Who Will Use Azure? [Blog]

Opinions on Azure the likely uptake of Azure appear to be very polarized around the time of its launch. I think it is a given that 2010 will not see a rush to Azure – the inevitable teething issues, plus the unavailability of several key elements of the platf0rm (such as database backup) will be enough to ensure most apps stay right where are on the Windows Server.

Adoption rates in future is, however, an interesting question and the answer really depends on who you talk to you. The staunchest critics seem to be DBA’s and SysAdmins who are used to the fine control they have over the hardware and the software stack. Moving to Azure surrenders most of this control to Microsoft and in truth wouldn’t leave DBA’s and SysAdmins a lot to do. In the opposing camp are small developers who have limited resources but need to deliver and maintain apps and, in common with most developers, have little idea about hardware, security or scaling applications. For these developers Azure is an ideal platform, as opposed to traditional ASP.NET Hosting since it takes most of the admin, security and application scaling chores away and lets users focus solely on building  the app. A bonus for web-app start-ups is that the hurdle of persuading users to trust the app with personal data, when the app is hosted on Azure it is a powerful marketing tool to highlight the platform’s enterprise level security.

Another compelling use case are apps which are of variable scale. Typically hardware must be set up to handle the maximum load an app will be under, this can be very tricky when the max load is vastly different from the typical load. At PDC Microsoft a ticketing app was demonstrated which was suddenly under intense load when new tickets were made available for popular sports events but under minimal load thereafter. The ability of Azure to scale effortlessly up and then down makes it a very natural fit for these apps. Large apps which need a server farm are a less compelling case, Azure certainly simplifies the scale but facilitates very little in the performance fine tuning of the scaling process. In addition it is definitely cheaper to run the apps on a server farm than Azure (ignoring any saving on admin personnel that using Azure may allow).

2010 is likely to be a defacto beta year for Azure its real test is likely to come down the road.