Roberto Brunetti - Windows Azure Step by Step

Copyright 2011 Roberto Brunetti

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When Roberto asked us to write a foreword for this book, he made us happy for several reasons. First, its a pleasure introducing you to the work of one of the members of DevLeap, a group of professionals who have always been distinguished by the quality and the clarity of their teaching materials and courses. Second, the topic discussed in this book touches one of the most important issues for the future of our profession: cloud computing, and in particular, the Windows Azure Platform, which is the first application infrastructure specifically conceived and built for the cloud.

The evolution of networks and the growing diffuseness of the Internet, after having transformed the way people consume content, are on the verge of changing the way we think about concepts such as computational power and storage capabilities. We are used to thinking of those as related to local physical machines, but the advent of cloud computing is leading toward a revolution in how we access computational and storage resources. Thanks to the Windows Azure Platform, huge data centers easily provide the computational power, storage, services, and applications developers need to develop their own solutions, transforming them into services accessible on demand.

Providing technologies and infrastructures that we are already familiar with, within an on-demand infrastructure, helps to reduce management and hardware and software maintenance and licensing costs and to constantly increase available computational power and storage capacity.

In this book, Roberto accompanies us through the world of the Windows Azure platform and services, providing us with detailed but still basic explanations about the objectives and features of the major components of this new platform and telling us how we can leverage this platform to host our own services and applications. Ranging from the core of the Windows Azure Platform to its deployment and monitoring services, from SQL Azure to full integration with the development tools, this book guides us in discovering the main aspects of this new technology, from a concrete, development-oriented perspective and with plenty of practical examples, in line with the philosophy that has always inspired any DevLeap activity. Case studies and practical tips regarding the use of the services and the most efficient implementation strategies show the best way to approach the Windows Azure Platform, allowing us to ride this new technological wave, which is expected to significantly improve our chances to leverage computational power, storage, and basic services, from the beginning.

Here begins a new and interesting journey toward a new technological frontier. The only thing you need to do to jump aboard and start exploring this application platform under Robertos guidance is to press F5!

Giuseppe Guerrasio
Architect Evangelist
Developers & Platform Evangelism
Microsoft Italy

Gabriele Castellani
Developer & ITPro Evangelist Manager
Microsoft Italy

Windows Azure is the Microsoft cloud computing platform that lets developers leverage its powerful, scalable, and fault-tolerant infrastructure to build successful applications.

Windows Azure Step by Step provides an organized walkthrough of the Windows Azure platform and its related technologies. The text is decidedly introductory; it discusses every released component, discussing theory interspersed with simple but effective procedures you can follow, and offering downloadable code examples you can use to jump-start your learning about the Azure platform and as a basis for your own explorations.