This week we start working on our Azure Guidance project. Many customers are looking to move to Azure and need good guidance on how to make the move to the new platform. At patterns & practices, this is our number one goal. You could think of this as a program that will have multiple projects associated with it. The program will follow three major themes:
- Moving to the Cloud
- Integrating with the Cloud
- Leveraging the Cloud
These themes will allow us to categorize the scenarios that we will be delivering. Most of the scenarios are challenges that customers face today. And as we progress the program forward we will have more scenarios. The following is a simple picture of our plans on delivering on this project.
Enterprise Library on Azure
Our first goal is to make sure that Enterprise Library 5.0 works on Azure. We have done a spike taking the Web Client Guidance Reference Implementation and changing pieces to use Enterprise Library. We will create a tech note of what works and does not work. This is not to create guidance on Azure, yet just give us and customers a way to ensure that Enterprise Library does not impede the opportunity to move to Azure.
Scenarios
We are going to build this project driven by scenarios. We will ship each scenario every 2 months focusing on 3 core scenarios at first. We will take a ASP.NET internal application and move it to Azure. This is more than just a coding exercise. We want to have an end to end scenario, from coding, migration, management and deployment. We will add some features to the app and start taking into consideration some of the change needed to take advantage of Azure. When you have your application running in Azure you may need to integration with other applications that you have. We will create guidance to help get through the challenges.
Integration Pack for Azure
As we move through the scenarios we will have reference implementation applications to help us explain and show how to meet the challenges. As we move through each scenario and creating the applications, we will take any reusable assets so that we can package them up into a library that customers can use. We are not sure that we will have something like this, but we think we will.
This is just an introduction to our plans for the next ~6 months. As we move forward we will talk more and more about each scenario as we cover them. We will have more information available at our project site as it comes along. If you want to know more you can keep watching my blog, Eugineo Pace’s blog and our CodePlex web site.
Listened to: The Leper Affinity from the album “Blackwater Park” by Opeth