account lists the project information
and the service namespaces that already exists in my account. You can
create a new service namespace by clicking the Add Service Namespace
link. Figure 2 shows the Create New Service Namespace screen.
You must select a unique
name for your service namespace and the region in which you want the
service namespace to run. If you're building a Windows Azure
distributed application, you can choose a common location for the
Windows Azure services, SQL Azure database, and AppFabric service
namespace so that all the Windows Azure components run in close
proximity to each other and yield better performance. Figure 3 shows an example service namespace screen.
The service namespace
page consists of four sections: Manage, Service Bus, Access Control
Service, and Information. The Manage section contains the management
key information you can use to interact with the Management service
interface. The Service Bus section contains service bus endpoints and
issuer information for using the AppFabric Service Bus. (I cover the
AppFabric Service Bus in the next chapter.) The Access Control Service
section contains the STS endpoint, Management endpoint, and Management
STS endpoint. The Information section consists of project information
and the region where the service namespace is located.
