Preface

Cloud technology is currently one of the most popular trends within the IT industry. Every day, a new company embarks on its journey with cloud computing, distancing itself from traditional on-premise setups, which have a tendency to hinder quick development and impede scaling operations. As the modern world requires us to adjust rapidly to changing expectations and dynamic workloads, knowledge of how to develop applications in the cloud is becoming more and more valuable.

You are holding in your hands a book that will guide you through the different capabilities and services of one of the most popular cloud offerings around—Microsoft Azure. We will focus mostly on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) components, which allow you to skip the cumbersome process of provisioning the infrastructure and focus directly on configuring various features and deploying your code, so that your application will be scalable, highly available, and resilient. The goal of each chapter is to give you a better understanding of multiple cloud patterns, connections, and integrations, so you can quickly start your very own project with an understanding of which Azure service you should use in this particular architecture.

Who this book is for

This book is designed to act as a journey through different Azure PaaS offerings. It covers many basic and intermediate concepts of different services, an understanding of which is crucial when it comes to developing reliable and robust solutions based on the Microsoft cloud platform. The main audiences are developers and IT pros who have just started working with Azure, or who want to do so, and who are seeking a detailed guide to enable them to extend their cloud skills.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Azure App Services, covers how to work with and develop web applications, monitoring, and diagnosis.

Chapter 2, Azure WebJobs, explains how to develop jobs co-hosted with Azure App Services.

Chapter 3, Deploying Web Applications as Containers, explains how to develop a web application and host it within a container using Azure App Services.

Chapter 4, Distributed Applications and Microservices with Service Fabric, is a basic introduction to a microservice platform called Azure Service Fabric.

Chapter 5, Using Azure Search, explains how to develop a search engine using Azure Search and utilize it in your application.

Chapter 6, Mobile Notifications with Notification Hub, covers the development of applications that leverage push notifications.

Chapter 7, Serverless and Azure Functions, outlines the building of applications based on the FaaS model.

Chapter 8, Integrating Different Components with Logic Apps, discusses the integration of different parts of your system using Azure Logic Apps.

Chapter 9, Swiss Army Knife - Azure Cosmos DB, covers the utilization of a modern storage solution with multiple APIs and a consistency model.

Chapter 10, Reactive Architecture with Event Grid, demonstrates how to reverse a control with another serverless Azure component called Azure Event Grid.

Chapter 11, Using Azure Storage - Tables, Queues, Files, and Blobs, covers a common Azure storage service with many different features.

Chapter 12, Big Data Pipeline - Azure Event Hub, explains how to create applications handling thousands of requests per second.

Chapter 13, Real-Time Data Analysis - Azure Stream Analytics, explains how to perform analyses on a stream of data.

Chapter 14, Enterprise Integration - Azure Service Bus, introduces an enterprise-class Azure service for messaging.

Chapter 15, Using Application Insights to Monitor Your Applications, explains how to use Azure Application Insights to log data from different Azure services as well as from your own applications.

Chapter 16, SQL in Azure - Azure SQL, introduces a relational database PaaS offering that is available in Azure.

Chapter 17, Big Data Storage - Azure Data Lake, introduces a limitless storage service for storing schemaless data.

Chapter 18, Scaling Azure Applications, covers more advanced topics on scaling applications and how scaling works in Azure.

Chapter 19, Serving Static Content Using Azure CDN, introduces your very own CDN hosted within Azure.

Chapter 20, Distributing Load with Azure Traffic Manager, explains how to achieve high availability and offload traffic using Azure Traffic Manager.

Chapter 21, Tips and Tricks for Azure, provides a bunch of tips for working with Azure and Azure resources.

To get the most out of this book

Activate your Azure subscription (whether a trial version, MSDN subscription feature, or a commercial one).

Since most of the examples are based on the .NET stack, some prior knowledge of this technology will make things easier for you, although, where possible, other technology stacks are also included, while a basic understanding of HTTP concepts (such as the protocol or communication model) will be an advantage. A basic understanding of container-related topics will also be beneficial. More advanced topics and detailed instructions will often be included in the Further reading sections. Make sure you cover them all after finishing exercises from this book.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packt.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

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We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789340624_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In the Main() method of your application, add the following code."

A block of code is set as follows:

using System;

namespace MyFirstWebJob
{
    class Program
    {

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

            var config = new JobHostConfiguration();
            config.UseTimers();

            var host = new JobHost(config);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

docker images

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "To do so, you have to right-click on the WebJobs section of your Azure App Service and select Open in Portal."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

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