Building for Scalability

By now I’m sure you have already identified several advantages of using Azure as it relates to building scalable solutions. The primary thing to keep in mind when building solutions for Azure is to architect for horizontal scalability rather than vertical scalability. This means you will need to build solutions that are distributed across many different machines, all working toward a common goal. Many of the features of F# that we have already discussed will help you accomplish this goal more easily.

In this section, I will walk you through building a simple solution for placing orders for hacky sacks. The solution will be built with one web role and two worker roles. We’ll use a few of the features of Azure that we already covered, such as queues, table storage, and SQL Azure. This will provide an example of one approach for building a solution that scales horizontally.