There are challenges in designing any software system, whether it is a small system with a single website and database backend or a large distributed multi-tier system with multiple applications and storage solutions that span multiple business domains and geographic locations. We face some of the same issues and challenges while designing a system for Microsoft Azure as we would face on an on-premises system, such as how to divide our system into different applications, services, and databases, and we may have some new or different challenges such as making the system scalable (larger organizations often support scalability to some degree with multiple web servers and load balancing, but Microsoft Azure offers advanced scaling options such as scheduled and metric-based scaling) and tackling authentication on a cloud system.

All real-life systems are rarely implemented using the same technology and are likely to incorporate new and legacy...