Azure Was My Idea
If you watched the day 2 keynote at PDC, you heard Steven Sinofsky discuss the role of telemetry and research in developing Windows 7. Understanding the needs of the market, partners and especially developers is paramount at Microsoft these days.
Microsoft definitely wants to hear from you.
Mike Wickstrand, the senior director of Windows Azure Product Planning at Microsoft is asking developers to offer ideas and help features "bubble to the top" in a Windows Azure Feature Voting forum on mygreatwindowsazureidea.com
The top vote getter so far is "Make It Less Expensive to Run My Very Small Service on Windows Azure" with 562 nods. Blogger Jouni Heikniemi is calling variants of this idea, "Windows Azure Express" or "Windows Azure Compute Small Business Edition" in his vote for Mini-Azure blog, worth reading for its detailed pricing proposals.
Microsoft offers a Windows Azure Introductory special but some developers claim that even with the MSDN subscriber perks, it does not meet their needs.
Mini-Azure voter Rob G., an MSDN subscriber, who is funding his own startup, and is excited about the possibilities the technology offers, commented:
"You could be blowing the competition out of the water, but you've come to the table with fairly weak pricing and an even weaker introductory offer. Just take a look at the small instance allowance. 25 hours - that's little over a day that I've got the instance turned on, never mind the fact that zero traffic is coming my way yet - which is the very thing that allows me to determine if the business and Azure are viable choices for me. Kicking the tires needs more time or bandwidth, and you're not offering that. What do I do for the other 30 days in the month - pay for no traffic? Sure I'm happy to - but at a much lower price. Something needs to be attached to actual usage in terms of traffic, not just the green light powering the machine."
Voter Benoire added:
"I did pick up on the introductory offer, but as Rob G pointed out, it doesn't really meet the needs of small devs - anything less than 744 compute hours a month means you can't run the instance permanently and therefore you can't deploy a typical site or application. Added to this, it's only a temporary offer for the first half of next year - I have ideas in the pipeline that aren't going to be ready for deployment until after that, so I'm not going to start off with Azure when I know that by the time I go-live I'll need to switch elsewhere."
Dennis holds a different view:
"Azure isn't meant to compete with $10/month shared hosting. And I don't think it should. It isn't difficult to move an app from a shared host up to Azure when it gets big enough to need a dedicated host machine. I'm currently working on a solution that will run the compute parts on a shared host and connect to Azure storage, which is relatively cheap. Then if/when the app needs to be moved to Azure compute instances, I won't need to do anything to move the data."
The next highest vote getter at a distant second (289) is "Provide the ability to get emails directly in Azure." That's followed by "Provide a way to schedule worker roles so that they only run when needed" (185 votes) and "Create a beta environment for .NET 4.0 tests and evaluations" (164 votes). The list goes on.
Are the economics of Microsoft's cloud computing a barrier to entry for smaller companies or developers who want to run services or a small site on Azure to get acquainted with the technology?
MSDN subscribers in supported countries and regions (see list here) can get access to compute hours, storage, SQL Azure, and AppFabric messaging on January 4, 2010. If you are not in one of the supported countries, you'll need to sign up for the Windows Azure CTP by December 31. Participation in the CTP closes after that date, according to Microsoft.
Express your ideas about Azure, its pricing model, and the features you need below or drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com Then go to the feedback forum and vote, Microsoft wants to hear from you.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 12/01/2009 at 7:22 AM