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.

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Personally, I’m all about Cloud Native Hyper-Scale applications. WOW! that’s a lot of buzz words in a row so let’s distill that to something more meaningful. I love the flexibility I get from Platform as a Service (PaaS). This model provides me with granular control over my application’s structure without thinking too much about the actual Virtual Machines (VMs).

The Azure ecosystem is rich with Software as a Service (SaaS) features that developers can use to build their own applications. SaaS provides tremendous value to developers and stakeholders because we as developers don’t have to take ownership. These are some of the SaaS features available developers on Azure today.

• Azure SQL Database
• Azure Table Storage
• Azure Blob Storage
• Azure Service Bus
• Azure API Management
• Azure DocumentDB
• Azure Search
• Azure Traffic Manager
• Azure Cache
• Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Azure Active Directory
• Azure Push Notification
• Azure Automation
• Azure Scheduler
• …

Every year, the list of services keep growing. Each service is built and maintained by Microsoft. It comes with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and assurances around data and privacy, SLAs also means that Microsoft is responsible for support. In other words, it means that we as developers get to focus on adding business value to our application and let Microsoft worry about the details. As long as we consider performance targets while we design, we get to spend time on the code that matters most to our businesses.

What’s your Cloud flavor? Mine is like a buffet, I compose with PaaS, Saas, IaaS and Hybrid Cloud solutions to provide the best end user experiences.