Chapter 17. Connecting in the cloud with AppFabric
This chapter covers
- Securing your services with ACS
- Introducing the Service Bus
- Connecting to your service from anywhere
The Windows Azure platform AppFabric (hereafter referred to as AppFabric) is an important piece of the Windows Azure puzzle. It’s part of the larger Azure ecosystem and provides some fundamental features for working with hybrid applications. It performs two major functions: securing REST services and connecting them together.
AppFabric is a big topic—one that deserves its own book. Whenever you start talking about security, you get into long conversations. The same goes for service buses. That’s because both of these topics involve a lot of terminology that the average developer is likely not familiar with.
Our goal in this chapter is to give you enough of a look at AppFabric to understand the core scenarios it can be used for, and to understand enough to confidently dive into a detailed book on your own. We’ll be visiting the two key services (Access Control Service and Service Bus) with a simple and straightforward example. You’ll need to know a little about Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), but don’t worry—WCF isn’t scary.