More Patterns and Guidance (Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Azure)

by Rick Anderson, Tom Dykstra

Download Fix It Project or Download E-book

The Building Real World Cloud Apps with Azure e-book is based on a presentation developed by Scott Guthrie. It explains 13 patterns and practices that can help you be successful developing web apps for the cloud. For information about the e-book, see the first chapter.

You've now seen 13 patterns that provide guidance on how to be successful in cloud computing. These are just a few of the patterns that apply to cloud apps. Here are some more cloud computing topics, and resources to help with them:

• Migrating existing on-premises applications to the cloud.

  • Moving Applications to the Cloud. E-book by Microsoft Patterns and Practices. Also available as a hard-copy paperback.
  • Migrating Microsoft's ASP.NET and IIS.NET. Case study by Robert McMurray.
  • Moving Apps to Azure: What changes? Short video by Stefan Schackow, explains file system access in Web Apps in Azure App Service.
  • Azure Hybrid Cloud. Hardcopy book or e-book by Danny Garber, Jamal Malik, and Adam Fazio.

• Security, authentication, and authorization issues unique to cloud applications

  • Azure Security Guidance
  • Microsoft Patterns and Practices - Azure Guidance. See Gatekeeper pattern, Federated Identity pattern.
  • Azure Network Security. White paper by Ashin Palekar.

See also additional cloud computing patterns and guidance at Microsoft Patterns and Practices - Azure Guidance.

Resources

Each of the chapters in this e-book provides links to resources for more information about that specific topic. The following list provides links to overviews of best practices and recommended patterns for successful cloud development with Azure.

Documentation

• Best Practices for the Design of Large-Scale Services on Azure Cloud Services. White paper by Mark Simms and Michael Thomassy.
• Failsafe: Guidance for Resilient Cloud Architectures. White paper by Marc Mercuri, Ulrich Homann, and Andrew Townhill. Web page version of the FailSafe video series.
• Azure Guidance Portal page for official documentation related to developing applications for Azure.

Videos

• Building Real World Cloud Apps with Azure - Part 1 Video of the presentation by Scott Guthrie that this e-book is based on. Presented at Tech Ed Australia in September, 2013. An earlier version of the same presentation was delivered at Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in June, 2013: NDC part 1, NDC part 2.
• FailSafe: Building Scalable, Resilient Cloud Services. Nine-part video series by Ulrich Homann, Marc Mercuri, and Mark Simms. Presents a 400-level view of how to architect cloud apps. This series focuses on theory and reasons behind recommended patterns; for more how-to details, see the Building Big series by Mark Simms.
• Building Big: Lessons learned from Azure customers- Part 1 and Part 2. Two-part video series by Simon Davies and Mark Simms, similar to the FailSafe series but oriented more toward practical implementation.

Code sample

• The Fix It application that accompanies this e-book.
• Cloud Service Fundamentals in Azure in C# for Visual Studio 2012. Downloadable project in the Microsoft Code Gallery site, includes both code and documentation developed by the Microsoft Customer Advisory Team (CAT). Demonstrates many of the best practices advocated in the FailSafe and Building Big video series and the FailSafe white paper. The Code Gallery page also links to extensive documentation by the authors of the project -- see especially the Cloud Service Fundamentals wiki collection link in the blue box near the top of the project description. This project and the documentation for it still actively being developed, making it a better choice for information on many topics than similar but older white papers.

Hard copy books

• Cloud Computing Bible. By Barrie Sosinsky.
• Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software. By Michael T. Nygard.
• Cloud Architecture Patterns: Using Microsoft Azure. By Bill Wilder.
• Windows Azure Platform. By Tejaswi Redkar.
• Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups. By Riccardo Becker.
• Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook. By Neil Mackenzie.

Finally, when you get started building real-world apps and running them in Azure, sooner or later you'll probably need assistance from experts. You can ask questions in community sites such as Azure forums or StackOverflow, or you can contact Microsoft directly for Azure support. Microsoft offers several levels of technical support Azure: for a summary and comparison of the options, see Azure Support.

Acknowledgments

This content was written by Tom Dykstra, Rick Anderson, and Mike Wasson. Most of the original content came from Scott Guthrie, and he in turn drew on material from Mark Simms and the Microsoft Customer Advisory Team (CAT).

Many other colleagues at Microsoft reviewed and commented on drafts and code:

• Tim Ammann - Reviewed the automation chapter.
• Christopher Bennage - Reviewed and tested the Fix It code.
• Ryan Berry - Reviewed the CD/CI chapter.
• Vittorio Bertocci - Reviewed the SSO chapter.
• Chris Clayton - Helped resolve technical problems in the PowerShell scripts.
• Conor Cunningham - Reviewed the data storage options chapter.
• Carlos Farre - Reviewed and tested the Fix It code for security issues.
• Larry Franks - Reviewed the telemetry and monitoring chapter.
• Jonathan Gao - Reviewed Hadoop and MapReduce sections of the data storage options chapter.
• Sidney Higa - Reviewed all chapters.
• Gordon Hogenson - Reviewed the source control chapter.
• Tamra Myers - Reviewed data storage options, blob, and queues chapters.
• Pranav Rastogi - Reviewed the SSO chapter.
• June Blender Rogers - Added error handling and help to the PowerShell automation scripts.
• Mani Subramanian - Reviewed all chapters and led the code review and testing process for the Fix It code.
• Shaun Tinline-Jones - Reviewed the data partitioning chapter.
• Selcin Tukarslan - Reviewed chapters that cover SQL Database and SQL Server.
• Edward Wu - Provided sample code for the SSO chapter.
• Guang Yang - Wrote the PowerShell automation scripts.

Members of the Microsoft Developer Guidance Advisory Council (DGAC) also reviewed and commented on drafts:

• Jean-Luc Boucho
• Catalin Gheorghiu
• Wouter de Kort
• Carlos dos Santos
• Neil Mackenzie
• Dennis Persson
• Sunil Sabat
• Aleksey Sinyagin
• Bill Wagner
• Michael Wood

Other members of the DGAC reviewed and commented on the preliminary outline:

• Damir Arh
• Edward Bakker
• Srdjan Bozovic
• Ming Man Chan
• Gianni Rosa Gallina
• Paulo Morgado
• Jason Oliveira
• Alberto Poblacion
• Ryan Riley
• Perez Jones Tsisah
• Roger Whitehead
• Pawel Wilkosz

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