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

Storage


Here, we shall describe in detail the different storage types and their typical uses. The Windows Azure storage services provide secure and scalable storage capabilities that offer the same high-class availability as you are used to on the platform. It offers a 99.9 percent service-level agreement (SLA). This means that Microsoft guarantees that at least 99.9 percent of the time, valid requests to the storage system are processed correctly. Blobs, tables, and queues are stored on the Windows Azure platform and are replicated at least twice in the same datacenter to offer maximum availability. When a hard disk crashes or some other failure occurs, the platform will still be able to offer the storage service. Blobs and tables are replicated to another datacenter on the same continent. For example, large images stored in blob storage in the Amsterdam datacenter are also replicated to the Dublin datacenter. The platform is therefore able to offer maximum availability of your data, even...