Microsoft's Azure--I remain perplexed

I'm still trying to figure out if Microsoft's Azure announcements are meaningful beyond just providing a bit of color for the newly revealed cloud services.

Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley provides some good insight in her "Microsoft's Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed," though the fact that she even had to write such a piece speaks to the lack of clear message coming from Microsoft.

The Microsoft approach (as expected) is heavily dependent on and influenced by Microsoft's own technology and practices. That's worked in the past, but cloud efforts to date have been dominated by nonpackaged software companies, namely Amazon and Google. Because of this, the way that developers interact with the cloud (APIs and transactions) is quite different than the standard Microsoft deployment mechanics.

Based on the existing information, Azure isn't very compelling. For example, with AppEngine, your applications automatically scale. Not so with Azure. Instead developers have to write their apps in a new way, which seems self-defeating.

I also wonder how an all Windows-based Cloud will deal with the threats of viruses, hackers, botnets, etc. Security was barely mentioned, but one could easily argue that Microsoft hasn't always had the best track record in that area.

So far, I would say that you can't count Microsoft out but that it's not leading the pack. CloudEnterprise.info has a comparison chart of how Azure stacks up with other cloud offerings.

[ppgreat]

Where there's smoke, there's vapor.

[shan_mcarthur]

I don't understand why you are publishing your opinion on Azure when you are still figuring it out. You comment that your apps automatically scale with AppEngine, but not so with Azure - unless you rewrite them. You had to rewrite your apps to get them to work with AppEngine as well, so I don't understand how you jumped to that conclusion. You say that the way people interact with the cloud is different than the standard Microsoft Deployment mechanisms - again, I don't think you have an adequate understanding of Azure (or cloud computing) yet to make this statement. The way you interact with an Azure-hosted application is through http, using the same open standards that are prevelent on the Internet. I can build a SOAP-based web service, or a REST service by using WCF. Azure sites are standard web sites - to the client. You were also very critical of their security and made a reference that using Windows Servers would be less secure and more susceptible to hackers and viruses - again, this statement is made without any understanding of the current market. Windows 2008 Server has proven to be very much more secure than competing OSes, and with Azure, there are no users on the server, so the protection level is extremely high.

I recommend you spend more time with Azure. It is a very important announcement for our industry and will have a significant impact throughout the coming years. You are probably going to look back on your posting here and realize how little you knew about it before you jumped to these conclusions.