Comments on thisDev: I Want To Like Microsoft Azure

NOTE: I forgot to release the second comment above...

2009-11-25T21:46:26.712-08:00

NOTE: I forgot to release the second comment above by Craig (and the two Craigs are different people). My response above directed @Luke was actually intended to be @Craig. Sorry for any confusion.

I would have liked to have seen them be more like ...

2009-11-21T20:41:36.179-08:00

I would have liked to have seen them be more like App Engine, with the auto-scaling capability. I don't wan't to spend $90/month for IIS to sit there and listen for connections that don't come in, and a worker process that doesn't have anything to do. However, when those processes do have something to do, I then have no problem possibly paying a bit of a premium for that time. As it is now, it strikes me as a little bit harder to use version of EC2, so why would I bother?

I think you are confusing too many parts of Azure....

2009-11-19T19:53:56.398-08:00

I think you are confusing too many parts of Azure. You can ignore most of the Azure API.

You have control over the Virtual machines, so you can go and install Tomcat, apache, etc. on them now. Base line the image, and deploy your application to instances of that VM.

If you do it that way, then it will scale as well as the same app on EC2.

If being locked into "Azure" and not being able to go from your on premise to Azure, then look at the "App fabric" (as dublin) that will now let you deploy the same app to both places.

@Luke: Microsoft and WordPress did that demo after...

2009-11-19T18:47:15.807-08:00

@Luke: Microsoft and WordPress did that demo after I wrote this post, but that doesn't really matter. The ability to run arbitrary apps puts them in more competition with EC2 rather than differentiating them. And you still don't "own" the box. That turns into a price war, not a feature or power war. Microsoft might win but price wars frequently produce two losers.

I think Microsoft has the chance to be a significant player in this space, but only if they provide something better that plays up to their strengths.

I think the lock in to the Azure platform is a bit...

2009-11-19T14:35:43.796-08:00

I think the lock in to the Azure platform is a bit overstated. That major applications such as Wordpress can easily be run on Azure tells me the the story. Do you think they rewrote Wordpress to make it run on Azure?

Azure will be supporting a virtual machine role ve...

2009-11-19T04:19:04.727-08:00

Azure will be supporting a virtual machine role very soon - you will be able to run anything in the cloud like you can on Amazon. You will very much be able to take applications not currently on Azure and run them on there with little to no changes required, and vice versa. The tooling MS are providing for all this looks fantastic, especially with the introduction of AppFabric for Windows Server which will provide the same application platform on-premise as you can get in the cloud, making interchanging between the two even easier.

@Q: Excellent point. Automatic scaling doesn't...

2009-11-18T23:21:30.430-08:00

@Q: Excellent point. Automatic scaling doesn't have to mean infinite scaling. There are lots of ways they could do it where that wouldn't be an issue.

The absense of automatic scaling was afaik a busin...

2009-11-18T23:15:59.207-08:00

The absense of automatic scaling was afaik a business decision based on the risk of incurring astronomical costs if traffic suddenly became astronomical. Think DDoS attacks on a cloud hosted website ... I agree with you however, a simple "maximum instance" setting and automatic scaling within those bounds would have been pure win.