In many ways, the SAG Awards website was a perfect candidate for Windows Azure. The website has moderate traffic throughout most of the year, but has a sustained traffic spike shortly before, during, and after the awards show in January. [...] The main challenge that SAG Awards and Microsoft engineers faced in moving the SAG Awards website to Windows Azure was in architecting for a very high, sustained traffic spike while accommodating the need of SAG Awards administrators to frequently update media files during the awards show. Both intelligent use of Windows Azure Blob Storage and a custom module for invalidating cached pages when content was updated were key to delivering a positive user experience.

He walks you through each of the five steps (high-level, obviously) that they took in the migration:

• Export data
• Install Drupal on Windows
• Import data into SQL Azure
• Copy media files to Azure Blob Storage
• Package and Deploy Durpal

Each step comes with some explanation and descriptions of the commands and tools used during the process.

When I say "community", I'm not talking about just the Symfony community, but I'm talking about all the people that are part of a larger ecosystem that makes Symfony better. [...] The corner stone of such a system is a unique account where all information are gathered and aggregated. We already have such a system on symfony-project.org but it is quite limited as it is only used for authentication.

Related to this goal, they've introduced SenseioLabs Connect, a site for tracking accounts "on steroids" and the Symfony Community Awards that lets you nominate individuals for awards like "Best Blogger", "Best Support in the Forum" and "Best Evangelist". Voting is open and will run until December 24th with the winners announced in January 2012.

The nomination stage is now closed and voting has begun in the 2010 Open Source Awards. [...] You can cast your vote here: http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/voting-stage.

The categories for the awards this year are:

• Open Source CMS Award
• Hall of Fame CMS
• Most Promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-Commerce Applications
• Open Source JavaScript Libraries
• Open Source Graphics Software

If you want more information or to cast your vote for any of the projects in these categories, go over to the Packt voting page and get your opinion heard.