Microsoft Cloud Offering–Windows Azure–Pros and Cons

I guess am a little late to join the party. But nonetheless, I wanted to start with a quick review of what all it has to offer, in what specs, and at what price. Though in this write up I want to concentrate upon the pros and cons of Windows Azure.

What’s the push from MS? Windows Azure does score well on three aspects for sure:

1. Partially, no Server Admin on your premise. And it covers, server hotfix/patching (not in all cases though), license audit taken care of by default and less worries for High Availability of your solution (key here is, how much MS can stick to its offered SLA).

2. Flexible Billing cycles (Pay-as-you-go). But one side note here. We all know how such billing cycles leave behind some clients feeling over-charged. It would be interesting to see how MS works on that because service billing (specifically pay-as-you-go) is quite different from one-time license provisioning. Biggest advantage is for SMBs who can beef up resources as they grow and dont have to fall in OpEx traps (at least from Infra-Licensing point of view).

3. Giving power back to the users to concentrate on Application and take away all their worries from hosting and provisioning point of view. But am sure, excluding SMBs, large scale applications would still be looking upon the ROI aspects, own cloud/datacentre vis-a-vis MS cloud (or any other cloud for that matter).

But nothing comes easy or free in this world ! While you can dream around some advantages as above, be ready to:

1. loose account control to MS

2. Increased competition (yes, your competitors can reach as easy too as you did, plus experienced & specialized development resources requirements ! )

3. MS have calibrations to compute how much you used them, how you plan to validate it !

4. Increased integration avenues / costs