Chapter 1 -- Scaling Business Web Sites with Application Center

Chapter 1

Because World Wide Web (WWW) technologies are rapidly becoming the platform of choice for supporting enterprise-wide applications, the infrastructure required to develop and host applications has grown in scale and complexity. Server technology is particularly hard pressed to keep up with the daily client demands for Web pages. Microsoft Application Center 2000 (Application Center), one of the key new products in the Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers group, is designed to address issues that are related to server scalability, manageability, and reliability.

This chapter provides an overview of this middleware server tier and shows how Application Center is positioned in the Microsoft platform. Following this, you'll learn about the challenges, issues, and solutions for building applications that are both available and scalable—by using Application Center.

In This Chapter

Building Blocks

Positioning Application Center

The Web Computing Model for Business

Enabling Highly Available and Scalable Application Services

Resources