What are viable ways to develop an Azure app on multiple machines.

Question

The scenario is that I am rebuilding an application that is presently SQL and classic asp. However I want to update this a bit to leverage Azure Tables. I know that the Azure SDK has the Dev Fabric storage thing available and I guess it's an option to have that installed on all of my machines.

But I'm wondering if there is a less 'invasive' way to mimick the Azure Tables. Do object DBs or document DBs provide a reasonable facsimile that could be used for the early protoyping. Or is making the move from them to the Azure SDK tables just more headache than it's worth?

Answer 1

In my opinion you should skip the fake Azure tables completely. Even the MS development storage is not an exact match to how things will actually run in the cloud. You get 1M transactions for $1, 1GB of storage for $0.15 and $0.15 per GB in/out of the data centre. If you're just prototyping, live dangerously and spend $10.

If you're new to working with Azure tables and you try to use a development storage or some other proxy you'll save yourself that much money in time spent reworking your code to work against the real thing.

If you're just using tables and not queues, blobs $10 will go a long way.

Answer 2

Each Azure "project" (which is like an Azure account) is initially limited to 5 hosted storage accounts. Let's say you have one storage account for your actual content, and one for diagnostics. Now let's say you want a dev and QA storage account for each of those, respectively, so you don't damage production data. You've now run out of your storage accounts (in the above scenario, you'd need 6 hosted accounts). You'd need to call Microsoft and ask for this limit to be increased...

If, instead, you used the Dev Fabric for your tables during development / local testing, you'll free up Azure storage accounts (the ones used for dev - you'd still want QA storage accounts to be in Azure, not Dev Fabric).

One scenario where you can't rely on Dev Fabric for storage: performance/load testing.