Preface

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's platform for cloud computing. It provides developers with elastic building blocks to build scalable applications. These building blocks are services for web hosting, storage, computation, connectivity, and more. They are usable as standalone services or are mixed together to build advanced scenarios.

This practical cookbook will show you these building blocks, focusing on why we should use one or the other, and when to use them appropriately. Even though reading the entire book will give you an advanced overview of the main blocks of the Azure platform, each chapter is self-contained. So, even an inexperienced reader could jump from one chapter to another without reading the entire book. Each chapter is organized into recipes—standalone units of execution to complete tasks that involve a specific feature/service of the platform. This approach gives readers the capability to focus on the technology for further use in real-world projects.

This book tries to provide a comprehensive overview of the main aspects of the Azure platform from the point of view of a developer. Some building blocks such as virtual machines are deliberately avoided to focus on development tools, development libraries, and development strategies. This is a recipe-based book; expect to dirty your hands with code that is also outside the boundaries of the recipe, as you would do with food in a real recipe.

Finally, Microsoft Azure is an evolving platform. As technical topics have a high decay rate, Azure services are enriched day by day with new features and service models, making the goal of writing a "complete" book almost impossible. However, this book focuses on core concepts, which remain quite stable over time.