Windows Azure and dynamic elasticity

Question

Is there a way do do dynamic elasticity in Windows Azure? If my workers begin to get overloaded, or queues start to get too full, or too many workers have no work to do, is

Answer 1

1. Create a queue named autoscale.[your_role_name].instance_count
2. In the Management Portal, set the autoscale to Queue.
3. Set the Target Count field to 1.

Now you can use standard enqueue and dequeue operations on that queue to control the number of worker role instances. You've got 7 days to process a message before it expires, so you might want to create a worker role that can ensure that the number of messages in the queue is tracking your target instance count.

If you're after dynamic elasticity, you've probably already got a worker-role-based controller in mind already, so that's probably not a problem.