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

Handling connection failures to SQL Azure


SQL Azure database is a distributed system in which each physical server hosts many databases. This sharing of resources leads to capacity constraints on operational throughput. SQL Azure handles these capacity constraints by throttling operations and closing connections that are using too many resources. SQL Azure also closes connections when it alleviates operational hot spots by switching from a primary SQL Azure database to one of its two backup copies. Furthermore, connectivity to a SQL Azure database is likely to be less reliable than connectivity to a Microsoft SQL Server database on a corporate LAN. It is imperative therefore that applications using SQL Azure be designed to withstand the connection failures that are far more likely to occur than with Microsoft SQL Server.

One of the mantras of cloud development is design for failure. It is important that applications using SQL Azure be designed to handle failures appropriately. There are two...