What makes a project suitable for Azure/the cloud?

Question

Hi,

I have read about Windows Azure but to get deeper into this technology, I need to (obviously) use it. I have a small ASP.NET site which gets little traffic and I am thinking that hosting this on Azure would save me money. Other than this, what other factors would contribute to a project being suitable for the cloud?

Thanks

Answer 1

The cloud generally encompasses four basic principles:

• Abstraction - getting a result without knowing how that result is obtained (for example, being able to eat a steak without having to personally kill a cow)
• Elasticity - being able to provision more (or less) resources as demand changes to scale to your system's needs
• Democratisation - users can provision resources for themselves without requiring administrator assistance
• Utility pricing - resources are charged as they are used, with no capital outlay required (like your electricity bill)

So good cloud projects speak to one or more of these attributes. Some examples:

• with abstraction you could set up a system that does an inherently complex calculation or process and exposes it as a simple web service for other systems to use.
• with elasticity, lets say your little ASP.Net site gets mentioned on Digg or somewhere similar and suddenly you have millions of users. With the cloud you can quickly provision more resources and handle the load without having to modify anything else.
• with democratisation, Eli Lilley is using cloud computing to allow scientists to provision large clusters of servers in minutes when that used to take months and involve IT staff
• with utility pricing you are allowing your customers to solve their problems using your system rather than having to buy infrastructure themselves

Answer 2

Azure does help in the sense that all your data is more "loss proof", and I think M$ also uses some sort of internal encryption, so some what more secure. benefits of "Azuring" your site : 1. Allowing you to expand the site, and your user base without need to jack-up your code and make major changes to your H/W, so you can grow on the fly, and all the underlying issues are taken care off, as long as you can pay up modestly( pay what you use, rather than heavy onetime investments and regular maintainance). Transitional disasters of site crashes, user loss etc will be completely avoided. 2. Azure is very well integrated into .NET; the transition will not be a major learning hurdle. Yesterday in one night I was able to figure out the blob and the table api, and how to integrate them with on of my projects.

Disadvantages: 1. Azure platform has been in flux for a lot of time, in the sense that it is not a mature product and the syntax and features are going to be in flux for sometime. ( although they have only been enhancements for the most part), so that might be an issue, for some. 2. extra effort of transition.

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my suggestion: shift if you feel 1. you are expecting growth in the future 2. want to learn and experiment with new technology; and ready to make an extra effort.