First Look
I finally had the time to site down and take a look at Microsoft’s Cloud platform Azure. Initially when I first received my ‘Tokens’ I logged on to the site and was intimidated. I would say it’s a little less then straight forward. Tonight I actually took the time to look up some tutorials and read up on the offering. So here you go My first application in the Cloud. Not much to look at, but it was relatively simple to create a basic web application and deploy.
I’m still viewing and learning about the ‘Storage’ concept. Stay tuned, I’m sure I’ll have a ‘Hello Cloud….I pulled [Insert Random Data here…] from the Cloud storage’. Speaking of storage, one of the tutorials I was watching talked about state, and how Azure handles it. My impression was that it’s very much like a state service you might create while building any old web farm.
Improvements
Microsoft clearly needs to brand Azure a little better. You have several choices of solutions, but nothing is clear as to what those services include, or their capabilities. Additionally these services are not ‘hobbyist’ friendly. I’m not sure they are even meant to be. Perhaps they are marketing this to the Enterprise, but all their literature points to ‘If you have a startup or an idea…’. The problem is, at least in the CPT, you have to build (read: plan) to use these services up front. And converting from using straight ADO providers, or even the more recent MVC is not easy. Amazon offers a virtual Windows machine with Remote Desktop capabilities. Much easier to use and port apps if you’re really looking for quick scalability.
Price
Microsoft’s position on pricing will be key to making inroads in this space. I imagine eventually they’ll move to an OS agnostic capability so price will be the deciding factor. If you know of any good price comparisons between the cloud providers let me know!