Book excerpt: This book provides practical guidance for adopting a high velocity, continuous delivery process to create reliable, scalable, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions that are designed and built using a microservice architecture, deployed to the Azure cloud, and managed through automation. Microservices, IoT, and Azure offers software developers, architects, and operations engineers’ step-by-step directions for building SaaS applications—applications that are available 24x7, work on any device, scale elastically, and are resilient to change--through code, script, exercises, and a working reference implementation. The book provides a working definition of microservices and contrasts this approach with traditional monolithic Layered Architecture. A fictitious, homebiomedical startup is used to demonstrate microservice architecture and automation capabilities for cross-cutting and business services as well as connected device scenarios for Internet of Things (IoT). Several Azure PaaS services are detailed including Storage, SQL Database, DocumentDb, Redis Cache, Cloud Services, Web API's, API Management, IoT Hub, IoT Suite, Event Hub, and Stream Analytics. Finally the book looks to the future and examines Service Fabric to see how microservices are becoming the de facto approach to building reliable software in the cloud. In this book, you’ll learn: What microservices are and why are they’re a compelling architecture pattern for SaaS applications How to design, develop, and deploy microservices using Visual Studio, PowerShell, and Azure Microservice patterns for cross-cutting concerns and business capabilities Microservice patterns for Internet of Things and big data analytics solutions using IoT Hub, Event Hub, and Stream Analytics Techniques for automating microservice provisioning, building, and deployment What Service Fabric is and how it’s the future direction for microservices on Microsoft Azure