Cloud computing has proven its ability, to be the baseline element of  digital transformation. Out of different the cloud delivery models public, private and hybrid, public cloud plays a significant role in digital transformation across all the industries, enabling the businesses to deliver and innovate at speed.

Many enterprises start their cloud journey with IaaS with pure lift & shift, but beyond the IaaS, PaaS and modern e-PaaS famously known as Serverless bring the real value of the cloud to the businesses. PaaS and Serverless bring ease of management & maintenance, achieving scale & agility, adopting modern tech stack with the increasing speed, leveraging complex technologies like Machine Learning and Blockchain available as services and many more.

Due to those reasons, most organizations favor PaaS and Serverless over IaaS. We see increasing interest in PaaS and Serverless not only from SMEs but also from large enterprises.

PaaS services are highly competitive in public cloud. Public cloud platforms/vendors notably Azure & AWS, compete with each other, offering numerous PaaS services. PaaS and Serverless services are either hard or impossible to have them in on-premise environments with the same flexibility and scale as in public cloud. This has not only made PaaS services a unique selling point of public cloud, but also making them quite native to respective cloud platforms. 

This leaves the PaaS and Serverless context, analogous a conceptual level, but they differ significantly at the implementation level.  Developers should know the details of the chosen cloud platform, in order to fully leverage the features the platform offers.

“Practical Azure Application Development”  addresses two key challenges of PaaS and Serverless solution design & development on Azure.

1. Provides comprehensive technology decision making guide and details of Azure PaaS and Serverless services, and helps in deciding the right service for the problem in hand.
2. A step by step approach on how to implement the selected services with a real world sample solution, starting from designing, to development, deployment and post deployment monitoring.

You can find ample amount of content in the web explaining the usage of different services of Azure. But most of them are focused on one particular service and explaining the technical details of a single service.

That is good information in knowing individual services as individual building blocks,

but in reality, what most important is, knowing how to build an end to end solution on a cloud PaaS stack, integrating different native services knowing their nuances.

“Practical Azure Application Development” takes you in a journey starting from explaining what is cloud computing and how to procure an Azure account to developing a document management solution using different Azure services.

It includes

• How to procure an Azure account.
• Integration with Visual Studio Team Services and implementing continuous integration and automated deployments.
• Managing ARM templates and auto provisioning environments.
• Developing and deploying applications to Azure App Service.
• Persistence using SQL Database and Azure Storage.
• Expanding the solution with Cosmos DB.
• Performance tuning with Redis Cache.
• Integration with Azure Active Directory (AAD) and multi-tenancy concepts.
• Managing security and permissions using Azure RBAC.
• Creating and delivering reports with Azure Power BI Embedded

The approach and the coverage of the content of the book has made it one of the all times best about Azure, rated by Book Authority.

“One of the best sellers in Amazon and ranked 20th in Book Authority under the ‘Best Azure books of all time’.

Available in Amazon : http://a.co/1YWMxdb

I’m working on the second edition of the Practical Azure Application Development, with more focus on Serverless. Expect it by the end of 2019.