Chapter 12. Developing Applications in the Cloud with Windows Azure

Microsoft continues to evolve Azure as a full-service, easy-to-scale, cloud platform for building, testing, and hosting applications. Azure offers website and cloud service hosting, virtual machines, storage, and media services. There are two core concepts of Azure: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). The former allows you to create, host, and manage virtual machines in the cloud. The latter, PaaS, is a hosting platform that is managed and scaled on your behalf. You can take advantage of PaaS directly by creating your own cloud services; alternatively, you can use Azure web apps, a hosting platform already built on PaaS and designed to make your development and deployment easier. The following describes the core Azure offerings across IaaS and PaaS:

App—The Azure platform allows fast and easy deployment and management of websites built on .NET, PHP, Node.js, and other technologies. These websites can take advantage of SQL databases, table storage, blog storage, caching, a content delivery network (CDN), and more. In addition, you can build mobile services for handling iOS, Android, Xbox, and other applications.

Compute/networking—This service allows you to deploy and run virtual machines (VMs) based on Windows Server or Linux. You can then use the machines to custom configure and host your applications. This allows you to deploy existing code without changes and take advantage of custom hosting configurations. You can also configure hybrid (on-premises to cloud) networked solutions.

Storage—Azure provides SQL and NoSQL database solutions. This includes full power of SQL Server as well as the ability for other storage solutions. It also has data services that allow you to get insight from all your data using HDInsight (Hadoop).

And more—Azure is big and ever-growing; the following are some additional services available to developers: Stream Analytics for processing millions of events per second; Predictive Analytics to use machine learning to mine historical data; identity management, single-sign on, and synch with on-premises directories; BizTalk services and other application integration options; media services to enable content encoding, storage, protection, and delivery; and more.

This chapter focuses on the developer experience with Azure and Visual Studio 2015. We first cover getting started with the Azure management portal; creating, deploying, and debugging your first application in Azure; and using the portal to monitor and manage your application. The chapter then covers the details of the Azure software development kit (SDK) for Visual Studio to make building and scaling cloud applications easier.