"Neo4j" entries

Building applications in Azure

Identifying the key requirements of a web application cloud architecture.

Download a free copy of “Azure for Developers,” an O’Reilly report by experienced .NET developer John Adams that breaks down Microsoft’s Azure platform in plain language, so that you can quickly get up to speed.

One of the most natural uses of the cloud is for web applications. You may already be using virtual machines on your own systems to make deploying your applications easier, either to new hardware or to additional servers. Microsoft Azure uses virtualization too, but it also brings useful benefits that virtualization cannot deliver alone. By hosting your application in the cloud, you can leverage automatic scaling, load balancing, system health monitoring, and logging. You also benefit from the fact that managed cloud platforms help narrow the attack surface of your system by automatically patching the operating system and runtimes and by keeping systems sandboxed. Let’s look at some examples of how to build some common web applications inside of Microsoft Azure.

Online store

Imagine that you work for a retailer who generates a significant amount of revenue through online sales. Imagine also that this retailer has been around for long enough that it already has an established web architecture that runs in a private data center. This retailer has decided that it wants to move to a hosted platform so that it no longer has any data center responsibilities and it can focus on its core business. How do you replatform this web application into Microsoft Azure? Let’s first identify some requirements for this system:

  • It has high utilization and needs to serve a large number of concurrent users without timing out, even during peak hours such as Black Friday sales.
  • It needs to accommodate a wide variety of products in its database that do not necessarily all follow the same schema.
  • It needs a fast and intelligent search bar so that customers can find products easily.
  • It needs to be able to recommend products to customers as they shop to help generate additional revenue.

However these requirements are being met today in the private data center, I can suggest some guidelines on how to reproduce this system in Microsoft Azure so you can boost performance instead of just replicating it. I will take each of these requirements in order and explain how to leverage certain Azure components so that these requirements are properly met.

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Graph tools forge path to new solutions

Find emergent properties and solutions to new computing problems with graphs

alchemyjsGraph databases haven’t made the news much because, I think, they don’t fit in convenient categories. They certainly aren’t the relational databases we’re all familiar with, nor are they the arbitrary keys and values provided by many NoSQL stores. But in a highly connected world–where it’s not what you know but whom you know–it makes intuitive sense to arrange our knowledge as nodes and edges.

Ted Nelson, inventor of the hyperlink, recognized the power of viewing life in graphs. After the implosion of his historic Xanadu project, he embarked on a graph database tool called ZigZag. The most modern instantiations of graphs–the Neo4j store and the Alchemy.js tool for interactively visualizing graphs–were well represented this year at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention.

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