The document details Jeff Wilcox's cloud environment and services utilized for the 4th & Mayor application, focusing on Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure functionalities. It discusses cloud APIs, migration challenges, and the architecture of the staging and production environments, along with costs and third-party service integrations. Additionally, it covers logging, statistics, and push notifications tailored for Windows Phone applications.

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.