Expand ASP. NET Applications on Windows azure

Senior architecture evangelist Brian prince and technical evangelist Nathan Totten demonstrate several optional solutions to expand ASP. NET applications installed on Windows azure.

The speaker pointed out that we can combine these solutions to increase or decrease the scale of applications. These solutions can be categorized into several categories: cache, traffic distribution, asynchronous work processing, and storage ). Prince and Totten recommend the following solutions to increase the scale of ASP. NET applications:

Increase the number of azure instances

Like adding virtual servers, this is the easiest way to allocate loads.

Add Table or blob Storage

Table Storage is Schema-less and non-relational, but it is more scalable than SQL azure. As Totten said, each partition in Table storage can process about 500 requests per second. Blob storage is an unstructured solution that may be useful for large file storage.

Add appfabric Cache

Appfabric is used to cache frequently accessed data in the memory and can also be used as a session Status provider.

Asynchronous work Processing

Azure queue will send messages to background processes called worker roles. When processing shopping cart or file uploads, We need to properly set azure queue so that the business logic can be processed in the background to improve front-end performance. The queue size is limited, but it can be used in combination with table and blob storage.

Place static or semi-static content in the azure Content Delivery Network

As the speaker said, the Windows azure Content Delivery Network (CDN, content delivery network) currently has 26 nodes in the world and will regularly add more nodes. For users, placing static data (or infrequently updated data) in CDN can improve performance, because the data will be extracted from the nearest data center.

Use traffic manager

Windows azure traffic manager (traffic manager) is similar to CDN but not used to store content. It hosts the entire application in multiple locations to provide better availability worldwide. When the master instance is unavailable, the traffic manager can also be used as a disaster recovery system.

Prince and Totten point out that the reliable initial design of applications is always the key to good performance, but the objective of Windows Azure is to allow us to easily increase or decrease the size of applications, this is also required by some organizations in their needs.