As I wrote in my previous post, different sites in TailSpin have different scalability needs. The public site, where customers complete surveys, would probably have need to scale to a large number of users. The first consequence in the design is the separation of this website into a specific web role...

Fabio asked me on twitter “why there’re no dequeue , peek and enqueue on Windows Azure Queues?”   One of the most common patterns for interactions with queues is this:     You get the message from the queue. This is not a “dequeue”, even though it looks like one. It is more a “peek &...

I had some great answers on my previous post question, like Simone ’s. Some where closer than others, but in general you got it right, Thanks! The recovery strategy depicted there assumes that all failures are external . That is, writing to a table fails, for example, and you have a chance to run the...

Things will eventually fail in your application and you need to be prepared. So most components should be designed for something going wrong and recover gracefully (or as gracefully as possible) and leaving the system in a consistent state (eventually in some cases). In this post I wrote about dealing...

We are almost content complete for our first Windows Azure Architecture Guide (the most probable name for our book). Available for download today: New updated samples, including all file processing and background tasks (lot’s of small nuggets in there, such as use of multiple tasks in a single Worker...

Last week Scott walked me through his current design for the “Integration Service” in our sample. Here’s some preview of this early thinking. As a reminder, our fictitious scenario has a process that runs every once in a while and generates flat files for some other system to process: it simply scans...

Question for you: if your application has 2 “background” task to perform, do you implement this as 2 distinct workers? or as 1 worker with 2 responsibilities? Option 1 is straight forward. Option 2 requires more work, but … does it make sense? It turns out that it does make sense. In some cases it makes...