We researched and tested Azure. We've been ready to do this for a long time. It's still not really ready.
Our review of Windows Azure was an intense experience. We’d waited and waited, and waited to review Azure after it was announced. Then more stuff was announced. We were trying to pin what Azure was. We eventually decided that cloud and Azure were really different things. While Microsoft was waiting and busily roadmapping the product, the industry shaped what Azure has become, which is a hybrid model of PaaS, developer platform, and dashes of IaaS. The frustration mounted as the list of items that were beta and “customer technology preview” and “invitation-only” became a wish list for functionality, any functionality. You see: Azure has no working VM Role today. IaaS as practiced merrily and daily in data centers across the planet is impossible for us because we can only use production stuff. Beta, CTP, and other forms of not-ready-yet aren’t allowed. So IaaS was out. Then there’s the PaaS way of looking at things: platform. You can do platform with Azure. But there’s no federated identity or AD (or other DS) joiners. You can’t even use your own Windows 2003/8 licenses today, only those specifically issued in the cloud. All the nice ostensible benefits of Hyper-V aren’t really useful because of the VM Role absence. Does it look juicy? Yes, and it has all of the qualities of fish on the grill, not done yet, not done yet. No kids, we’re not there yet…. yes the signs say destination, but we’re not THERE YET. There are arguments that say it has to be rock solid before such a platform can be released. I would heartily agree with that. EC2 has gone down, other cloud platforms have had their problems, and I’m sure Microsoft is sensitive about reliability criticism. Bring it out of the oven when a toothpick comes out clean. I get it. But I’m going to be old and grey before that happens. Microsoft Office 365 “cloud” offering goes off beta, perhaps by the end of the month. We’ve been waiting for that one for a long time, too. And therein may lay some wisdom. Apple, for all of its misgivings and miss-starts, keeps a near-maniacal lid on what’s going on so that the world has great anticipation of their announcements. Microsoft used to have people lining up at COMDEX, breathless for what tidbits and announcements and demos that Bill Gates might have. There was anticipation in product announcements. What happened there would have meteoric effects on the industry, on stocks, on direction. Apple stole that. Now, Azure is long in the tooth and it’s not even here. It’s a yawner even though when all of the “roadmap” finally goes production, the conversation will have left the building, like Elvis, I mean Steve Jobs. I think Azure’s going to be great, if monolithically Microsoft. That’s a bit dangerous. The day when Azure was announced, a lot of its features were ephemeral, hazy, like clouds themselves. They’re tactile now, but out of reach, just over the horizon. Eternally just over the horizon. The world turns.
