Elasticity means that service consumers can increase or decrease the subscribed service level at any

time per business demand. From the business perspective, elasticity of the cloud reflects the agility of
the company adopting itself to market changes.

The availability of the cloud means that users can access the services hosted on the cloud at anytime,
anywhere.

Fault Domain refers to a group of resources that could fail at the same time.

Update Domain refers to a group of resources that can be updated simultaneously during system
upgrades.

Scalability is an indicator of how well a system can support its users in terms of both quantity and
quality.

Quantity indicates the capacity of a system to deal with workload changes. Adding more memory or
CPUs to improve the capacity of the server is an example of scaling up or vertical scaling. However,
vertical scaling is not limitless and can cause service interruptions. Adjusting the system capacity by
increasing or reducing the number of servers is called horizontal scaling or scaling out.

Quality means that a service can maintain an acceptable performance level when dealing with a large
number of concurrent users.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is the hardware provided by a cloud platform provider to run user’s
application, including infrastructure, hardware devices and server virtualization.

PaaS (Platform as a Service) provides a software environment to develop and run applications on the
cloud. While IaaS users have to manage their virtual servers, PaaS users do not have to directly work on
virtual servers. Microsoft Azure manages every aspect of the virtual machines, including the following:

 Installing an OS and building up the necessary environment to host the service

 Updating the OS and installing security patches
 Monitoring the health of virtual servers and performing auto recovery when necessary

PaaS separates cloud services from underlying infrastructure. Microsoft Azure provides two platform
services for cloud service developers: Microsoft Azure Websites and Microsoft Azure Cloud Service.

 SQL Database – Microsoft Azure SQL Database is highly compatible with Microsoft SQL Server.
 Storage Services – Microsoft Azure provides a rich set of NoSQL storage, including table storage,
BLOB storage, queue storage and virtual drives. A table is used to store large amount of
unstructured data; BLOB is used to store large amounts of text or binary data such as videos,
audio and images; Queue Storage provides message queue service; and virtual drives simulate
NTFS disk volumes for cloud services.
 Caching Services – Microsoft Azure provides Role-Based Caching and Microsoft Azure Caching.
 Service Bus – Service Bus provides various message-based services for system integration, loose
coupling, hybrid cloud, and push notifications, including message queues, topics and
subscriptions, notification hubs and relayed connection.
  Mobile Service – Mobile Service provides a series of common services required by mobile
applications to ingest, encode, manage, and share media. Users can upload media documents to
Media Service, which encodes, encrypts, and broadcasts media streams to end users.
 Workflow Service – Allows to create, execute, and manage workflows on Microsoft Azure.
 HDInsight – HDInsight provides the capability of managing dynamic Apache Hadoop clusters to
handle Big Data scenarios on Microsoft Azure.
 Active Directory Access Control - Active Directory Access Control provides strong support for
authentication and authorization.
 BizTalk Service

Pitfalls in migrating existing ASP.NET Websites

 Azure Websites Runtime Environment – Azure Websites runtime environment is based on IIS
running on the Windows OS. Azure Websites does not allow you to customize IIS or virtual
machines. You must consider using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services or Microsoft Azure Virtual
Machines if you need control over the environment.
 Data Storage – Azure Website does not allow you to access the entire file system on virtual
machines. You can read and write files and folders under the root folder of your sites. You
should consider using Microsoft Azure Storage Service if you need high performance key
value pair storage or large volume file storage.
 Session States – Although Azure Websites support cookie-based sticky sessions, it is advisable
to save session states to external storages (such as database). When the virtual machine
hosting your website fails, the Azure Websites failover mechanism reallocates the website to
another healthy virtual machine. If you save your session states in memory, the states will be
lost during migrations. In addition, if a website is inactive for a long time, it will be removed
from IIS and put into hibernation which will again cause websites to lose in-memory states.