Marcelo Calbucci

I’ve been reading about Windows Azure recently because I’m always starting new projects and I was wondering if I should try some of those on the cloud. I got to be honest about it; I’m pretty disappointed with Windows Azure as a cloud computing platform. The technology behind it is pretty sophisticated, the tools are great, and the cloud element is there for sure, but it’s not what I wish the future would be.


Windows Azure was Microsoft’s reaction to Amazon Web Services. Because of that, it basically borrows a lot of the elements and concepts from AWS. Amazon was a leader in cloud computing, first launching S3, then EC2, than a dozen different cloud services. They are killing with their pricing model, but they left a lot of work for the developer themselves, like dynamically detecting load and scaling the computing needs.

Windows Azure tries to build on the same concepts as Amazon, adding nice features and integrating beautifully with Visual Studio, SQL and the whole Microsoft stack.

So why am I so disappointed?

I think that’s not the future. It doesn’t feel like the future. It feels like I need to know too much about the underlying environment. I need to know about virtualization. Not much, but some. Of all the cloud computing initiatives, I think Google App Engine is the most interesting. Conversely, they are the least evolved and stable. But that’s how innovation happens.

Google flipped the model on its head and said, we won’t tell you how anything works behind the scene. You won’t know what machine, file system, system architecture, data center, or anything. All you do is write code on this language, use these APIs and you have a live Web application, by the way, you *really* pay-as-you-go (as opposed to allocated resources that are never used).

For a technologist like me who’s a lot more interested in the value to the end-user than in the technology itself, Google App Engine is more exciting. They are very far from a point I’d consider them worth of my time right now, because of how limited the capabilities are, but they are going on the right direction.

AWS and Azure only feels right if I was about to build a product who could go boom! Even on that case, it had to go really boom. Right now, I run a dozen websites out of my small Dell server which cost me about $500 in hardware and $0 in Microsoft software (thanks to BizSpark). I can easily serve tens of thousands of visitors per day and there is no bottleneck on my system.

Once I looked at Azure, it would cost me about $80/month to run a tiny website. Of course it’s a deal breaker for me. I can’t have a dozen websites each running at $80/month.

For now, I’ll continue with my own Server collocated at a data center. It’s cost effective, full featured and there is no learning curve for me (a curve that would take me nowhere at the moment).

But before I go, I have to say there are many situations where cloud computing is great, so don’t try to tell me I’m wrong, because I’m just speaking for myself (as always) and that’s my case that I’m sharing. Your story might be completely different and you might have your own arguments. Just be pragmatic about it.