Chris Hay

Chris Hay is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev, an international conference speaker, and cofounder of a .NET usergroup in Cambridge, UK (http://nxtgenug.net/). He has spent part of the past year working and living in India.

My day job involves building some of the largest m-commerce systems in the world. When Microsoft announced Windows Azure to the world at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in 2008, I immediately thought of how I could use the cloud as part of the systems I was actively building.

Of all of the key scenarios for using the cloud, dynamic scaling is one of the most well-known. I was hoping that the promise of massive numbers of servers and a simplified platform would be able to meet my enormous scale needs, while making it easier to build large-scale systems. Azure offered the promise of being able to deploy an application into the cloud and have an automated deployment and provisioning system, with a complete abstraction of the underlying physical infrastructure.

Coupling this newfound passion with my long-held desire to someday write a book, I settled down to write the proposal that I would send to Manning, pitching my idea for a book titled Azure in Action. And a year later, here it is!

books by Chris Hay

Azure in Action

  • October 2010
  • ISBN 9781935182481
  • 488 pages
  • printed in black & white

Azure in Action is a fast-paced tutorial that introduces cloud development and the Azure platform. The book starts with the logical and physical architecture of an Azure app, and quickly moves to the core storage services—BLOB storage, tables, and queues. Then, it explores designing and scaling frontend and backend services that run in the cloud. Through clear, crisp examples, you'll discover all facets of Azure, including the development fabric, web roles, worker roles, BLOBs, table storage, queues, and more.