Book Image

Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

By : Oliver Michalski, Stefano Demiliani
Book Image

Implementing Azure Cloud Design Patterns

By: Oliver Michalski, Stefano Demiliani

Overview of this book

A well designed cloud infrastructure covers factors such as consistency, maintenance, simplified administration and development, and reusability. Hence it is important to choose the right architectural pattern as it has a huge impact on the quality of cloud-hosted services. This book covers all Azure design patterns and functionalities to help you build your cloud infrastructure so it fits your system requirements. This book initially covers design patterns that are focused on factors such as availability and data management/monitoring. Then the focus shifts to complex design patterns such as multitasking, improving scalability, valet keys, and so on, with practical use cases. The book also supplies best practices to improve the security and performance of your cloud. By the end of this book, you will thoroughly be familiar with the different design and architectural patterns available with Windows Azure and capable of choosing the best pattern for your system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Uptime and downtime


Before we go further into the details, we still need to clarify two terms that are important to our explanation:

  • Uptime
  • Downtime

The term, uptime, is easily explained, it is just another name for what I mentioned in the previous section of the chapter, operation time. In other words, the period of time when an application runs without errors and without interruptions.

The term, downtime, then designates as a counterpart, the period where it comes to an interruption. However, it does not matter to us whether the disruption has been deliberately caused (for example, in the case of maintenance tasks), or is a consequence of errors, damage or even a total failure.

Why are these terms important to us? Both values are part of the calculation of the degree of availability, and thus also a part of the definition of a SLA.