Windows Azure Solution Cookbook

I’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing cloud computing with our customers lately and the common theme among them all has been “lean”. Windows Azure can provide some tremendous benefits to nearly every organization we speak with: operating cost reduction, faster time to market, scale on demand. It literally can’t get any leaner that this.

The challenge I’m running into is that it’s hard for architects and developers to get a big picture of the Azure platform and how all the features can be used together to build solutions. Microsoft is shipping new services on a quarterly basis and each new service is designed to solve a particular need our customers are asking for. We need a way to see these services holistically as a set of building blocks or ingredients to use in our solutions.

Windows Azure Reference ArchitectureIn this series going to offer up some architectural recipes to help visualize solutions to the common scenarios we’ve identified since Azure’s launch. These are by no means the only solutions you an solve with Azure or the only way to address these scenarios but hopefully they will provide you with a high level way to visualize your solutions on the Azure platform.

The diagram you see to the right is designed to provide a layered architectural overview of the developer and infrastructure services currently available in Windows Azure*. (Note: You can click on it to see the full size version.) This diagram will be the master template for the entire series.

Recipes


* Special thanks to my buddy Holger Sirtl for his outstanding architecture overview diagram. This series would not be possible with out him.