Best Practices For Cloud Development

Delivering functional applications depends on where you’re coming from. If you’re developing an in every respect new application for your business at the time it’s likely that the application requirements will be tied down and you’re looking at an application port to the cloud.

To help you along the way there’s Moving Applications to the Cloud on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform published by Microsoft Press. That will guide through the basics through to using storage, automating deployment and application tuning.

Fortunately, Microsoft is working to simplify application scaling for developers through the cleverly-named WASABi – the Windows Azure Auto-Scaling Application Block. It’s now a beta release and it allows developers and IT professionals to add and manage automatic scaling capabilities for Windows Azure hosted apps and services.

A great place to start is the open-source community CodePlex. There you’ll find the Windows Azure SDK for PHP to support deploying PHP apps to Windows Azure.