Book Image

Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By : Riccardo Becker
Book Image

Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By: Riccardo Becker

Overview of this book

Leverage different Windows Azure components together with your existing Microsoft .NET skills to fully take advantage of the power of Windows Azure. Use this book to start small and end big by creating and using storage, cloud services, sql databases, networking, caching and other innovative technology to realize your first top-class Windows Azure service! "Windows Azure for Start-ups" is an incremental guide that will take you from the essentials of the Windows Azure platform up to the realization of your own cloud services running on the platform. You will learn how to apply different technologies of the Windows Azure platform with the help of examples all focusing on one single fictitious start-up scenario. This book is centred around a fictitious company called Geotopia that wants to build a brand new social network by using the Windows Azure platform. It will take the reader from the theory and rationale behind Windows Azure right to building services and coding C#. The books starts by outlining the concepts of Windows Azure. It then demonstrates how to set up a development environment and how to build your application by using different storage mechanisms, applying different features from the Windows Azure platform and ending with the newest features explained from the latest release. Windows Azure for Startups will help you take full advantage of the Windows Azure platform and bring your new service online as quickly as possible.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Windows Azure Programming Patterns for Start-ups
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Virtual machines


Virtual machines offer an easy way to create a virtual machine inside Windows Azure that you control and manage yourself—a true IaaS capability. This feature contains Windows Server 2008 R2 and some Linux distributions that you can choose from. It allows us to completely build a VHD that is similar to the one running in our own datacenter, giving us the opportunity to fully migrate it to Azure. Load balancing between virtual machines and connecting to web and worker roles is possible.

Creating a virtual machine

A virtual machine can be created on the new Windows Azure portal preview (http://manage.windowsazure.com). Select the VIRTUAL MACHINE node in the preview portal and click on Create a Virtual Machine. This will take you to a wizard that guides you through the process of creating a virtual machine. For the purpose of this chapter, we will look at the QUICK CREATE option.

By clicking on the CREATE VIRTUAL MACHINE option, we start a provisioning process that will finally...