Authentication
Access Control is a Windows Azure service that provides an easy way of authenticating users who need to access your web applications and services, without having to factor complex authentication logic into your code. It provides integration with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), support for popular web identity providers including Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, and support for ADFS 2.0.
Learn about options for managing identity in Windows Azure using Windows Server Active Directory Domain Services (AD), Windows Azure Active Directory, and Windows Azure Active Directory Access Control.
Learn how to build a web application that uses Windows Azure AD for single sign-on.
Learn how to build a web application that can be used by organizations that have Windows Azure AD.
Learn how to build a web application that uses the Graph API to query directory entities.
Caching and CDN
Feature guide: Caching
Caching increases performance by temporarily storing information from other backend sources, and can reduce the costs associated with database transactions in the cloud.
The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) offers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content by caching blobs and static content at physical nodes around the world. This articlea describes how to enable CDN and add, access, and delete content.
Email and Voice
Windows Azure applications can use SendGrid to include email functionality. SendGrid provides reliable email delivery, real-time analytics, and flexible APIs that allow users to easily incorporate the service into their Windows Azure applications.
Windows Azure applications can use Twilio to incorporate phone call and Short Message Service (SMS) message functionality. Use the Twilio APIs to make and receive phone calls, make and receive SMS messages, and enable voice communication using existing internet connections, including mobile connections.
Image Processing
Blitline is a cloud-based image processing service. This guide describes how to access Blitline services and how to submit jobs to Blitline.
Media
Windows Azure Media Services provides an extensible media platform on Windows Azure. Media Services components can be used to accomplish tasks including uploading, storing, encoding and streaming content. You can leverage the system end-to-end or integrate individual components with your existing tools and processes.
Messaging and Integration
Service Bus Queues offer simple first in, first out guaranteed message delivery and support a range of standard protocols (REST, AMQP, WS*) and APIs to put and pull messages on and off a queue.
Service Bus Topics provide a publish/subscribe messaging model to support one-to-many communication. You can optionally register filter rules for a topic on a per-subscription basis, which allows you to restrict which messages to a topic are received by which topic subscriptions.
Windows Azure Queues store large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. Common uses of Queue storage include creating a backlog of work to process asynchronously, and passing messages from a Windows Azure Web role to a Windows Azure Worker role.
Service Bus Relay solves the challenges of communicating between on-premises applications and the outside world by allowing on-premises web services to project public endpoints. Systems can then access these web services, which continue to run on-premises from anywhere on the planet.
The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) 1.0 is an efficient, reliable, wire-level messaging protocol that can be used to build robust, cross-platform, messaging applications. This article provides an overview of AMQP 1.0 support in Service Bus that allows you to build cross-platform, hybrid applications using an open standard protocol.
This How-To Guide explains how to use the Service Bus brokered messaging features (queues and publish/subscribe topics) from AMQP 1.0 using the .NET API.
Service Bus Notification Hubs provide scalable, multi-platform push notifications to mobile platforms. This article provides a high-level overview of the Notification Hubs feature.
Service Bus Notification Hubs provide scalable, multi-platform push notifications to mobile platforms. They offer dynamic tagging on device registrations, fully platform-agnostic back-end code, and secure registrations of devices. This guide show how you can leverage key Notification Hub features to develop a .NET back-end for a mobile app.
Build a front-end ASP.NET MVC web role that uses a back-end worker role to process long running jobs. You will learn how to create and deploy multi-role solutions, as well as how to use Service Bus Queues and Topics to enable inter-role communication.
Build a hybrid application that is hosted in the cloud and access data that is stored on-premises. You will learn how to communicate between on-premises and the cloud using Service Bus Relay.
This in-depth tutorial series describes how to build a multi-tier ASP.NET web application that uses Windows Azure queues to communicate between web and worker roles.
Monitoring and Management
New Relic is a developer focused tool that monitors your production applications and provides deep insight into their performance and reliability. It is designed to save you time when identifying and diagnosing performance issues, and it puts the information you need to solve these issues at your fingertips.
The Autoscaling Application Block from the Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 Integration Pack for Windows Azure provides tools that let you automatically scale your cloud service. You can use performance counters to understand your app's performance, and then write rules that will automatically scale your app to adjust for specified targets and thresholds.