Services

In Chapter 5, Architecting and Building Applications for the Cloud, one of the necessary requirements for achieving Cloud Ready applications were backing services. A backing service, or service for short, is quite simply any networked service that an application will consume. For example, MySQL, SQL Server, and S3 Blob stores for DataStores, RabbitMQ for messaging and emailing services. Note that when we say service, it corresponds to a blueprint of that service. In order for applications to use the service, we must create an instance of the service, or what we call a service instance. Once these service instances are created, an application instance can use these once they are bounded.

That is, these services are actually accessed by application code through some URL or some other form of a locator that potentially require credentials, that is, this could be some form of connection string. When this happens, we say that an application is now bounded to a service instance. For the...