In my attempt to cover most of the features of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Windows Azure, I’ll be covering Windows Azure storage in the next few posts.

Why using Windows Azure storage:

• Fault-tolerance: Windows Azure Blobs, Tables and Queues stored on Windows Azure are replicated three times in the same data center for resiliency against hardware failure. No matter which storage service you use, your data will be replicated across different fault domains to increase availability
• Geo-replication: Windows Azure Blobs and Tables are also geo-replicated between two data centers 100s of miles apart from each other on the same continent, to provide additional data durability in the case of a major disaster, at no additional cost.
• REST and availability: In addition to using Storage services for your applications running on Windows Azure, your data is accessible from virtually anywhere, anytime.
• Content Delivery Network: With one-click, the Windows Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) dramatically boosts performance by automatically caching content near your customers or users.
• Price: It’s insanely cheap storage

The only reason you would not be interested in the Windows Azure storage platform would be if you’re called Chuck Norris …
Now if you are still reading this line it means you aren’t Chuck Norris, so let’s get on with it, as long as it is serializable.

In this post we will cover Windows Azure Blob Storage, one of the storage services provided by the Microsoft cloud computing platform. Blob storage is the simplest way to store large amounts of unstructured text or binary data such as video, audio and images, but you can save about anything in it.

The concept behind the Windows Azure Blog storage is as following:

There are 3 things you need to know about to use Windows Azure Blob storage:

1. Account: Windows Azure storage account, which is the account, containing blob, table and queue storage. The storage account blob storage can contain multiple containers.
2. Container: blob storage container, which behaves like a folder in which we store items
3. Blob: Binary Large Object, which is the actual item we want to store in the blob storage

One of the features that are provided with the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, is the Windows Azure caching service, of which we will cover the basics in this post and show you how to set up the Windows Azure cache cluster.

1. Using memory caching to improve performance

By caching the information in memory and retrieving it from memory on subsequent request, we enhance performance greatly because we do not have to retrieve the information from disk every time, which is a lot slower then retrieving it from memory. Data that is being requested often and is not subject to fast change, is ideal to be cached in memory. The first retrieval the information is being retrieved from disk or database and after first retrieval we store the data in the memory cache. On the next request, we look if the data is available in cache and if it is, we serve it directly from the memory which is a lot faster.

You can get an idea of how big the difference in some cases could be by using memory retrieval instead of using disk retrieval.

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One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service. The Windows Azure Access Control Service is a hosted service that provides federated authentication and rules-driven, claims-based authorization

Quoted directly from MSDN:

Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) is a cloud-based service that provides an easy way of authenticating and authorizing users to gain access to your web applications and services while allowing the features of authentication and authorization to be factored out of your code. Instead of implementing an authentication system with user accounts that are specific to your application, you can let ACS orchestrate the authentication and much of the authorization of your users. ACS integrates with standards-based identity providers, including enterprise directories such as Active Directory, and web identities such as Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook.

Available features on the Windows Azure Access Control Service:

• Integration with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF)
• Out-of-the-box support for popular web identity providers including Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook
• Out-of-the-box support for Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0
• Support for OAuth 2.0 (draft 10), WS-Trust, and WS-Federation protocols
• Support for the SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, and Simple Web Token (SWT) token formats
• Integrated and customizable Home Realm Discovery that allows users to choose their identity provider
• An Open Data Protocol (OData)-based management service that provides programmatic access to the ACS configuration
• A browser-based management portal that allows administrative access to the ACS configuration

Now there is quite some stuff in the list above that I have no knowledge about. And to be honest, Security and Active Directory and so forth are not really my biggest interests. Security is a very important aspect, but I prefer to leave the hardcore stuff to the security people.

However that being said, integrating a website with the ACS to authenticate users against an identity provider like Windows Live ID, Google or Facebook is quite interesting. I know many of us have written websites before and using our own custom user store or a membership provider. We are holding sensitive data which is always a possible security leak. Integrating with an identity provider like Windows Live ID, Google or Facebook provides our users to experience the single sing-on experience and we do not have to worry about storing the sensitive data.

How many times have you not registered on some random website with a username and password that you can not remember anymore later ? Would it not be easier to identify yourself to all those websites with your Google or Facebook identity. It removes you from the hassle to remember all your different users and password and it lowers the risk of your credentials being exposed since your credentials will only be stored at identity providers such as Google or Facebook.

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In this post we will look into the publish/subscribe pattern with the Windows Azure Service Bus, which is a messaging platform in the cloud. One of the common use to build disconnected and reliable systems is the use of queues:

The Windows Azure Service Bus allows messaging using the publish/subscribe pattern, which looks like this:

The sender sends a message to a topic and anyone who could be interested in one of those messages, could subscribe to the topic. They could subscribe to receive any message, but they can also apply filters on the incoming messages to only receive certain messages that comply to the defined filter.

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Windows Azure is the public cloud computing platform Microsoft provides. With the Windows Azure platform, they also provide a set of a tools to work on the platform and to integrate with on-premise solutions.

One of integration features provided with the Windows Azure platform is Windows Azure Data Sync

Gotten for the Azure Data Sync on MSDN:

SQL Azure Data Sync is an Azure service that enables you to easily synchronize geographically disbursed SQL Server and SQL Azure databases. Data Sync provides an intuitive UI with optional tutorials that guide you through the process of creating database groupings (sync groups) that are synchronized together. You define exactly what data from each sync group is synchronized – tables, columns and rows (using row filters), as well as how frequently the synchronization jobs are performed.

SQL Azure Data Sync uses a hub-spoke topology with the hub always being a SQL Azure database.

Our company has three departments around the world and each of these work with their own database, since connecting to a central database would issue too much latency for the departments. For that reason, they all use an identical database, but it is local to the department and it contains the information related to the department. Now the departments want to share the information between departments, but they want to keep their database local for latency issues. This means we can not set up a central database to which the departments will connect to, so we need to set up a synchronization mechanism. There are multiple synchronization mechanisms like for example SQL Server replication and so forth. We want to use the Windows Azure Data Sync service to synchronize the information between the different departments, on a 1 hour base. One of the good things about Windows Azure Data Sync is that we do not have to do any coding, we do not have to set up any synchronization agent and so forth, we just have to set up the Data Synchronization in the Windows Azure portal.

To use Windows Azure or Windows Azure Services you will need an active Windows Azure subscription. Windows Azure Data Sync can be found in the portal:

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