Hardening Azure Applications

Learn what it takes to build large scale, mission critical applications -hardened applications- on the Azure cloud platform.

This 208 page book covers the techniques and engineering principles that every architect and developer needs to know to harden their Azure/.NET applications to ensure maximum reliability and high availability when deployed at scale. While the techniques are implemented in .NET and optimized for Azure, the principles here will also be valuable for users of other cloud-based development platforms.

Applications come in a variety of forms, from simple apps that can be built and deployed in hours to mega-scale apps that need significantly higher engineering rigor and robust organizations to deliver them. How do you build such massively scalable applications to keep pace with traffic demands while always being ‘online’ with five 9’s availability?

The authors take you step by step through the process of evaluating and building applications with the appropriate hardness attributes. For example, it is easy to say that an application should be available “all the time”, but it is very important to understand what each level of 9 for availability means and the resulting implications on engineering and resources. The book explains the details required for developers and IT Pros to get it right in Azure.

What you’ll learn

• Why it is important to harden Azure/.NET applications and ensure they are always available.
• Characteristics of advanced applications
• Design for failure – how to avoid common mistakes and prevent failure
• Design for scale – prepared to scale up and scale down the application to fully leverage the best of Cloud infrastructure
• Techniques to secure the applications without restricting the business goals of the company
• How to train teams and people to run such hardened services

Who this book is for

Developers creating high reliability Azure applications in .NET plus most other popular environments like Java, PHP, node.JS, Python, Apache, etc.

Architects and CIOs.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introducing the Cloud Computing Platform
Chapter 2: Cloud Applications
Chapter 3: Hardened Cloud Applications
Chapter 4: Service Fundamentals: Instrumentation, Telemetry, and Monitoring
Chapter 5: Key Application Experiences: Latency, Scalability, and Throughput
Chapter 6: Failures and Their Inevitability
Chapter 7: Failures and Recovery
Chapter 8: High Availability, Scalability, and Disaster Recovery
Chapter 9: Availability and Economics of 9s
Chapter 10: Securing Your Application
Chapter 11: The Modernization of Software Organizations