Getting to Know Azure Mobile App

Microsoft Azure Mobile App has recently gone GA (General Availability) and has definitely captured my attention. Mobile App is a tremendous accelerator that enables us to go from an idea to a functional prototype quickly. Then, we can continue to build on that initial investment to create a robust production ready app. Finally, using Visual Studio Team Services and Release Management, we can publish our apps to our favorite app Stores.

Why Mobile App

These are reasons why you should consider Mobile App on your next project. They certainly contributed to my agility throughout my adventure.

• Build native and cross platform apps
• Connect to your enterprise systems
• Connect to SaaS APIs easily
• Build offline-ready apps with sync
• Push Notifications to millions in seconds
• Automatically scale-out to handle any incoming customer load.
• Build low friction server-side REST services.
• Benefit from a simplified data access layer.
• Deliver functional prototypes with minimal effort.

Scaling Azure Cloud Services

When we build applications on the cloud, we usually favor scaling-out over scaling-up. Consequently, scaling in and out is supported out of the box on Microsoft Azure. On rare occasions, there is a business need to scale-up during peak hours and to scale-down for the quiet hours. This blog post will show you how to achieve this with the help of Microsoft Azure Automation and with PowerShell.

Keep in mind, that scaling up and down requires us to be creative.

Choosing The Right Compute Virtual Machine Size

Believe me when I say that we regularly overestimate the actual resource requirements for our applications. To be fair, it used to be the right thing to do. But when it comes to the cloud, the right way to go about resource requirements is to start small and to scale out to maintain your applications’ target performance. If scaling out isn’t working because the Virtual Machine lack RAM, CPU or local temporary storage its time to think about scaling up.