Cloud Service Fundamentals
This series documents the individual components of the Cloud Service Fundamentals code project by the Azure CAT team.
The "Cloud Service Fundamentals in Azure" sample demonstrates how to create database-backed Azure services from real-world customer learnings of the Azure Customer Advisory Team (CAT). Learn the fundamental building blocks for scale-out Azure applications.
For more details about this project, read Building Blocks of Great Cloud Applications.
To find out about new content from the AzureCAT team, follow @WinAzureCAT
Telemetry
Telemetry – The basics for instrumentation and logging of application services through asynchronous mechanisms at scale implemented in a data pipeline. Effectively leveraging the telemetry data is critical in troubleshooting a service and determining the health of a service. The code project implements a scheduler using a background worker role to collect telemetry data periodically from the application, perf counters, IIS logs, event logs and the sharded SQL Database DMVs. The data is written to a custom ops store database in Azure SQL Database. The data collected by the scheduler can be viewed by reports hosted in SQL Reporting.
Articles include:
- Telemetry - Basics and Troubleshooting
- Telemetry - Application Instrumentation
- Telemetry - Data Acquisition Pipeline
- Telemetry - Reporting
Data Access Layer
The layer accessing the multiple databases in Azure SQL Database efficiently and reliably. The code project has data access wrappers for both single-database and sharded solutions, and demonstrates techniques such as parallel fan-out queries across shards.
Articles Include:
DAL - Introduction into Fault-Tolerance
Caching
By using Azure Caching, user data may be stored and retrieved more efficiently from a dedicated cache when combined with the Data Access Layer.
Cloud Service Fundamentals - Caching Basics (Azure Team Blog)
Configuration
Configuration files are key to help make managing your application seamless whether configuration parameters are in web.config or the service config – this should be transparent to the application.
Configuration in Distributed Applications
Application Request Routing
Implementation of cookie based routing & affinitization of users to multiple hosted services and sharded databases leveraging the ARR (Application Request Routing) technology in IIS to enable scale-out at the application service level with sharded databases.
Application Request Routing in CSF (Azure Team Blog)