Microsoft Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Azure Platform 143pages software manual

Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Azure Platform This first volume in a planned series about Windows Azure demonstrates how you can adapt an existing, on-premises ASP.NET application to one that operates in the cloud. The focus is on migration and based on a fictitious scenario.
Intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that are appropriate for the cloud.
Readers should be familiar with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual Studio, ASP.NET, and Microsoft Visual C#.

This book introduces a fictitious company named Adatum which step-by-step modifies its expense tracking and reimbursement system, aExpense, so that it can be deployed to Windows Azure. Each chapter explores different considerations: authentication & authorization, data access, session management, deployment, development life cycle & cost analysis. How can a company's applications be scalable and have high availability?
To achieve this, along with developing the applications, you must also have an infrastructure that can support them. For example, you may need to add servers or increase the capacities of existing ones, have redundant hardware, add logic to the application to handle distributed computing, and add logic for failovers. You have to do this even if an application is in high demand for only short periods of time. Life becomes even more complicated (and expensive) when you start to consider issues such as network latency & security boundaries. The cloud offers a solution to this dilemma. The cloud is made up of interconnected servers located in various data centers. However, you see what appears to be a centralized location that someone else hosts and manages. By shifting the responsibility of maintaining an infrastructure to someone else, you're free to concentrate on what matters most: the application. If the cloud has data centers in different geographical areas, you can move your content closer to the people who are using it most. If an application is heavily used in Asia, have an instance running in a data center located there. This kind of flexibility may not be available to you if you have to own all the hardware.