Microsoft’s Windows Azure is truly a revolutionary way to have web sites hosted. The beauty of it is practically all the IT type stuff is just taken care of for you. The kind of thing you do not have to worry about are
Security patches to the operating system
- Worrying about what happens if the server goes down and you are not around
- Database backups if your system crashes unexpectedly
- Scaling servers to meet high demands
- Other platform provided features such as Cache
The penalty for this unfortunately is that you have to spend more time up front specifying your configuration exactly so that Azure knows how to exactly boot and provision your web site in the cloud.
The Windows Azure I imagine is one where, from Visual Studio, I simply could say “Publish To Azure” , and as long as I have a Microsoft Live sign on, it would basically publish my web site to the Azure Cloud. Seems to me that as long as the web site can run in my local development environment with either the built in visual studio web server (aka Cassini) or IIS Express, Azure should be able to make this into a cloud web site with no other steps. I’m not saying don’t offer all the other configuration options, just give me a choice to make it easy and let me go with the defaults.
Am I wrong? I totally get that there are a ton of configuration options that can be specified, but it seems to be they should not have to be. If you feel the same or different, let me know your opinion, post your comment below and let the discussion begin now.
Again, I can’t express how much I like having Azure as a destination for deploying web sites. Even with the current extra work to deploy, it is a huge benefit and worth it. I strongly recommend taking a serious look at Azure for your web site if you have not already.