38 - Hands-on with The Geode Pattern (Build globally distributed applications!)
Building on the theoretical foundation from episode 11, this hands-on session with Will Eastbury demonstrates what it actually takes to deploy and operate a Geode pattern implementation on Azure.
Will walks through a distributed OData service running across three Azure regions — US West, Australia Southeast, and UK West — showing how Azure Front Door acts as the single intelligent entry point that routes users to their nearest geode. Azure Cosmos DB serves as the multi-region data backplane, making every geode identical and capable of servicing any tenant.
The demo covers:
- Inspecting the Azure portal to see the App Service plans, Application Insights instances, and Cosmos DB account tied to each region
- Sending requests through the Front Door endpoint and observing which geode responds
- Taking a geode offline and watching health probes remove it from the back-end pool — without impacting end users
- A critical authentication caveat: how ASP.NET request-rewriting middleware handles URL redirection when your app sits behind a reverse proxy like Front Door
Key takeaway: while the Geode pattern is powerful, teams need to account for authentication redirect flows and ensure any URL-rewriting middleware is configured correctly for each geode’s identity within the Front Door back-end pool.
Related Content
17 - The Throttling, Retry and Circuit Breaker Patterns
How do you protect your infrastructure from traffic spikes, safeguard multi-tenant workloads from noisy neighbours, and handle transient failures gracefully? Chris and John Downs walk through three essential cloud resilience patterns: Throttling (protecting services from excess load via rate limiting and HTTP 429), Retry (handling transient faults with exponential backoff), and Circuit Breaker (preventing cascade failures). Part of the "Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time" series — essential viewing for any developer building on Azure.
29 - The Sidecar and Ambassador Patterns
When modernising a legacy application, rewriting everything from scratch is rarely feasible. The Sidecar and Ambassador cloud design patterns offer a pragmatic alternative — attach a companion process to offload cross-cutting concerns like retry logic, circuit breaking, and protocol translation without modifying the application itself. Chris and Peter explore both patterns in depth, covering when to use each, how they relate to service meshes, and their role in Kubernetes-based architectures.
27 - The Compute Resource Consolidation Pattern (Optimise for Cost!)
Are you running dedicated compute for every tenant, microservice, or application instance — and paying for it? The Compute Resource Consolidation pattern shows you how to consolidate tasks onto shared infrastructure, such as a single AKS cluster with namespace isolation or an Azure SQL elastic pool, to reduce costs and management overhead. This episode explores the key trade-offs: blast radius containment, noisy neighbour contention, scalability profiles, and multi-tenancy strategies. Part of the "Architecting for the Cloud, One Pattern at a Time" series.