Its
been fairly long since I blogged, hoping to catch back into the momentum. In
the past couple of years I've been involving myself more into solution
engineering predominantly for cloud, mobile, SOA platforms.
"Cloud"
and "Mobility" are the buzz words today. Most of the
"Web" app customers of yester years have been wanting to move to
cloud, and also enable mobile access of their applications. The primary
challenge that comes up for Enterprise mobile applications is scalability and availability
of the apps across regions.
This is
where a cloud platform, can help, especially, if the platform could do a
service from backend that can connect to any of the form factors, either a
mobile, laptop, slate or tablet. Having this service in cloud makes the service
extremely scalable, with increasing number of users across devices.
Windows Azure as a cloud platform brings about
a nice feature of providing Backend
as a Service (BaaS) through Windows
Azure Mobile Services (WAMS). WAMS provides an extremely easy way to
develop scalable backend on cloud that can connect to mobile or client
applications.
With
this move, Windows Azure has established in the world of cloud in PaaS-IaaS-BaaS stack, thereby distinguishing from
other cloud providers like AWS, who are yet to provide such a kind of service.
The
other interesting part of Azure mobile services is that this service can be
integrated to any of the mobile phone applications, such as Windows Phone,
Andriod, iOS or even an HTML5 app. So now the question comes up on when exactly
should we look at using WAMS.
When
should you use Azure Mobile Services:
1. When
you want your mobile application to be available across devices
including Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, iPhone, iPad and Android
2. When
you need to create highly functional scalable mobile applications using Windows
Azure
3. When
you need to enable back-end capabilities of existing native mobile applications
4. When
you want your app to integrate with with well-known identity providers
(like Live ID) for authentication.
5.
When you want to integrate with notification services to enable push
notifications in your app.
6. When
you need to integrate your mobile app with other cloud services
7. When
you want to enable service monitoring and logging in your mobile applications.
If any
of these requirements sound familiar to what you are looking for, then do login
to Windows Azure portal and check
out this cool feature of WAMS here :)
In the
forthcoming blog posts, I'll be writing more on how WAMS can be developed and
consumed in HTML 5 applications and other mobile applications.
