The Agenda

This full day seminar provides an immersive, marketing-free, deep dive for experienced architects who want to learn architectural and implementation best practices that have been developed from implementing real world large distributed Azure systems that leverage characteristics and features of the Windows Azure platform.   This session will be presented by members of the Azure Customer Advisory Team and the Data Platform Azure Product Team.  
We will cover a number of use cases, including migration of traditional applications to the cloud, and more modern green field application scenarios and needs with a specific flavor and focus on data platform technologies.  We’ll show you how to analyze where a cloud platform can really make the difference. These considerations will include arguments like architecting for costs, increasing deployment and upgrade flexibility, reduce operating complexity in real application scenarios.  
The experiences we share and learnings we present to you have been acquired working with the most complex customer projects to date.   The practices we share are immediately applicable to design and implement solutions of every scale. Across the entire seminar we’ll consider different angles, like achieving scalability at every application layer, addressing reliability and resiliency requirements, and operating, monitoring and troubleshooting cloud solutions at scale. You will learn about pros and cons of different options for storing data in cloud solutions, like Azure SQL Database or SQL Server running in Windows Azure Virtual Machines, and how to optimize data access layers that need to interact with these different data sources using caching and other approaches. 
Agenda:
- Architecting scalable and reliable Azure data-centric solutions (1.5h)
- Implementing a cloud service data access layer (1.5h)
- Azure Data Platform technologies: performance and scalability comparison (1.5h)
- Design for operations: solution monitoring and troubleshooting (1.5h)