Building Hybrid Applications in the Cloud on Windows Azure (Microsoft patterns & practices)

The IT industry has been evolving at a rapid pace; and with the advent of cloud computing the rate of evolution is accelerating significantly. However, most organizations still have a lot of IT assets running in on-premises datacenters. We are in the middle of a transition between running everything on-premises and hosting everything in the cloud. Hybrid is a term that represents the application that positions its architecture somewhere along this continuum. Hybrid applications span the on-premises and cloud divide, and bring with them a unique set of challenges. This guide addresses these challenges by mapping Windows Azure features to specific scenarios encountered in the hybrid application design and development. A case study of a fictitious company named Trey Research explains the challenges encountered in a hybrid application, and describes solutions using Windows Azure features such as Service Bus, Caching, Traffic Manager, Azure Connect, SQL Azure Data Sync, ACS, and more. The guide is divided into two main sections. The first describes the specific design decisions Trey Research made when designing their application. The second provides general guidance on typical scenarios and use cases encountered in each of the challenge areas. Together they will help you to find solutions for the challenges you will meet when developing your own hybrid applications. This guide is intended for architects, developers, and information technology (IT) professionals who design, build, or operate applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Although applications do not need to be based on the Windows operating system to operate in Windows Azure, this book is written for people who work with Windows-based systems. You should be familiar with the.NET Framework, Visual Studio , ASP.NET MVC, and Visual C#.

Scott Densmore works as a Software Engineer at Microsoft. His primary interests are cloud computing and mobile device computing. You can find him at http://scottdensmore.typepad.com/ and on Twitter @scottdensmore.

Alex Homer is a technical writer assigned to the Microsoft patterns & practices team. He spends his days knee-deep in design patterns and architectural literature; writing books, documentation, sample code, and producing technical guidance in its myriad other forms. His weekly ramblings on the IT industry, and life in general, can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/alexhomer/.

Masashi Narumoto is passionate about the idea of the Internet as a knowledgebase. The Internet has significantly changed our lives and there's no doubt that there are still huge changes to come. His goal is to harness the ideas of many individuals into more meaningful collections so people can learn and achieve through the lens of collective intelligence. During his time on the patterns & practices team, he has worked on a series of Windows Azure Guides as a program manager, and is currently focused on Big Data. Previously, he spent 20+ years developing and consulting on a variety of solutions especially in the retail and manufacturing industry. You can find Masashi at http://blogs.msdn.com/masashi_narumoto or on Twitter @dragon119.

John Sharp is a principal technologist at Content Master, part of CM Group Ltd (www.contentmaster.com) , a technical authoring and consulting company. An expert on developing applications with the Microsoft .NET Framework and Windows Azure, John has written several books, including Microsoft Visual C# Step By Step and Microsoft WCF Step By Step. He has a degree in Computer Science from Imperial College, University of London.

Hanzhong Zhang is a senior software development engineer in test with the Microsoft patterns & practices team, primarily working on Windows Azure, SharePoint, and Enterprise Library. Before joining Microsoft, he focused on the document management system as Senior Software Engineer with Sharp Laboratories of America at Huntington Beach, California. Hanz has more than 15 years of experience with software development, architecture and testing.