1. Marcus Tillett
T:@drmarcustillett
www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk

2.  Dive into the Windows Azure Platform
 DEMO: Migrating an existing on-premise
application to Azure
 .NET development differences with the
Windows Azure Platform

4. AppFabric
Applications
SQL Azure
Windows Azure
Applications
Server Desktop Mobile Others

5. Application
Compute Storage
Config Fabric
AppFabric
Applications
SQL Azure
Windows Azure
Applications
Server Desktop Mobile Others

7. Public Internet
 IIS7
 Web Hosting
Web Role  Web Services
Load
Balancer
Storage Services

8. Public Internet
 Self hosted
 “Windows
Worker Services”
Role
Load  Infinite Loop
Balancer
Storage Service

10.  Open - REST interface
 HTTP or HTTPS
 Authenticated using secret keys
 Can access from outside Azure
 All data replicated at least 3 times
Table Storage Blob Storage Queue Drive

12.  Provide access rights to containers and blobs
 Start
 Expiry
 Permission (r, w, d, l)
 Resource (c, b)

13.  No limits on number of Queues
 Message:
 Max size 8kb
 Operations:
▪ Enqueue
▪ Dequeue
▪ RemoveMessage

15.  Queues guarantee a message will be
processed at least once.
 Allows recovery in the event of errors
 Message come back to life if not Removed
 Approximates First In First Out queue

17.  Partition Key for Scale
 Row Key for performance
 Non-RowKey queries result in a partition scan
 Row Key and Partition Key as strings
 Data sorted by Row Key within a Partition
 Denormalise the data for performance
 These aren’t SQL tables

18. PartitionKey RowKey Timestamp ReleaseDate
(Category) (Title)
Action Fast & Furious … 2009
Action The Bourne … 2007
Ultimatum
… … … …
Animation Open Season 2 … 2009
Fast query by
Animation The Ant Bully … 2006
Partition Key and
… … … …
Row Key Comedy Office Space … 1999
… … … …
SciFi X-Men Origins: … 2009
Wolverine
… … … …
War Defiance … 2008

19. Film_ByCategory Film_ByReleaseDate
PartitionKey RowKey ReleaseDate PartitionKey RowKey Category
(Category) (Title) (ReleaseDate) (Title)
Action Fast & Furious 2009 2009 Fast & Furious Action
Action The Bourne 2007 2007 The Bourne Action
Ultimatum Ultimatum
… … … … … …
Animation Open Season 2 2009 2009 Open Season 2 Animation
Animation The Ant Bully 2006 2006 The Ant Bully Animation
… … … … … …
Comedy Office Space 1999 1999 Office Space Comedy
… … … … … …
SciFi X-Men Origins: 2009 2009 X-Men Origins: SciFi
Wolverine Wolverine

20.  Example

22. Partition RowKey Title Date Approve Cost Description Amount
Key Centre
123 Client 1/6/10 Y 123
meeting
123 1 Travel £15.00
123 2 Lunch £10.00
123 3 Drinks £25.00
456 Training 5/8/10 N 123
course
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....

23.  Motivation:
Ensure that modifications to a master record and its
item records are performed in a transactional way.
Implementation :
Multiple entity types stored in single table with the
same partition key can utilise the Windows Azure
Table entity group transaction feature that provides
batch transactions on entities.
Uses:
When a transactional operation is required.

26.  Retry when connections fail
 Expect network latency (e.g. SQL Azure)
 Be stateless
 Design for failure
 Don’t rely on local storage
 Allow for restart in inconsistent state
 Be aware of the emerging patterns for Azure
 http://bit.ly/9Wsrk
 Choose you Table partition key carefully

27.  Development Fabric
 Differences from development and live
 Test early and often
 Limited registry and disk access
 Logging and Diagnostics
 Configuration
 app and web config for runtime static configuration
 Azure configuration for simple strings
 Roll your own for more complex configuration
 Deployment
 Only core .NET assemblies are pre-deployed in Azure. You
need to deploy any custom libraries yourself.

28. Transact-SQL Features Supported Transact-SQL Features Unsupported
 Constants
 Constraints
 Cursors  Common Language Runtime (CLR)
 Index management and rebuilding  Database file placement
indexes  Database mirroring
 Local temporary tables  Distributed queries
 Reserved keywords  Distributed transactions
 Stored procedures  Filegroup management
 Statistics management  Global temporary tables
 Transactions  SQL Server configuration options
 Triggers  SQL Server Service Broker
 Tables, joins, and table variables  System tables
 User-defined functions  Trace Flags
 Views, including sys.synonyms view
 Spatial data and indexes (June 2010)

29.  Further reading
 http://www.azure.com/
 http://blog.smarx.com/
 Signup for Azure
 http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/
(Credit card required)
 Ensure that you complete delete a deployment –
otherwise you will be charged!
 Join your local user group
 UK (http://ukazurenet.com)
 Buy a book

30.  http://tinyurl.com/azurebook
 “Thinking of... Delivering
Solutions on the Windows
Azure Platform?”
 ISBN: 0956155634

31. Marcus Tillett
T:@drmarcustillett
www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk