Azure Canonical Application Architecture

While working with a customer last week at our Microsoft Executive Briefing Center (Microsoft EBC), one of the things we need to do was find a simple way to whiteboard the architecture.  We walked through a lot of variations of application patterns, but the customer ultimately wanted to see one code base running on Azure that could support multiple clients (such as desktop, phone, browser, etc.)   We found a model that was pretty straightforward and allowed us to easily map the customer’s scenario onto the Azure platform.

Once we had a model, it was a lot easier to drill down on things such as why SQL Azure vs. Azure Storage or how to flow claims or how to partition the database.  It’s like a backdrop that you can overlay or drill down on security, performance, manageability, etc.  It helped us quickly explore paths without getting into weeds and keeping the big picture in mind.  It also helped us figure out where target some of the key architectural spikes.

Here are some of the models we walked through on the whiteboard:

Baseline

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Azure Storage Example

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SQL Azure Example

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