When developing applications for a diverse and high-scale platform such as Azure Websites, there’s never such a thing as enough information, right? Indeed, our customers are always on the lookout for more information, guidance and examples of using Azure’s vast abilities to their advantage and this month, MSDN Magazine has decided to dedicate their issue (July 2014) to Azure Websites.

The issue includes 5 feature articles:

Scaling Your Web Application with Azure Web Sites
Yochay Kiriaty, program manager on the Azure Websites team kicks off the issue with an article that shows how to modify Web applications to handle millions of HTTP requests across both multiple instances and multiple regions.

Architect for the Cloud Using Azure Web Sites
Sometimes bad things happen to good apps, and when they do you need to react fast. This article by Apurva Joshi and Sunitha Muthukrishna, program managers on the Azure Websites team, explores the tools and patterns you can adopt to make your Web applications even better and more resilient in a sometimes-hostile cloud environment.

Building a Node.js and MongoDB Web Service
Tejaswi Redkar, Director of business programs for Azure and author of the very successful book Windows Azure Web Sites: Building Web Apps at a Rapid Pace shows you how to develop a RESTful Web service in Node.js that accesses a MongoDB database in the cloud, and how to deploy it to Azure Web Sites.

Hybrid Connectivity: Connecting Azure Web Sites to LOB Apps Using PortBridge
Hybrid apps bring the power of the cloud to existing software services that run on-premises in your datacenter. This article, also by Tejaswi Redkar, takes a deep look at connecting a Web site to a line-of-business application running on-premises and shows how to enable seamless connectivity.

Azure Web Sites: Teaching from the Cloud
James Chambers, MVP for Azure and author of an excellent book about Azure Websites explores using Azure Websites, MVC 5, SignalR and Azure SQL towards the creation of an e-learning application that provides course modules, lessons and basic user administration. The result is a Web site that allows an instructor to “push” content to the students’ browsers, keeping all students in sync with the current lesson.

In addition, the regular columnists of MSDN Magazine discuss and highlight other aspects of cloud development in their regular columns.

The printed issue is on its way to MSDN subscribers, but if you can’t wait to feast your eyes on this sizeable collection of practical info, head over to the MSDN site right now!