I'm learning about Microsoft Azure, and there are lots of concepts that, although are not new for me, I'd like to know more about them, like for example database sharding, denormalization, nosql, content delivery networks, distributed cache (like memcache), asynchronous processing, split systems, load balancing, etc... etc...
I'm looking for a book about approaches rather than technique.
The problem is that I can read a lot about how to use Azure Storage, or how to use Azure CDN, but without a correct approach, the result won't be as good as expected.
Thanks in advance.
Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group has put out several resources in the last year that you might want to take a look at. They generally take an over-arching approach. Here is a link to one of their resources on building applications on Windows Azure.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff966499.aspx