Cloud Service Fundamentals

This series documents the individual components of the Cloud Service Fundamentals code project by the Windows Azure CAT team.

The "Cloud Service Fundamentals in Windows Azure" sample demonstrates how to create database-backed Azure services from real-world customer learnings of the Windows Azure Customer Advisory Team (CAT). Learn the fundamental building blocks for scale-out Azure applications.

Component documentation will be posted every other Thursday starting on July 27th.

For more details about this project, read Building Blocks of Great Cloud Applications
To find out about new content from the AzureCAT team, follow @WinAzureCAT

Telemetry
Data Access Layer
- DAL - Introduction into Fault-Tolerance
Caching (coming soon)
Configuration (coming soon)
Application Request Routing (coming soon)
Deployment (coming soon)

Telemetry

Telemetry – The basics for instrumentation and logging of application services through asynchronous mechanisms at scale implemented in a data pipeline. Effectively leveraging the telemetry data is critical in troubleshooting a service and determining the health of a service. The code project implements a scheduler using a background worker role to collect telemetry data periodically from the application, perf counters, IIS logs, event logs and the sharded SQL Database DMVs. The data is written to a custom ops store database in Windows Azure SQL Database. The data collected by the scheduler can be viewed by reports hosted in SQL Reporting.

Articles include:

Telemetry - Basics and Troubleshooting

Telemetry - Application Instrumentation

Telemetry - Data Acquisition Pipeline

Telemetry - Reporting

Data Access Layer

The layer accessing the multiple databases in Windows Azure SQL Database efficiently and reliably. The code project has data access wrappers for both single-database and sharded solutions, and demonstrates techniques such as parallel fan-out queries across shards.

Articles Include:

DAL - Introduction into Fault-Tolerance

Caching (coming soon)

By using Azure Caching, user data may be stored and retrieved more efficiently from a dedicated cache when combined with the Data Access Layer.

Configuration (coming soon)

Configuration files are key to help make managing your application seamless whether configuration parameters are in web.config or the service config – this should be transparent to the application.

Application Request Routing (coming soon)

Implementation of cookie based routing & affinitization of users to multiple hosted services and sharded databases leveraging the ARR (Application Request Routing) technology in IIS to enable scale-out at the application service level with sharded databases.

Deployment (coming soon)

Methods to deploy your custom configuration with multiple hosted services, variable number of instances and configuring the number of shards through the use of Windows Azure Cmdlets in PowerShell.