Microsoft Azure eCommerce Resource Guide

Azure is a profoundly robust cloud hosting infrastructure that's scalable to meet the desired performance, security and overall functionality needs of each organization. As an eCommerce application continues to grow and evolve, the cost is expected to lower while the value increases for the business and the organization behind it.

There is a wide array of benefits for setting up Azure as an eCommerce infrastructure host. One of the key advantages of Azure hosting is how it extensively correlates to a typical .NET based application framework. Clarity eCommerce is an application that's highly optimized for running within the Azure environment, leveraging its numerous offerings by being tightly integrated.

The Clarity eCommerce platform is also architected and designed as a .NET application. The overall Azure infrastructure, which includes app services and SQL databases, is very similar to IIS (Internet Information Services) and mySQL. In a nutshell, Azure SQL and mySQL correlate firmly with IIS and app services. The offerings in Azure hosting infrastructure comprise a set of available resources that can be utilized to provide the foundation for an eCommerce application.

Specifically, app services can be set up to be load balanced and scaled up or down dynamically, allowing you to enjoy an effective failover in different regions. You may opt to scale up and down based on traffic, since this ability is offered too. The ultimate benefit is that, as the business grows, it’s able to quite rapidly deploy supplementary resources without having to change the overall architecture or functionality of the application. This represents a really crucial ability for the business from a long-term return on investment perspective.

Strong Interoperability & Enhanced Functionality

Having an eCommerce application that can take advantage of Azure and is able to be rigidly coupled to how it’s designed to work constitutes a powerful tool; it really allows the business or the organization to benefit from this scalability, without the downside of further cost and effort invested into the underlying infrastructure.

In a number of cases, eCommerce applications could require additional exertion in order to take advantage of a cloud hosting infrastructure. On the other side, Clarity is built using a Microsoft SQL server infrastructure, and the eCommerce application technically utilizes Entity Framework Code First. All of the Clarity eCommerce features tie remarkably closely to Microsoft's Azure SQL instances, and collaborate efficiently with Azure SQL to be scalable and take full advantage of the overall:

• Indexing
• Searching
• Caching
• Behind-the-scenes infrastructure

Most users won’t know the technical aspect but they still need and expect the resulting experience. Customers want the caching and indexing to make the sites run very rapidly, the database architectures so that the eCommerce application for Azure is capable of leveraging the clustering of the SQL databases, and the capabilities to have failover for uninterrupted service.

The business additionally needs the overall infrastructure so that databases can start out as relatively small and then scale up rapidly and dynamically, without having any major overhead from a programming or application architecture change perspective.

As a Microsoft partner, the Clarity eCommerce platform is highly tuned to Azure and supports seamless interoperability. It’s also designed and architected on the .NET framework, which generally helps to significantly leverage all of the advantages the Azure hosting infrastructure has to offer. Finally, there are plentiful Azure-specific nuances where Clarity has a strong background and specializes in.

• Microsoft Azure eCommerce Overview
• Microsoft Azure Security Platform
• SQL Database Components for Azure eCommerce
• Application Services within Azure eCommerce
• ECommerce API Integration
• Scaling & Application Performance Optimization
• Elevated Azure eCommerce Security & API Incorporation
• How Caching Raises Performance