Cloud Design Patterns

Cloud applications have a unique set of characteristics. They run on commodity hardware, provide services to untrusted users, and deal with unpredictable workloads. These factors impose a range of problems that you, as a designer or developer, need to resolve. Your applications must be resilient so that they can recover from failures, secure to protect services from malicious attacks, and elastic in order to respond to an ever changing workload.

This guide demonstrates design patterns that can help you to solve the problems you might encounter in many different areas of cloud application development. Each pattern discusses design considerations, and explains how you can implement it using the features of Windows Azure. The patterns are grouped into categories: availability, data management, design and implementation, messaging, performance and scalability, resilience, management and monitoring, and security.

You will also see more general guidance related to these areas of concern. It explains key concepts such as data consistency and asynchronous messaging. In addition, there is useful guidance and explanation of the key considerations for designing features such as data partitioning, telemetry, and hosting in multiple datacenters.

These patterns and guidance can help you to improve the quality of applications and services you create, and make the development process more efficient. Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Part 1. Preface

Part 2. PATTERNS
Chapter 1. Cache-Aside Pattern
Chapter 2. Circuit Breaker Pattern
Chapter 3. Compensating Transaction Pattern
Chapter 4. Competing Consumers Pattern
Chapter 5. Compute Resource Consolidation Pattern
Chapter 6. Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) Pattern
Chapter 7. Event Sourcing Pattern
Chapter 8. External Confguration Store Pattern
Chapter 9. Federated Identity Pattern
Chapter 10. Gatekeeper Pattern
Chapter 11. Health Endpoint Monitoring Pattern
Chapter 12. Index Table Pattern
Chapter 13. Leader Election Pattern
Chapter 14. Materialized View Pattern
Chapter 15. Pipes and Filters Pattern
Chapter 16. Priority Queue Pattern
Chapter 17. Queue-Based Load Leveling Pattern
Chapter 18. Retry Pattern
Chapter 19. Runtime Reconfguration Pattern
Chapter 20. Scheduler Agent Supervisor Pattern
Chapter 21. Sharding Pattern
Chapter 22. Static Content Hosting Pattern
Chapter 23. Throttling Pattern
Chapter 24. Valet Key Pattern

Part 3. GUIDANCE
Chapter 25. Chapter 23. Throttling Pattern
Chapter 26. Autoscaling Guidance
Chapter 27. Caching Guidance
Chapter 28. Compute Partitioning Guidance
Chapter 29. Data Consistency Primer
Chapter 30. Data Partitioning Guidance
Chapter 31. Data Replication and Synchronization Guidance
Chapter 32. Instrumentation and Telemetry Guidance
Chapter 33. Multiple Datacenter Deployment Guidance
Chapter 34. Service Metering Guidance
Chapter 35. Service Metering Guidance