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

Introduction


The Windows Azure Queue Service is the Windows Azure Storage Service feature that manages Windows Azure queues and the messages in them. A queue facilitates scalability of a Windows Azure hosted service by allowing disconnected communication between roles in the hosted service, allowing the roles to scale independently of each other. Indeed, they do not even need to be active at the same time.

More generally, the Queue service provides a coherent way to manage the processing of a task comprising several steps. For example, a long-lived task could be broken up into steps and the status of these steps managed using queues. We look at this in the Managing Windows Azure queues recipe.

The Queue service provides a two-level hierarchy comprising queues and the messages in them. The only limit on the size of a queue is the 100 TB limit for a storage service account. An individual message may store up to 8192 bytes of data. A queue stores a message for a maximum of seven days, after which...