Building Elastic and Resilient Cloud Applications

This book demonstrates how you can use the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure in an existing Windows Azure application to enhance the maintainability, manageability, scalability, stability, and extensibility of the application. Windows Azure offers exciting opportunities for developers to build large and complex applications to run in the cloud. Windows Azure enables you to take advantage of a pay-as-you-go billing model for your application infrastructure and on-demand computing resources. The Autoscaling Application Block helps to take advantage of the elastic nature of Windows Azure, by automatically handling changes in the load levels over time and scaling out or throttling accordingly. This will help to meet your SLAs and also reduce the number of manual tasks that your application operator must perform, while staying on budget. The Transient Fault Handling Application Block provides a set of reusable components for adding detection strategies and sophisticated retry logic into your Windows Azure applications using SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus, and Caching Service. This makes your Windows Azure application more robust and resilient to transient faults, which improves overall application stability. Benefit from the autoscaling and transient fault capabilities, spend more time focusing on your business logic and spend less time on the plumbing. The Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure will do the heavy lifting for you! This guide helps you to quickly grasp what the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure can do for you, presents examples that show it in action, and makes it easier for you to start experimenting with these new application blocks. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that are appropriate for the cloud and who wants to learn how to realize the benefits of using Enterprise Library in a cloud-based application. You should be familiar with Windows Azure, the.NET Framework, Visual Studio, ASP.NET, and Visual C# to derive full benefit from reading this guide.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction to Windows Azure
Chapter 2 Introduction to Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure
Chapter 3 The Tailspin Scenario
Chapter 4 Autoscaling and Windows Azure
Chapter 5 Making Tailspin Surveys More Elastic
Chapter 6 Transient Fault Handling
Chapter 7 Making Tailspin Surveys More Resilient
Appendix A Sample Confgurations for Deploying Tailspin Surveys to Multiple Data Centers
Appendix B Tailspin Surveys Installation Guide
Appendix C Glossary