Azure stitches together a handful of already existing technologies, and does that result in a vision? I don’t really think so. Microsoft just sucks at changing the world. They take their piece of the cake, but they are not game changers. Slow and steadily, but not “PDC, here we are, changing the way applications are done”. He who believes that is a jerk.

What they have built is a technology to build, manage and provision scalable apps. What is crap about this platform is that I don’t have a unified way of building apps. It shouldn’t matter, where I host my code and my data and my workflow. Why should I care whether I will host my crm platform in my datacenter or in the cloud? Or in my datacenter now and the cloud later? Or half of it here and the rest there? With Azure I’ll have to make that choice before I start building. Because as of now, Red Dog won’t be licenced (well parts will find its way into products).

I don’t really think these guys have a clue. Technology wise they do, but vision-wise, I doubt it. Other MS products in the pipeline will have a bigger effect in the short term.

These guys should do better, quicker. Well Ray is a good guy. At least he has ideas.

When I am talking about Azure, most people show the same reaction: “I will not give my data to Microsoft, nor will any/my company do.” It is funny to see that nearly all .NET developer I spoke to, behave like this (you know, these developers who present their whole life in facebook etc. . Microsoft should work on their image somehow.

The good thing is mentioned in “Microsoft becomes a ….”. Since I am a .NET developer, I have a .NET platform environment supporting the cloud business case (such as google and amazon)

OK. The core Azure system is about trusting Microsoft (as long as it is only available from MS – we will see). You will have to trust MS that they will deliver computing power. You will have to trust MS that they will not use your data (hey what about Google, Amazon …). But this is not the main point for developers.

Microsoft presents an architecture that will scale beyond my scope. They offer a solution for monitoring, versioning, computing/data distribution and authentication. You are free to use it, if your business profits from it. For me it is an reference on how to write scalable software (stateless, asynchron)

Alternative you can use the .NET services to do your work in the Cloud without using the core Azure system. Use your own computing power by providing computing services, use your own data storage by publishing your own data services (e.g. via Biztalk Services). Change your architecture!

Conclusion I: Azure and its services is about services in a cloud (developers view!). Use your computing and data storage power wherever you want. Use the base Azure conzepts to write scalable, secure and versionable services. As a .NET developer, use the preferred technology stack (uuuuhh damn stateless, asynchronous and services stuff). Write services, write services, write services.

Conclusion II: If the security concept (federated authentication) will not be accepted (trusted), the cloud (and Azure) will fail. MS should provide the “connectors” for free. MS should connect all major portals.

Conclusion III: Developing using WebRoles (FrontRole), WorkerRoles should not be special to the Azure environment. This should become a standard pardigma for “normal application development” (ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF).