In this series, we will discuss about Microsoft Cloud Application Architecture and common cloud computing patterns to make application resilient and scalable.

We will be using Asp.net MVC as our framework for applicable examples and Azure as cloud services provider.

If you are new to azure development, check out Getting Started Azure development guide.

If you do not know where to start, please check my blog post, which covers detail about getting subscription and setting up. In this series, we assume that you already have active Azure subscription and Visual Studio 2013 or later installed on your system.

Since we are using Microsoft Azure cloud as cloud services provider, let us discuss the type of services azure provide us. First, we will discuss usual broad categories of services and then we will move to Azure specific services types. We can divide Microsoft Azure services into 3 broad categories such as below:

1. Infrastructure as a Service
2. Platform as a Service
3. Software as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service

This is the basic providing of any cloud services provider; it is renting the IT Infrastructure for your use, it includes compute resources such as VMs for windows, Linux etc. Storage to store data, network resources such VPN etc. You have full control over the resources and it is your responsibility to apply the patches and do maintenance, although Microsoft provide you Service Level Agreement and guarantees the up time of the resources. You will mostly pay for resources you use with respect to time or number of unit consumed, and is usually called Pay as you go model, which we will discuss in detail later on in this series.

All these resources enable you to do what we call as lift and shift migration, you only need is to migrate all resources to cloud as it is. Infrastructure is the main building block and enable even cloud providers to provide as Paas, Saas and other services, which we look at next.

Platform as a Service

Every Cloud resource provider services, which enable developers to quickly deliver services/solutions  without need to manage the underlying infrastructure such as VM, storage, network. These providing are usually can be acquired on demand and can scale as your solution demand more resources. Payment model for these is the same as pay as you go or some time unit of consumption.

Software as a Service

In software as a service, usually vendors use cloud-computing provider’s services to develop solutions and expose their services as software. End users (you) of services do not need to worry about anything related to under lying infrastructure or to manage any resources, users just use the services over the internet using browser and payment method is usually subscription based. Office365 is a good example of Saas.

Now once we have passed the board categories discussion, let us move to exciting part of the services available to us on Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services

Microsoft Azure Cloud provide a whole bunch of Cloud Services, some are listed below, and as the list is keep growing, we will keep adding them to the list.

I know it is long list; and some items are duplicated as well under some headings, unbelievably, we are going to cover every one of the items listed above, and will discuss common cloud patterns for each item. As we go, we will keep adding the Icons for each discussed item, when a relative item’s post published on this site.

We are going to group some items in an implementation to cover real world scenarios and best practices as well as common cloud patterns while development, related source code will be available through GitHub.

This will be long and exciting journey, I hope you are ready, because we are about to get started.

Stay Tuned.