On the surface, the idea of infrastructure and services in configurations you can access as needed and abandon at will without investment is immediately attractive to anyone who has had to acquire, maintain, scale and retire physical servers, network and supporting equipment. It isn’t surprising then that the first to market cloud services have tended to emulate the environments data center managers and developers are comfortable in.

 For early adopters, it doesn’t really matter if the services offered provided more value than their current environment – they are happy with a one-to-one replacement. In the long run, the trade-offs in training for optimized services and hardware acquisition made up for any lack of immediate return.

On this basis, the value of basic cloud computing services was quickly established. But, as with any technology today, the market has scaled very quickly. Simple virtualization is down to commodity pricing, making it possible for only the largest vendors who can leverage hundreds or thousands of servers to make significant profit on this service alone.

While this might seem like a great thing for companies wanting to use cloud services, it has created significant problems. If the profit in a cloud service drops, the vendors only have two choices, cut services to existing customers or close. It requires a lot of investment and debt to open a competitive Cloud service and the debt must be paid. Clients facing a lost of services can move to another offering but then they face the reality that there is little parity between services. What works on one cloud service might need significant refactoring to work at all on another.

Microsoft Enters with 2nd Generation Cloud Services

When Microsoft introduced Windows Azure, many thought that Redmond had come to the party too late. Another commodity cloud service would simply drive the market price down more and even with Microsoft’s deep reserves, it was likely to be very difficult to find a market any time soon.

Thinking of Windows Azure as a standard environment replacement though is a misunderstanding. In fact, although standard applications can take advantage of parts of the Azure offering, it is not intended as a simple server and stack replacement. The focus of Azure is highly scalable, compute and storage configurations that can handle situations that would require significant investment for their clients to take advantage of – if they were available anywhere else.

The services Azure provides are best utilized by architectures and applications that are designed specifically to take advantage of its unique capabilities. If you have a standard application and just need deployment, standard cloud services will be a better fit. But that being the case, how do you know when to consider Azure?

Our Azure Experience

As a new and truly second-generation cloud service, there is little commercial experience with Azure. Application architecture on Azure is broadly different and has many options that don’t exist in a traditional cloud compute and storage environment. Microsoft has provided many accommodations to help developers adapt to Azure, but standard design patterns cannot leverage the many scenarios available. There are few parallels in standard Internet application architecture.

Scio has studied the opportunities Windows Azure presents and is highly experienced in the development, deployment, operation and maintenance of highly-scalable Internet applications. We have partnered with Microsoft to help companies evaluate Azure and to architect and design applications for the platform.

Without careful evaluation of your plans and needs and experience with current cloud services, it is impossible for anyone to know which service is best for your project. With the many choices available, it is difficult to make selections and feel confident about your direction.

Scio is a leading technical consulting provider for the architecture, design, development and operation of Azure-based applications and services. We maintain our partnership with Microsoft specifically to help us stay on top of this exciting and evolving set of cloud services.

Planning an Internet-based Application?

If you are considering developing and deploying an application on the Internet, you need to know which service fits your needs best and what your road map should be to take advantage of it. Whether it is Windows Azure or another service, you can count on the technical experience Scio provides to help you make the choices and follow through all the way to production.

If you would like to consider a Cloud Services Assessment or Azure services directly, please call us today. We’ll be happy to show you how we can help you get started successfully.