I don’t get it.  I admit I can’t understand where Microsoft is going with Windows Azure.

There are two issues as I see it. 

1. Small to medium sized business who will be attracted to the pay as you go model will have to learn and re-architect their applications to sit on the Microsoft SQL Services model.  It won’t be an easy road. Everything they have learned about databases by and large goes out the window and they must do a significant retraining on how to work with a database with no transactions, etc. At least they announced Join support! While they are doing that they will also have to be learning the ins and outs of using the new Windows Azure as their deployment mechanism.  It is going to be a tough road for many of them.

2. Large business is interested because they:

• Want to try and minimize their rocketing data center costs.  Interested in leveraging the IP Microsoft is building around energy and cost efficient hosting.
• Are interested in lower cost mechanisms for doing geo-scaleout without having to build the physical presence around the world.
• Love the ability to dynamically increase scale without large up front capital expense with the associated long lead times.

However large business is not going to be willing to place their revenue stream into the hands of a single source vendor.  Once I write my software to the proprietary Microosft SQL Services I have no where else I can run the software. Yeah, yeah if I architect and factor my design I can limit the impact of the lockin but the issue still stands.  Am I willing to bet the revenue stream of my company on a single source solution that I can’t have another vendor host for me and I cannot run inside my firewall?  This isn’t just a Microsoft issue.  I see the same issue with Amazon Web Services and their SimpleDB service.  It is fairly proprietary and I can’t run it inside my firewall.

I was hoping that Amazon with the release of EC2 for Windows would put some pressure on Microsoft to release a full version of SQL Server instead of the crippled entity based model that is more a copy of Amazon’s SimpleDB.  However if you take a close look at the pricing it falls apart.  While .125/hour for a windows instance is quite price competitive once you add SQL Server standard it jumps to anywhere from $1.10 to $2.40/hour!  If you need authentication services also then it caps out at $3.20/hour!  While $0.125/hour only translates to ~$91/month the SQL Instance bumps up to more than ~$800/month!  No longer price competitive whatsoever. 

What is a developer to do?

Monday, October 27, 2008 12:36:58 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]   .NET Architecture