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I know this post is quite off the track with my series on Big Data and Hadoop and I apologize for this right at the beginning. This post is all about Azure - Microsoft's cloud platform and if this interests you, please go ahead and read through, else, feel free to skip. I could not resist sharing this incredibly helpful piece of information that I have compiled and I hope this will provide you some guidance towards building or moving your on premise workloads to Microsoft Azure.

The patterns & practices team has been working on developing Azure architecture guidance. I’m happy to announce that first round of guidance is now available to public at https://github.com/mspnp/azure-guidance. The purpose of this project is to provide architectural guidance to enable you to build and deploy world-class systems using Azure. These documents focus on the essential aspects of architecting systems to make optimal use of Azure, and summarize best practice for building cloud solutions. The current set of guidance documents contains the following items. Note that this is a living project. We welcome feedback, suggestions, and other contributions to those items.

• API Design describes the issues that you should consider when designing a web API.
• API Implementation focusses on best practices for implementing a web API and publishing it to make it available to client applications.
• Autoscaling Guidance summarizes considerations for taking advantage of the elasticity of cloud-hosted environments
• Background Jobs Guidance describes the options available, and best practices for implementing tasks that should be performed in the background.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) Guidance provides general guidance and good practice for using the CDN to minimize the load on your applications, and maximize availability and performance.
• Caching Guidance summarizes how to use caching with Azure applications and services to improve the performance and scalability of a system.
• Data Partitioning Guidance describes strategies that you can use to partition data to improve scalability, reduce contention, and optimize performance.
• Monitoring and Diagnostics Guidance provides guidance on how to track the way in which users utilize your system, trace resource utilization, and generally monitor the health and performance of your system.
• Retry General Guidance covers general guidance for transient fault handling in an Azure application.
• Retry Service Specific Guidance summarizes the retry mechanism features for the majority of Azure services, and includes information to help you use, adapt, or extend the retry mechanism for that service.
• Scalability Checklist summarizes best practices for designing and implementing scalable services and handling data management.
• Availability Checklist lists best practices for ensuring availability in an Azure application.

Please join our gitter chat for any questions or suggestions. We’ll continue releasing guidance on each architectural aspect of cloud services.

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