Cloud architecture has evolved at a rapid pace in recent years, and offers highly reliable and scalable solutions. This has drawn the attention of enterprise companies, who are now adopting cloud services, and either migrating their existing systems or creating new systems on the cloud. Another advantage of the cloud is the cost. Previously, mid-or-small-sized companies had to invest a lot into building their infrastructure, and had to buy highly-priced servers to host applications. Apart from this, they also needed a support contract, or had to hire a local team to support the application, depending on its complexity. On the other hand, with the cloud, companies can use the pay-as-you-go model or purchase a subscription, and host their applications without needing to purchase any hardware or hire a team to maintain the infrastructure. In this chapter, we will use the cloud platform of Microsoft, known as Microsoft Azure, and develop and host applications built using .NET Core.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Discuss the three computing models of Cloud, namely IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
• Focus on Microsoft Azure as a Cloud provider and discuss the difference between Virtual machines, Cloud services, and App services
• Explore how we can develop .NET Core applications using Azure App Services, which not only provides a Rapid Application Development model, but also facilitates deploying and maintaining an application on the cloud
• Explore how we can develop background services and event handling on the cloud using WebJobs and Azure Functions
• Discuss scalability and performance options in Azure App Services
• Explore logging and monitoring options for .NET Core application using Azure