The impediment of adopting Azure
Microsoft has been promoting Azure for about 4 years. I believe its adoption is far from desirable. For me there are two reasons that make me hesitate to adopt Azure:
- Unlike other infrastructure based cloud platforms such as Amazon's EC2, Azure is an application-based platform. If an application is based on Azure, it has to be hosted by Microsoft's Azure. There is no other choice. However, applications using infrastructure based cloud platforms can be migrated easily from one provider to another. For example, an app hosted by EC2 can be easily migrated to Rackspace's cloud servers.
- Considering how hard Microsoft has been promoting Azure, I assume Microsoft uses Azure for its own web applications. Microsoft websites (e.g. many *.msdn.com ones) probably have the worst performance among websites of tech giants such as Google, Amazon. This means either Azure has a performance problem or Azure is not an important factor in improving the performance of Microsoft technology based web applications.