"Azure" entries

Building applications in Azure

Identifying the key requirements of a web application cloud architecture.

Download a free copy of “Azure for Developers,” an O’Reilly report by experienced .NET developer John Adams that breaks down Microsoft’s Azure platform in plain language, so that you can quickly get up to speed.

One of the most natural uses of the cloud is for web applications. You may already be using virtual machines on your own systems to make deploying your applications easier, either to new hardware or to additional servers. Microsoft Azure uses virtualization too, but it also brings useful benefits that virtualization cannot deliver alone. By hosting your application in the cloud, you can leverage automatic scaling, load balancing, system health monitoring, and logging. You also benefit from the fact that managed cloud platforms help narrow the attack surface of your system by automatically patching the operating system and runtimes and by keeping systems sandboxed. Let’s look at some examples of how to build some common web applications inside of Microsoft Azure.

Online store

Imagine that you work for a retailer who generates a significant amount of revenue through online sales. Imagine also that this retailer has been around for long enough that it already has an established web architecture that runs in a private data center. This retailer has decided that it wants to move to a hosted platform so that it no longer has any data center responsibilities and it can focus on its core business. How do you replatform this web application into Microsoft Azure? Let’s first identify some requirements for this system:

  • It has high utilization and needs to serve a large number of concurrent users without timing out, even during peak hours such as Black Friday sales.
  • It needs to accommodate a wide variety of products in its database that do not necessarily all follow the same schema.
  • It needs a fast and intelligent search bar so that customers can find products easily.
  • It needs to be able to recommend products to customers as they shop to help generate additional revenue.

However these requirements are being met today in the private data center, I can suggest some guidelines on how to reproduce this system in Microsoft Azure so you can boost performance instead of just replicating it. I will take each of these requirements in order and explain how to leverage certain Azure components so that these requirements are properly met.

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How to create a Swarm cluster with Docker

Using Docker Machine to create a Swarm cluster across cloud providers.

Editor’s note: this is an Early Release excerpt from Chapter 7 of Docker Cookbook by Sébastien Goasguen. The recipes in this book will help developers go from zero knowledge to distributed applications packaged and deployed within a couple of chapters. One of the key value propositions of Docker is app portability. The following will show you how to use Docker Machine to create a Swarm cluster across cloud providers.

Problem

You understand how to create a Swarm cluster manually (see Recipe 7.3), but you would like to create one with nodes in multiple public Cloud Providers and keep the UX experience of the local Docker CLI.

Solution

Use Docker Machine to start Docker hosts in several Cloud providers and bootstrap them automatically to create a swarm cluster.

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Microsoft opens up

How Microsoft is contributing to and benefitting from open source.

Microsoft seems to be embracing open source more and more. What does this tell us about the company's near-term future?

Strata Week: Shop ’til you drop

Stack Exchange goes in-house, Netflix pays for platforms, survey data gets visualized, and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace

In this edition of Strata Week: Stack Exchange takes their hardware and software in-house; Neflix explains their adoption of AWS and open source; the New York Times maps out survey and census data; and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace.

Strata Week: Shop 'til you drop

Stack Exchange goes in-house, Netflix pays for platforms, survey data gets visualized, and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace

In this edition of Strata Week: Stack Exchange takes their hardware and software in-house; Neflix explains their adoption of AWS and open source; the New York Times maps out survey and census data; and Infochimps acquires Data Marketplace.

Developing intuitions about data

Why we must consider the different properties and purposes of computer files.

Some kinds of computer files have different properties than others, and thus serve different purposes. Structured representation of data is one such property. If we are trying to put data onto the web, and if we want others to have the use of that data, and if we hope it will flow reliably through networks to all the places where it's needed, then we ought to consider how the files we choose to publish do, or don't, respect that property.