Developing Cloud Applications with Windows Azure™ Storage

Foreword

To my fellow Data Lover,

The most important part of any application is its data. Data is used for user accounts, orders, game scores, news items, status updates, documents, photos, music, images—the list goes on and on. It used to be that data was all about bytes stored on a hard disk and how quickly our applications could access these bytes. But for today’s modern cloud-based applications, topics related to data now include:

• The geo-location of the data center storing the data, which impacts latency and geopolitical boundaries.

• Security and confidentiality of the data.

• Redundancy and high availability of the data.

• Performance and scalability when accessing the data.

• Optimistic concurrency patterns, transactions, and atomicity.

• Historical copies, ...