The full sample with an automated setup is now (finally) available for download. You can check it out running on Azure at https://azurestocktrader.cloudapp.net. At the top of the landing page there is a download link. The sample will setup purely on-premise, as well as on Azure or both if you have an Azure subscription, or free trial. There are all new documents for how to re-configure the application using ConfigWeb, to show various deployment topologies. You can view the topology of our current deployment on Azure by hitting https://azureconfigweb.cloudapp.net. The current deployment is hybrid; with option to have the Azure Web site reach back into on-premise services and use an on-premise SQL Server running in a secure private data center. Some highlights:
A) You can wire the desktop smart client to use Azure hosted services in the cloud; or on-premise services.
B) You can setup the application elements to run on-premise, but use SQL Azure in the cloud; with no setup/maintenance of the database infrastructure required.
C) One code base runs on Azure, on-premise, against SQL Server, and/or against SQL Azure.
D) I need to complete the benchmarks, at which time I will do some more posts around performance characteristics between cloud and on-premise; and some of the tweaks made to the application to deal with Internet latencies: for example when running the desktop smart client (or web app) behind a corporate firewall and going out over the Internet for business service + database requests running on Azure/SQL Azure.
E) As before, you can use ConfigService to setup on-premise clusters with load balancing/failover, and use ConfigWeb to manage application-level settings across nodes without app restarts or config file re-deploys on a live system. This also works when scaling out across many Azure instances. If on-premise, you can use ConfigService to provide load balancing (say, between a Web site and remote services it uses via WCF); or plug in an external load balancer like F5 or Cisco. On Azure, the Azure Fabric Controller provides the load-balancing automatically.
The setup is automated (as much as I could)--so you can just run an MSI and the databases, web sites, etc all get setup automatically.
-Greg