Azure also offers a bunch of App Services that you can take advantage of.
One of those is a Service Bus.
You can think of the Service Bus as a reliable loosely coupled queue.
For example in my own experience years ago creating a
website we had the ability to order catalogs from a system.
Those catalogs were tied to a mainframe back end
that was not able to service requests very quickly.
Our ASP front end web roles would quickly fill up
that queue, and the back end mainframe would actually halt
(LAUGH)
any new catalogs that were being requested.
This might be the same in an E-Commerce website, for example.
If you have a tightly coupled back-end solution with your website, if the
back-end system goes down your website would be unable to process any orders.
A service bus would allow you to loosely couple these with a queue.
So that when things are added onto the queue from the website.
So, for example, an order, or a newsletter Sign
Up like we are building in our own app.
We don't have to worry about the back end not being able to service that as quickly.
Service Bus also gives a Service Bus relay.
A relay is a way for you to connect your own
WCF services, that you may have on premise securely with the cloud.
Another area currently in preview is a Notification Hub.
A Notification Hub will allow you to send out
push notifications to all devices that you have registered.
App services also offer Media Services.
Media Services allow video streaming across a variety of devices.
It's capable of huge workloads.
So think about a video service, for example YouTube.
Users may come in and upload videos.
On the back end, you're going to process those videos for different screen
sizes and OS'.
So you'll have some for HTML5 streaming, you'll
have some for H264, where I'll be watching
it on a phone or a slate, and it will do all of that for you.
App Services also offer BizTalk services.
BizTalk is a popular integration services, and
it's now available in the cloud, in Azure.
This is typically used for B2B or EAI integration scenarios.
And App Services also offer Active Directory and Identity Services.
So, you can integrate with your own premise AD or host your own in the cloud.
There's also active authentication currently in preview.
This is a two factor authorization security
system that many companies are now enabling.
All of this is down in Azure, in the cloud,
and these services can communicate with both your on premise, and
your cloud based solutions.
Next, we're going to look at creating a Service Bus message queue, and we're
going to add that to our Cloud Service
we're doing currently, for our newsletter signup.
Another area for App Services, is Caching.
Windows Azure offers in-memory caching.
As well as managed, multi-tenant shared cache.
So for example, I can create one cache that's built
upon the memory of all my different web roles or
worker roles.