Integrating Applications With The Cloud On The Windows Azure Platform

Integrating Applications with the Cloud on the Windows Azure Platform
Contents:
Foreword(s) Preface Chapter 1: "Introduction" Chapter 2: "The Challenges of Cloud Integration" Chapter 3: "The Trey Research Scenario" Chapter 4: "Deploying Functionality and Data to the Cloud" Chapter 5: "Authenticating Users and Authorizing Requests" Chapter 6: "Implementing Cross-boundary Communication" Chapter7: "Implementing Business Logic and Message Routing" Chapter 8: "Replicating, Distributing, and Synchronizing Data" Chapter 9: "Maximizing Scalability, Availability, and Performance" Chapter 10: "Monitoring and Managing Hybrid Applications"

Preface
Modern computing frameworks and technologies such as the Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows IdentityFramework make building enterprise applications much easier than ever before. In addition, the opportunity to build applications that you deploy to, and run on a cloud platform such as Windows Azure can reduce up-front infrastructure costs, and ongoing management and maintenance requirements. However, most applications are not simple; they may consist of many separate features that areimplemented as services, components, third-party plug-ins, and other systems or resources. Integrating these separate features when all of the components are hosted locally in your data center is not a trivial task, and it can become even more of a challenge when you move your application to a cloud-based runtime environment. For example, a typical application may use web and worker roles running in WindowsAzure, store its data in SQL Azure, and connect to third-party services for tasks such as authenticating users and arranging deliveries. However, it is not uncommon for an application to also make use of services exposed by partner organizations, or services and components that reside inside the corporate network and, for a variety of reasons, cannot be migrated to the cloud. Applications such asthis are often referred to as hybrid applications, and the issues you encounter when building them, or when migrating parts of existing on-premises applications to the cloud, prompt questions such as "How can I integrate the various parts across network boundaries and domains so that all of the parts can work together to implement the complete application?" and "How do I maximize performance andavailability when some parts of the application are located in the cloud?" This guide, "Integrating Applications with the Cloud on the Windows Azure Platform", focuses on the common issues you will encounter when building applications that run partly in the cloud and partly onpremises, or when you decide to migrate all or parts of an existing on-premises application to the cloud. It concentrateson Windows Azure and SQL Azure, and shows how you can take advantage of the many features of the platform to simplify and speed up development of these kinds of applications. The Windows Azure platform contains an infrastructure component called Windows Azure AppFabric, which implements a range of services specifically designed to help you build hybrid applications. These services, such as ServiceBus, Caching, Traffic Manager, and Azure Connect, are the main topic of this guide. The guide demonstrates the scenarios where these services are useful, and shows how you can apply them in your own applications. This guide is based on the experiences of a fictitious corporation named Trey Research who evolved their existing on-premises application to take advantage of the Windows Azure platform.The guide does not cover the individual migration tasks, but instead focuses on the way that Trey Research uses the Windows Azure AppFabric services, and other parts of the Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform, to manage interoperability, process control, performance, management, data synchronization, and security.

Who This Book Is For
This book is the third volume in a series about Windows...