Short slides about some of the app services and cloud basics used for the 4th & Mayor app, a Windows Phone foursquare app. Presented at a Windows Phone Garage event in Redmond, WA on 3/14/2013.

1. MY CLOUD +
WINDOWS PHONE @jeffwilcox
Developer, 4th & Mayor
EXPERIENCE

2. JEFF’S TOPICS
My cloud environment
$$$
The cloud APIs I expose
Staging and Production Environments
Connecting to the cloud from my client application
Logging and Statistics
Migration challenges
Scale
Push Notifications for Node.js / Azure open source

3. MY CLOUD ENVIRONMENT
Amazon Web Services Windows Azure
 DNS (Route 53)  Web Sites
 Compute (EC2)  API Web Services (Node.js)
 Web Site www.4thandmayor.com
 Load Balancing (ELB)
 Staging Environment for APIs & main Web Site
 Storage (S3) & CDN
 Live Tile Generation*
 Text and Email Notifications (SNS)  Cloud Service Worker Role: Mail
 Intra-region data transfer to 3rd party Processing
services  Cloud Service Web Role: SSL Load
Balancer
MongoLab
 Table Storage Service
 Hosted MongoDB in US-EAST-1AWS
 User Data, Push Processing Queues  Virtual Machines
 Linux: Statsd statistics & time/data store
 Hosted MongoDB in West US / Azure Store
 Web Site Sessions  Windows Azure Store

4. MY CLOUD ENVIRONMENT
Amazon Web Services Windows Azure
 DNS (Route 53)  Web Sites $50-$100*
 Compute (EC2) $25-$150  API Web Services (Node.js) *trial/partially free compute
 Web Site www.4thandmayor.com
 Load Balancing (ELB)
 Staging Environment for APIs & main Web Site
 Storage (S3) & CDN
 Live Tile Generation*
 Text and Email Notifications (SNS)  Cloud Service Worker Role: Mail
 Intra-region data transfer to 3rd party Processing
services  Cloud Service Web Role: SSL Load
Balancer
MongoLab $40
 Hosted MongoDB in US-EAST-1AWS
 Table Storage Service
 User Data, Push Processing Queues  Virtual Machines
 Linux: Statsd statistics & time/data store
 Hosted MongoDB in West US / Azure Store
 Web Site Sessions FREE  Windows Azure Store

5. BILLS

6. AZURE PORTAL ROCKS!

7. CLOUD APIS
My Services Storage-hosted services
 Push notification connections, disconnects,  What’s new content
push URI changes  Known current version number
 Automated Crash Reports  Version-specific kill bits, global kill bit
 Email crash reports & mail parsing  Standard tiles
 Custom live tile generation
3rd Party Services
 App settings & preferences  Foursquare
 Continuous processing queue  Google Analytics
 Live tiles, toasts, new users, upgrade logic, special
tasks 3rd Party Tools
 UserVoice ($0)
 Platform/version-specific tasks & services
 Tumblr ($0)
 GitHub ($12)

8. STAGING & PRODUCTION
Debug builds target my staging environment
Staging uses modified JSON values (keys, certificates, etc.)
Git deployment with Azure Web Sites makes it quick & easy
Production challenges
Version-specific endpoints
Migration between providers
Database and cloud downtime

9. AUTHENTICATION, KEYS,
CERTS…
Environment variable MODE assign staging/production value
Environment variable APP assigns service: e-mail processing, worker, web,
API host
JSON-based configuration loaded through configuration.js

10. CONNECTING FROM THE
CLIENT APP
HttpClient NuGet/PCL
Retry policies, handling HTTP status
GZip Compression
RestSharp
JSON.NET
Caching technology & strategies; AgFx

11. LOGGING & STATISTICS
Logs Stats
 Detailed  Statsd, Graphite, Carbon
 Table storage  Time scale storage
 Per-user  UDP
 Winston (Node.js logger) extension  Fire and forget
 Linux VM on Azure or EC2 Instance
 DNS

12. MIGRATION CHALLENGES
> 150,000 users in active processing Foursquare is in US-EAST-1 (AWS)
DNS hosting helps w/transitions Statsd helps show trends during
tests
Free time

13. SCALE
Smart per-user resource allocation
Web Sites Reserved Instances: Size & Count
Mongo-based consistency enables multiple workers
DNS Load Balancing

14. PUSH NOTIFICATIONS FOR
NODE.JS
MPNS module
 Windows Phone 7-8
 Dev: Jeff
 Source: https://github.com/jeffwilcox/mpns
WNS module
 Windows 8
 Dev: Tomek
 Source: https://github.com/WindowsAzure/wns

15. OPEN SOURCE AZURE
Consider Windows Azure
Mobile Services for your next app!
Resources at:
http://windowsazure.com/
Check the OSS team out online:
http://windowsazure.github.com/

17. NOTES
4th & Mayor is a trademark of Wilcox Digital, LLC
This presentation was created for a “Windows Phone Garage” event on
3/14/2013
Opinions are Jeff Wilcox’s alone.