Building Elastic and Resilient Cloud Applications: Developer's Guide to the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure (Microsoft patterns & practices)

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.

Dominic Betts is a principal technologist at Content Master. An expert on developing applications with the Microsoft .NET Framework and Windows Azure, Dominic has produced numerous training courses, white papers, and other technical material on .NET, Windows Azure, and Microsoft BizTalk.

Jeremi Bourgault is a software developer with more than 11 years of professional experience. He has contributed to numerous software projects involving Microsoft technologies including the Enterprise Library project from the patterns & practices group, providing hands-on expertise and guidance.

Julian Dominguez is a software developer on the Microsoft patterns & practices team, producing written and code-based guidance for .NET developers. He has been a contributor on several projects with this team, including Prism, Enterprise Library, and CQRS Guidance. You can find him on his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jdom.

Ercenk Keresteci, one of the founders of Full Scale 180, Inc., focuses on bringing new markets and new technologies together in innovative and profitable ways. He concentrates on architecting solutions targeting cloud platforms, specifically Windows Azure.

Dr. Grigori Melnik is a Principal Program Manager in the patterns & practices group at Microsoft. He leads the Microsoft Enterprise Library, Unity, Acceptance Testing Guidance, and CQRS Guidance projects. Prior to that, Grigori was a researcher, software engineer, and educator. His areas of expertise include agile methods, empirical software engineering, and software testing. Grigori is a regular contributor to software conferences around the world. He is a member of the IEEE Software Advisory board. Grigori holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada. Contact him at http://blogs.msdn.com/agile or follow him on twitter via @gmelnik.

Fernando Simonazzi is a software developer and architect with over 12 years of professional experience. He has been a contributor to several projects for Microsoft's patterns & practices group, including Prism v4 and several versions of the Enterprise Library.

Erwin van der Valk is a freelance software developer and architect. Previously he worked as a Microsoft employee at patterns & practices in Redmond. He still occasionally works for patterns & practices, for example on the recently released Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure.