Shiju Varghese's Blog

 When we build apps for larger IoT scenarios or working on Big Data solutions, one major challenge would be to handle millions of messages received from hundreds of systems where these messages will be subscribed by hundreds of other systems. To handle this kind of problem using our traditional enterprise messaging systems and publish-subscribe message brokers would be really a challenge as we need to handle massive amount of stream of data in a second, in which we may need to process the data and events in near real-time. Our most of the existing publish-subscribe message brokers would be failed when we deal with millions of messages in a second. Technologies like Apache Kafka solves this problem by providing a high-throughput distributed messaging system with a distributed commit log. Kafka is designed for cluster-centric design where you may need to leverage distributed coordination tools such as Apache ZooKeeper for coordinating and synchronizing the cluster nodes. This may leads to lot of operational complexity when working with larger distributed systems.

In my previous blog post, Building Distributed Cloud Apps With Azure Cloud Services And Azure Service Bus Topic, I have introduced a reference Azure app for developing multi-tiered distributed apps using Azure Cloud services and Azure Service Bus Topic. In that app, we have used two Azure worker roles for running a background processing system and a Notification Hub. This app is same like the previous one, the only difference here is that we are replacing two Azure worker roles with two WebJobs and running in a Azure  WebSite. In the previous system, we have used a one Azure web role and two Azure worker roles for an ordr processing demo app. Here we replace these three systems with one WebSite, which is also working as the host for two WebJobs. In short, we replace the worker role with WebJobs. The extra functionality which we have added in this version is the distributed caching with Azure Redis cache.

We have been developing few sample apps for providing guidance on building cloud apps with Microsoft Azure. We release the first sample app for building distributed apps on Microsoft Azure. The guidance app is available on github at https://github.com/AccelNA/azure-guidance. 

Microsoft Azure team has announced a new NoSQL database named "DocumentDB". DocumentDB is a fully managed, massively scalable, NoSQL database as a service on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This is a right movement from Microsoft as the existing Table storage was not effcient comparing to other NoSQL databases available in the market. In my initial evalution, DocumentDB is the most feature rich NoSQL databse comparing to many popular NoSQL database.  In DocumentDB, we can write Trigger, Stored Procedure and User Defined Function (UDF) in JavaScript. 

We have just started a sample app for demonstrate building apps with ReactJS and ASP.NET Web API.  An early version of the app can available on github at https://github.com/shijuvar/react-aspnet . Please note that the ReactJS version of the app is not a final version, but it is an early version which will continuously refactor with a proper Flux architecture. The RESTful API written with ASP.NET Web API 2.

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional 2014 award in Microsoft Azure.This is my fifth Microsoft MVP award in a row. Last four years, I was received Microsoft MVP award for my contributions to ASP.NET, but this time I am honoured with Microsoft Azure MVP award.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to use Azure Redis Cache for storing ASP.NET session state. In Azure, In-Proc session mode does not work as our application will be working with sticky sessions on a load balancing scenario. In this context, ASP.NET  session state and caching do not work so that we have to put ASP.NET state information on a persistent storage. And it is very important that we should develop the cloud apps in stateless manner so that we can easily scale our apps. In Azure, we can leverage the following storage options as a persistent storage for storing ASP.NET state information.

We have released an updated version for the single page application (SPA) demo built with ASP.NET Web API 2 and AngularJS. The current version (v1.2.0) of the demo app available on github at https://github.com/MarlabsInc/webapi-angularjs-spa. The following are the new features added in the webapi-angularjs-spa v1.2.0: