Engwar

Windows Azure is another cloud platform that can be used to deploy applications to the cloud and not worry about rest of the duct tape that’s required for smoother operation. Like many things from Microsoft, a killer feature is tight integration with Visual Studio. You can literally build and deploy applications to the cloud with a single mouse click.

With my experience developing applications with Microsoft technologies, the biggest gripe I have so far is the lack of flexibility. I can recall in one instance where I tried to log raw XML messages going through Geneva libraries turned out to be very difficult. The successful documented scenarios, happy path, in other words work marvelously. Turning on WCF logging didn’t log the RST message coming to Geneva. Solution to that problem turned out to be overriding the XML writer method to write the stream to a file. Ultimately was able to get it solved without having to do that.

Coming back to Azure, it seems that it’s not a low level virtualized environment like Amazon EC2. The lines are still blurry to me when it’s positioned somewhere in between EC2 and Google App Engine. One problem of having a platform layer (Windows Azure OS) that sits above the actual OS is, the way of doing things will be different. One major advantage of EC2 is if you boot up a Windows machine, it’s Windows. Azure, things are different. Comparing, a major advantage is things can be simplified to a jaw droppingly awesome level. With the development frabric installed which lets you test your applications on your local machine before deploying to Windows Azure platform, Windows programs you develop through Visual Studio can be deployed within seconds. You don’t have to learn any additional deployment methods. Great for application developers. If you want to do something at a lower level you need to learn more.

The most interesting part for me atleast is the support for FastCGI. Through that, you can call native code. Like PHP for example. The PHP Azure SDK seems really interesting.