Chapter 6. Scaling web roles

One of the coolest things about Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application. Whenever you need more computing power, you can just ask for it and get it (as long as you can afford it). The downside is that in order to harness such power, you need to design your application correctly. In this chapter, we’ll look at what happens when your application is under pressure and how you can use Windows Azure to effectively scale your web application.

6.1. What happens to your web server under extreme load?

Back in chapter 1, we talked about the challenges of handling and predicting growth for typical websites. In this section, we want to show you what happens to a web server when it’s under extreme load and how it handles itself. Using the Ashton Kutcher example from chapter 1, what would happen to your web server if Ashton Kutcher twittered about your little Hawaiian Shirt Shop and you suddenly found thousands of users trying to access your website at the same time?

6.2. How the load balancer distributes requests

6.3. Session management

6.4. Cache management

6.5. Summary