Summary
This chapter explained the fundamentals of the Windows Azure storage service. Concepts such as shared keys, accessing the service through the REST API, using the storage client library, and the importance of the collocation of services were all covered to give a good grounding knowledge of the service.
The Queue service was introduced as a way to allow asynchronous communication between the components of your application, and to allow your work to be buffered. The exercise in this chapter demonstrated how to submit your work from a Silverlight application into a queue, so that the work is buffered and queued up, allowing the worker roles to process messages asynchronously as they got to them.
In the next chapter, we will look at how the Azure Blob storage can be used to save files and documents in a durable persistent store, and how sending files to the users can be made faster by using Content Distribution Networks (CDN).
