Thanks for providing a good brief summary of Azure. One thing that might be worth mentioning is that you can provision your Web role and SQL Azure dbase in any of Microosoft’s datacentres very easily. We hadn’t really thought about this much before we launched on Azure. On a recent trip to China it was clear the speed of data transfer from the European data centre to Northern China was prohibitively slow. Luckily, we were able to provision a new instance of our app in the Hong Kong datacentre in less than hour. That wouldn’t really have been possible so easily with any other hosting option that I know of.

There are

With regards to some typical billing scenarios, I think I’ll address them in a subsequent post since the billing can be a little tricky to get used to, too.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article and for your suggestions. Keep them coming!

I suggest a new title
An introduction to Windows Azure for Project Managers

And following on from that – some example costs of using the Web Roles and Sql Azure services. I’ve only ever briefly looked at Azure, but find the pricing difficult to relate to physical server / bandwidth packages that you get on typical “old fashioned” hosting.

Also, the data storage section that describes Blobs, Blocks, Pages… this stuff is a little abstract to me, even as a programmer. Maybe you can elaborate a little on why I care about anything more granular than a blob? I normally read files off a hard drive in their entirety, so I’m just assuming the more granular stuff is for those who want to only access sections of a file at a time (for whatever reason, eg. database file)

… and lastly: nice article!