Preface

Microsoft Azure Storage provides a set of services that can be used by applications for data management and storage. By providing scalable, durable, and highly available services, this platform is remarkable for its design and rich features that can help you achieve all types of data management tasks, from the simplest to the most complex. For developers, it provides a rapid development environment that supports small to large-scale applications, and enables new scenarios on the cloud, server, mobile, and web. For IT professionals, it reduces the complexity of managing, protecting, and replicating data.

Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials is a jump-start book for developing applications using the different storage services. This book will teach you about the different characteristics of each service and how to utilize them in applications and perform basic programming operations on them.

The storage services are exposed through REST APIs which make them accessible to any HTTP enabled application; these APIs allow for platform specific client libraries to be implemented on top of them. This book will be focusing on Windows Azure Client Library for .NET using the C# language. We will deal with storing and retrieving unstructured data with blobs, and then move on to tables to insert and update entities in a structured NoSQL fashion. Then, we will explore Queues as a reliable messaging service; after that, we will show file storage that allows migrating legacy applications' data to the cloud; to end with, we will learn about transient fault handling and service monitoring.

This book is an introduction to Microsoft Azure Storage and also to developing applications that make use of these data management services.