Book Image

Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

By : Neil Mackenzie
Book Image

Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

By: Neil Mackenzie

Overview of this book

The Windows Azure platform is Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service environment for hosting services and data in the cloud. It provides developers with on-demand computing, storage, and service connectivity capabilities that facilitate the hosting of highly scalable services in Windows Azure datacenters across the globe. This practical cookbook will show you advanced development techniques for building highly scalable cloud-based services using the Windows Azure platform. It contains over 80 practical, task-based, and immediately usable recipes covering a wide range of advanced development techniques for building highly scalable services to solve particular problems/scenarios when developing these services on the Windows Azure platform. Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book starts by explaining the various access control mechanisms used in the Windows Azure platform. Next you will see the advanced features of Windows Azure Blob storage, Windows Azure Table storage, and Windows Azure Queues. The book then dives deep into topics such as developing Windows Azure hosted services, using Windows Azure Diagnostics, managing hosted services with the Service Management API, using SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. You will see how to use several of the latest features such as VM roles, Windows Azure Connect, startup tasks, and the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Optimizing blob uploads and downloads


Large blobs need to be uploaded to the Windows Azure Blob Service, either in blocks for block blobs or in pages for page blobs. Similarly, blobs can be downloaded in byte ranges. These operations can be implemented in parallel using different threads to upload or download different parts of the blob.

The Blob service has a scalability target for throughput of about 60 MB per second for an individual blob. This creates a limit to how much performance improvement can be achieved through parallelizing operations on a blob. When contemplating parallelization, it is always worth testing the actual workload to ensure that any expected performance gain is in fact realized.

.NET Framework 4 includes the Parallel Extensions to .NET that simplifies the task of parallelizing operations. These provide parallel versions of the traditional for and foreach statements. The Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach methods can be dropped in almost as replacements for for and foreach...