Windows Azure Report Card – Year One

OK, Windows Azure isn’t a year old yet (it only came out of Beta in February) but it is almost year since it was made widely available and demoed at PDC 2009. So before PDC 2010, its a good time to reflect on the past year of Azure with a report card for Azure to take home to its Microsoft parent.

Overall Stability, Security and Performance :  A-

Azure definitely confounded some of its harsher critics by registering a very good track record for uptime, performance and most important – security. Since its launch there have been no major security issues and no large outages. I’ve run Azure since April and the only issue was two short periods (under one hour) of sluggish performance while OS patches were being applied, it seems that most users experiences have been similar to mine.

SQL Azure : D

While the performance of SQL Azure has been good, I can only register my bitter disappointment at the progress of adding features. I noted that probably the biggest weakness of SQL Azure at launch was the lack of any backup facility, we were promised two backup functions (continuous and clone) with one to appear in the first half of 2010 but still no sign of anything, no sign of encryption or compressions either. The features that have been added can only be described as basic – such as a 50GB sized database, or  the ability to automatically upgrade to a larger database size (although we still have to execute a TSQL Alter statement for this). 
SQL Azure itself is a solid product but it is still too expensive and lacking in even the basic features SQL Server users require.

Windows Azure Features : C-

Azure is still not heavy in terms of features, which is fine for a product is its first year so it would be merited a B- or C+ had it not been for the omission of .NET 4.0 support (6 months and counting since .NET was released).  Unfortunate for Microsoft the last year has been one of heavy innovation for its main rival – AWS. Most notably, AWS Simple Notification Services (SNS) allows AWS users to send notifications via several formats (even email and SMS) to alert a user of an application of an event (this is a heavily requested feature on Azure but no plans have been confirmed to add it).

Azure Tooling : C+

.NET developers are used to best in class dev tools and so we’d expect great tooling for deploying to Azure. We now have an vastly improved Visual Studio experience which allows for direct deployment  to Azure (which is great since the Azure developer’s portal is still slow and generally a poor user experience). We can also directly connect to SQL Azure databases to view and interact with database objects from SSMS 2008 R2 and generate scripts to create an SQL Azure database. But this is pretty much the minimum we would expect using a Microsoft environment.

In the minus column the Azure portal is still slow and lacking in features, monitoring of the cost is very basic and the are no tools for monitoring the   various running instances of an Azure service. Also, migration tools are pretty lacking – the SQL Azure migration is good to troubleshooting a migration to SQL Azure but won’t be able to solve many of the incompatibilities. No tool exists for migration an ASP.NET app (there are several tutorials on migration in which the process looks relatively simple but there are enough gotchas to make the migration of a reasonably sized ASP.NET app a real headache).

Pricing : D

I’ve given a D for pricing as it is the one area where improvement could easily have been made. Probably the most persistent complaint about Azure is the high cost of the entry. With a single SQL Azure database and only a single compute instance an Azure plan will cost $60 – $90 per month depending on any discounting given if you are a member of BizSpark or MSDN etc. Even worse if you need to rely on Azure’s 99.95% uptime SLA you are required to have 2 compute instances which will comfortably bring the cost to over $100 (imagine your hosting company informing you that you needed a second server if you wanted to have good uptime ). This is a relatively high barrier to entry for small developers who are building new apps which will only initially use a fraction of the small compute instance and the 1GB SQL Azure database allocation. AWS meanwhile now offers an ultra-small instance which costs only $15 per month and in addition they are offering a full free year to new users.

I would have given an E except for the fact that Azure pricing matches AWS whilst offering a lot more.  The Azure platform handles all the OS patching, scaling and security without the need for user intervention. AWS by contrast with its infrastructure as a service model merely provides the OS and offers some tools the user can implement (such as the elastic load balancer) to manage scaling, patching and security updates is left to the user.

Conclusion

Overall the grades might not have been too high but it is definitely the grade for stability, security and performance which is the most important since a poor performance would surely mean the death of the Azure platform and the only one area where Azure should definitely have been better is in pricing. We are definitely lacking in tools and features (especially for SQL Azure) but since it is just a year we shouldn’t be too demanding – the real test of Azure will be whether it can innovate over the next 1 -2 years.