Cloud being inherently different from traditional web hosting, making best use of a cloud platform generally requires some architectural changes to an existing application. In his article “Top 7 Concerns of Migrating an ASP.NET Application to Windows Azure”, Peter Laudati explores some of these concerns in detail, in the context of ASP.NET and Windows Azure.
The top concerns listed in the article are –
- Handling Storage – decision between using Virtual hard disks, Windows Azure storage (blobs, tables, queues) or SQL Azure.
- Mapping the Applications to a WebRole
- Application Dependencies
- Session State – can use providers for storing session state information in Windows Azure Cache, Table Storage or even SQL Azure. (Note that, sticky sessions is not a great fit for a good cloud application)
- Identity and Authentication
- Handling Configuration
- IIS configuration differences
Most of these concerns will apply in some way to other technologies and other cloud platforms as well (for e.g. Amazon S3 or RDS for storage instead of Windows Azure Storage or SQL Azure).
Some other articles you could refer to are “Moving Channel9.msdn.com to Windows Azure” for a case study on migrating an existing application to Windows Azure and “Patterns for Building Applications for Windows Azure”.