C H A P T E R  9

AppFabric: Caching

In my conversations with customers, I make a point to stress the importance of understanding the implications of a PaaS architecture. With Windows Azure, the fact that load balancing can only be done in a round-robin fashion certainly has architectural impact, especially when pitted against the fact that two instances must be running to remain within the terms of the Azure Service Level Agreement. This is where customers typically realize what I really mean when I say that an app must be stateless.

Sometimes, this is followed by a confession that their “stateless” web farm-based application uses in-memory session state, and that they employ a sticky-IP type of load balancing to ensure that requests go to ...

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