Drawbacks of Windows Azure Platform?

Question

It seems that documents available now are only whitepapers from Microsoft. So I only heard about advantages of this platform. I want to know about its drawbacks. What components/features of Windows Azure/SQL Azure/AppFabric make you uncomfortable? Which ones do you want to change/improve?

Thank you so much for this.

Answer 1

I'm not entierly sure on specific features but there are a few things that bother me about so called Cloud computing.

1. Loss of control over pretty much anything. I know you can set things up but it's not quite the same is it?
2. Speed. If I'm hosting my site in say the cloud and my data locally in Australia then there is going to be a speed issue in getting my data off of the web.
3. It's still too new and there aren't enough war stories yet. Not enough people have experianced the bad to have either faund a way to fix it or to influence a fix.

I think item 3 is my biggest point. I'm a huge early adopter in most things but when it comes to hosting into a new environment that is still fairly new then I'd like to wait and see what others are saying first.

I'd also like to see a few large reference sites to get an appreciation of speed.

Answer 2

I'm missing two things: transactional message queues with the "only once" delivery (i.e.: MSMQ Azure) and faster management API. One of these is promised to be fixed later, for the other there is a suggestion on uservoice for Azure.

As for everything else - it's really easy to develop and manage auto-scaling (self-tuning) and really efficient cloud applications with Windows Azure. EC2 and Rackspace weren't that friendly to me. Of course, there are rough edges (quite a few of these), as in any bleeding-edge technology, but it is worth it.